Honesty is a core value of mine. And honesty with clients is essential to building and maintaining trust.
Honesty means admitting when I don’t know. And in the world of energy healing, so little is truly known.
“Will energy healing work for me?” I don’t know.
“Will there be side effects?” I don’t know.
“How often should I have a session, every week, every month, every 2 months?” I don’t know.
I have reasonable guesses for all of those questions. Guesses backed up by data. It would be so easy to guess confidently, to present a guess as something I know.
But I don’t do that because it loses client trust.
Most obviously, you’ll lose trust when you guess wrong. I learned this on my first consulting assignment, where I felt like I had to know all the answers about our software. After a few wrong guesses, the client didn’t believe me even when I actually knew the answer. And over years of consulting, I developed a habit of only answering questions when I knew I was correct.
But there’s another, subtler way that guessing loses trust:
Clients will notice when there’s no real way you could know something. They know how little research is done on energy healing. They know that doctors can’t promise to fix a health problem, and that you really can’t either. Even when a confident guess is right, the act of guessing, of confidently stating something you cannot know, loses trust.
Here’s how I answer those questions:
Let’s use as an example, “Is one session every 4 weeks really the right frequency for me?”
First, I admit ignorance. “There’s no way for me to know the right frequency for you.”
Then, I share my data. “Across many clients, I find the results tend to start fading at about the 3-week mark, and fade completely at the 6-week mark. Once the course of treatment is completed, this is no longer the case, but this tends to be how it goes until then.”
Now that they know the data, I share my conclusion. “That’s why I typically recommend one session every 4 weeks, this tends to be the sweet spot between getting results and reducing costs.”
When I answer like this, clients relax. People are so used to being sold to, to over promising and confident guessing, that an honest answer can be unexpected. But when people get an honest answer, they can feel it.
That’s how trust is built.
Joins me live every Sunday
Every Sunday at 11am Pacific, I geek out about energy on my live stream, Ask an Energy Scientist.
This weekend, I’ll talk about how admitting ignorance can build trust. Bring your questions, or just drop in and listen.
Just join my Facebook group, Energy Healing Lab, and you’ll get a notification when it starts.
Looking forward to talking with you!