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I have a family member who works in the restaurant business. He tells me that some customers actually will spout at him “The customer is always right.” as they spew angrily at him about the food that they ordered. He has to get the manager and the manger has to go mollify the customer. The manager has to make nice. 

I recently had a client stop sessions because I have a policy to not make appointments by email. I wanted to give her as much as I could within that policy and offered everything I could short of confirming an appointment by email. It would have taken a simple phone call to me to set one up but instead she kept sending emails. Her emails actually got lost in other email boxes. Technology is far from perfect.

Since we had no communication, I didn’t know that her emails were lost and her anger was building thinking I was ignoring them. By the time I found  her email she had so convinced herself that I was ignoring them that she insulted me in her last email.  

In the past I would have taken it. After all the customer is always right. Right? No. Not right. Just as we as business people are not always right. Our customers are not always right. No one is always right.

She was insulting  and when her mails got lost she assumed that they were ignored. She could easily have called to verify I got them. She could easily have gotten her needs met by being kind and having us come to a solution that would have addressed her needs as a client and my needs as a practitioner. I would have been happy to explain and clear the confusion but she didn’t. Those were the facts.

I help my clients become their authentic selves and it obliges me to walk my talk. I lovingly expressed myself and the perspective I had about her responses. I held us both as individuals that had the right to respectful truthful expression. 

This incident and the ones I hear from my clients started me thinking a lot about the belief that “The customer is always right.” I’ve had some experiences as a person in business where customers were not right. Not only were they not right, some of them were insulting and some actually abusive. Outside of these few I’m blessed with clients that I look forward to talking to daily. It’s a handful of times out of many years of my practice. But the few times that I have had a client who did not treat me well left an impression and it made me think about what we accept as normal. 

One of the issues that we deal with in all businesses is that we hold this belief that the customer is always right. What is that about? Clearly you know if you’ve been in any office or had your own business that the customer is not always right. I have many sessions with my own clients during which they will vent about a client or customer who they feel is treating them very poorly. But they have to suck it up. They have to take it. 

When I think about why there is this behavior about “The customer” that makes business owners step on our own being and deny our truthful expression I come to one thing –  fear that loosing an unhappy customer will somehow hurt our business. 

I think we need to take a look at this belief and see it for what it is. It comes from fear and that is not the kind of energy that will further us in our lives or in business. If we look at it from the perspective of the Law of Attraction, the belief comes from scarcity. If we believe that there is finite number of customers that the universe has to offer us,  we’ll be afraid to loose any customer — even one who mistreats us. 

But there is more than that that happens when we don’t express how we feel when we have a customer who is treating us poorly, we close down out throat. We create that much more space between us and our authenticity. 

What if we express what we really felt in relationship to how we were treated? 

We may express anger. We may express sadness that the conflict occurred. We won’t be wasting precious energy on making “nice”. We won’t have the added stress of not being true to ourselves. We will be real to ourselves.

We will free up our energy to move as we give ourselves freedom to express our authentic feelings rather than be governed by an adage.

One more thing that I believe can happen is that in expressing your experience of that customer to them in a respectful way you may actually percolate something in them that can lead to them waking up just that much more.

In the process of being authentic you’ve given yourself the gift of being real and you’ve given the customer or client a mirror that could be the very thing they needed to help them heal.

Sit down and write a list of the beliefs you have about money, business, relationships, and so on. Think about things that you’ve swallowed as true without questioning them. Ask yourself if the belief is in alignment with you living the quality of life you want to live. Play with what it would be like if you that belief didn’t govern you anymore. You might be  to see how many you have and how many you’d love to let go of.

I’d love to know your thoughts about this subject. I know it’s a bit controversial but that is exactly what I think we meed to do. We need to look at the adages and self limiting beliefs that we are taught by our families and our society. Only when we come from choice do we have authenticity and without authenticity we can never have true personal freedom.

As always I’d love you comments,

Shulamit

www.limitfreeself.com