Inspiring Your Clients

Giving Hope To Your Clients by Jane Thurnell-Read

One of the things we often need to do as therapists is give hope to our clients, but it’s a fine line we walk, between giving hope and making false promises.

It is important not to promise too much, because, at the end of the day, it’s not only what you do as the therapist that counts - what the client does or does not do matters too, and even when everyone is working together for some reason clients don’t always get better.

But inspiring clients is an important therapist skill, and sadly it’s not usually even discussed during most professional training. We need to inspire some clients so that they will come back when things are not working as we hoped, motivating them to have another go rather than getting despondent and giving up. We need to inspire clients to change their diet, take exercise, etc. We need to inspire clients to want to tell other people about us too.

The most successful and busy practitioners are not necessarily the most competent technically; it’s the therapist who knows how to give hope and inspire clients who will often have the busiest practice.

So, how do we do that? Telling stories about other clients (without revealing information that allows them to be identified, of course) can be very effective. This can also be used to help clients understand the range of problems that your therapy can help. Even if they don’t have the problem themselves, they may well know someone who has.

Many clients view the body as being very fixed with only the changes of age and trauma occurring. Yet the body is continually renewing itself. The physical body you have now does not contain any atoms or molecules that are the same as those that were ‘you’ fifteen years ago. The molecules are so slowly replaced that we have the illusion that our eyes and hands and face and internal organs are the ones we had all those years ago: after all they look the same apart from signs of ageing. There is some observable evidence for this process in the way in which hair and nails grow, and skin flakes and peels. As Deepak Chopra writes in Quantum Healing:

All of us are much more like a river than anything frozen in time and space. If you could see your body as it really is, you would never see it the same twice. Ninety-eight per cent of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago.

Chopra goes on to give figures for the rate at which various parts of the body change. He writes that the skin is replaced within a month, the stomach lining every four days, the liver is completely renewed every six weeks.

I find that if you tell new clients this it gives them a whole new way of looking at their own body. They realise that the injured joint has the capacity for healing and change or the skin that’s “always been a problem” could be something different.

Over the years I’ve had clients whose problems did not go away in spite of all my best efforts, but they’ve recommended me and sent me many other people because in some way I’ve managed to inspire them with what I do and am. I think that what really works is to have integrity, to be honest in your relationships with your clients and to do the best you can. These simple virtues inspire people.

Copyright Jane Thurnell-Read Online Health Shop owner.