Constance Dierickx, PhD | 9 flags to look out for when onboarding new clients to save you money

As coaches, mentors, or consultants, we’ve all experienced those clients. You know, the ones we have to chase for payment, who send us War-and-Peace-length emails, cancel sessions at the last minute, try to micromanage our process, resist any real work in (and in between) sessions, or who—citing a lack of real friends—try to pressure us to attend virtual one-on-one coffee chats. 

Don’t you wish you had that magic toolbox to triage clients, separating out good prospects you can truly help from those who need clinical assistance?

That’s why screening prospective clients is key before onboarding them, according to Constance Dierickx, author, clinical psychologist and executive coach. But how? “I have a framework in my head,” Dierickx says, which she says is embedded now after years of clinical practice. Referred to as the “Uber-coach” or the “corporate secret weapon,” or The Decision Doctor®, Dierickx is used to pressure-cooker scenarios such as high-stakes decisions, transitions, and crises. 

As coaches, we don’t all have a PhD in psychology—like Dierickx has—to help us weed out those bad clients, but she says there are some behaviors to look out for. 

Saying no to income is hard for any coach, and takes courage. But here are 9 red flags that could save you time, money, and aggravation.

1. Self-proclaimed experts

It’s a simple but powerful truth: if your client isn’t willing to learn, your coaching engagement won’t go well. Recently, Dierickx decided against working with a very successful entrepreneur, because that person showed “a pattern of behavior wherein she could not give up being the expert.” This person had to prove to herself that all her learning came from her own choices about whom to talk to, what environment to be in, what decisions she made. She had to give herself all the credit for learning anything. “And I think it's very antithetical to learning,” Dierickx says. “I think one of the wonderful things about great leaders that I've worked with is that they can say, ‘I didn't know that. Tell me more.’ And so they're doing more than one thing at a time. One, they're learning. Two, they're reinforcing the behavior of someone else to share what they know. And three, if they do it in public, they're saying, without saying, to a group of people: “This is a learning environment. This is an environment where we're going to continuously learn and grow.’”

When leaders say they are learning from others but don’t demonstrate it, it shows a lack of integrity. “It's just the worst possible scenario because the leader is showing people that they're saying one thing and doing another,” she says. “Learn in public. Wander around and learn in public.”

“I will tell you that some of the worst people to try to coach are people who think that they're coaches,” she says. “And the same is true if somebody has a PhD or a law degree or whatever, and every five minutes, they're telling you that.”

Such clients have what Dierickx calls “cognitive rigidity” or the inability to think about something in a different way. “They are so defended that they can’t tolerate a new idea,” she says.

2. Potential rescue missions

During our coaching development, we learn to identify good prospects by their willingness to change. Dierickx takes it further. Being willing isn’t enough.

“It's beyond willingness, it's ability,” she says.

The way to determine a prospect’s ability to change is to explore his or her past changes. This determines whether they are not only open and willing to change, as well as whether they can change at all. The key is to ask them to tell you about something that they changed about themselves or their circumstances that they feel proud about. 

“I ask: ‘What's something you're proud of that took a lot of effort on your part to go from what was, to what it is now?’” she says.

They need to have actually changed something about themselves. If that prospective client can’t give good examples of prior change, then decline working with them. Any work with this client will become a rescue mission. They may change their behavior in the short term, or on a surface-level, and get a promotion, but the change will only last a few months. 

Ask provocative questions. Some clients—whom you may have been hired to help retain—are already hell-bent on leaving a company. You can save a lot of time and energy by finding out what they really want on the front end.

3. That ‘ick feeling’ 

Many people talk about the importance of heeding ‘gut feelings.’ But that’s only half the battle, Dierickx says. “So when someone says to me, ‘it was gut instinct,’ get it out of your gut and put it in your brain and analyze what’s going on because that’s going to help you more,” Dierickx advises. 

She tells the story of the CEO who came to her and asked her to work with a woman whom Dierickx later found out was ‘a train wreck’. “…this senior executive starts talking to me and just wants to be my best friend in 90 seconds. And my radar is going [off].” 

Although the woman was charming, enthusiastic, attractive, executive was well put together, and exhibited very high verbal ability, the interaction was “Too much, too fast, and too personal,” Dierickx says. 

“Going around saying, ‘I did it by gut,’ you’re depriving yourself of learning what we call pattern recognition. I took that feeling of ick about this person who had a very senior job and I moved it up to my brain and asked myself, so what made it ick? Too fast, too personal, effusive, high emotionality.”

“Pattern recognition for a coach is gold,” Dierickx adds. 

Such personalities can be seductive, and there’s nothing wrong with us if we get sucked in once in a while. Even the most rational types are human beings too and can be candidates for seduction.

Dierickx remembers a patient years ago who kept getting seduced by the wrong men. She cried in her office and was convinced there was something wrong with herself. Dierickx looked at her and said it was her radar—or detection system—of that particular thing that was the problem. It was too slow. Working on her radar and strengthening it to become more sensitive helped her and gave her a needed sense of control to make better decisions. 

4. Our own too-rapid judgments

When we form too-rapid judgments about potential clients and don’t examine them,  that can lead to taking on the wrong clients too quickly. We are all prone to making inaccurate judgments about people based on our distorted views or on incomplete information. Just because someone is able to cry about their mothers, doesn’t mean they are empathetic. They may be crying about themselves.

“I'm trying to avoid a cognitive bias, which is really hard to do because we're all human and we have these,” Dierickx says. “And the reason I'm doing it is I don't want to get sucked in, and I know I can get sucked in. I'm not so grand about my ability that I think I can't get sucked in.”

“If somebody tells you, you're a horse's ass, that's just their opinion. If two people tell you, it's a coincidence. If three people tell you, buy a saddle,” says Dierickx. 

We should always be looking for data pieces that hang together. It’s a screening process that ensures we are “not simply looking for confirmatory data.”

 “And this is where adopting the mind of a scientist is incredibly useful,” Dierickx says. She goes on to explain the following methodology when she is trying to decide whether or not to work with somebody or if she is doing an assessment for a client. 

She listens, watches for, and captures data.  She writes “HO” for hypothesis, followed by whatever her head gives her, such as “controlling or unwilling to learn” or whatever her hypothesis is. 

“And then I force myself to come up with evidence for and against,” says Dierickx.

She goes back to the example of the effusive executive who gave her all those compliments. “Up to a point they were pretty pleasant. And then when she asked me to turn around, then it became unpleasant,” she says.

5. Loose boundaries

If someone is too effusive, too fast, too personal, too charming, that’s a red flag, such as when a potential client says: “I trust you. I trusted you from the moment we met.” “I'm thinking to myself: ‘You're going to hate me in about 90 days or less,” Dierickx says. The problem is that the person likely runs too hot, then too cold. 

Dierickx says this example is blatant. But what if the loose boundary is wrapped in charm and is more subtle?

Sometimes the “ick” feeling isn’t there. So what do we do then?

“Boundaries is it. Boundaries is a huge thing,” Dierickx says. We have to watch for signs.

6. Rate balkers and quibblers

Hiring a coach, consultant, or mentor is an investment. Dierickx advises us to drop prospective clients who argue about our rates. 

“You don't work with somebody and invest your intelligence and your experience and your goodwill and your hopes for them, you don't invest in them until they've invested in themselves,” Dierickx says. Interestingly, the self-proclaimed expert mentioned above had asked Dierickx to cut her fee in half. 

Dierickx counsels coaches to change peer consulting groups, if they find themselves being told to lower their fees. “Get a new group, because the problem isn't what the market will bear,” Dierickx says. “The problem is how we feel about ourselves and articulate our value.” 

People who quibble about the terms of the engagement. They may ask for eight references, giving the excuse they’re really analytical. But they are really showing a reluctance to commit to the engagement.

7. Control patterns

Coaching a micromanager or someone who is being controlling is possible, if the client can come to see the connections to other parts of their lives, according to Dierickx. If such a change isn’t possible, such a person might need a therapeutic intervention.

“As a coach, you're not responsible for that. That's their little red wagon, but you want to be able to detect it so you can make the decision, but it doesn't have to be no,” Dierickx says.

Identifying potential clients who might turn out to be the ones who try to micromanage every minute of working together is possible through the mind body connection. Typical  body sensations we feel when somebody is trying to control us include a feeling of constriction and flinching, according to Dierickx. The feeling may be intense. The key is to take that physical reaction, realize that it’s healthy and good, and ask ourselves what it is trying to tell us. If we try to verbalize what we are feeling physically, then we can do something about it rather than leaving it in the gut. The gut is the warning system, or “the sentry” that alerts us that something is wrong.“So what happens when a person is controlling is, they start showing you that very early,” says Dierickx.” They'll say things like: ‘Here's my number. Call me at the appointed time.’” 

Dierickx calls this data. That person is immediately assigning the caller role to us. 

Or controlling patterns will show in the form of questions or the following interaction:

"Well, how many times are we going to meet? What's your hourly rate?" 

"I don't work like that." 

"Well, you have to work like that because your fee has to be based on time." 

"It doesn't. And it isn't." 

"No, but you must have, at some point in time, figured out your time."

 "No, I don't."

 "Oh, come on." 

“And they just keep at you,” Dierickx says. “So I get that question about fee and time, because my fees aren't based on time. They haven't been for 12 years. I'm not pivoting to satisfy somebody who wants to implant their template on me about how I'm supposed to work.”

8. Going against advice from peers

“If you're struggling with whether or not someone's going to be a good client for you and you call a peer colleague and you ask for advice and they tell you not to do it. And you argue with them, you better look at yourself,” she said.

9. Quoting others 

If a prospect starts to quote other people when asking questions, be careful. 

That prospect may say a friend or a spouse told them to ask us a certain question. That friend or spouse is not the client in the room, so bringing them into the discussion changes the relationship from a dyad to a triad. You can’t work with someone who isn’t actually showing up. 

Dierickx had a prospect once who quoted her husband during an introductory meeting, to which she asked her whether her husband was in business with her and found out that the husband ran his own consulting firm and was not doing very well.

As Maya Angelou said, “be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” And in this case, the naked person isn’t even in the room.

Every coach or consultant wants to work with clients they can genuinely help. So we need to practice detecting behavior patterns and collecting data to help determine who will be a great client - and who won’t be. If in doubt, refer out to a therapist or psychologist or someone with a set of clinical tools. Who knows, that prospect may be able to change whatever it is that’s holding them back and return to you in a healthier, coach-able state of mind.