What Changed When She Stopped Trying to Fix Everything First
For three years, Priya had run her practice the same way.
When a client expressed dissatisfaction — with the pace, with a session, with anything — she went immediately into fix mode. What can I change? What can I add? How can I make this right before it becomes a problem?
She was good at it. Clients generally felt well-cared for. The feedback she received was warm.
What they didn’t see — what she barely let herself see — was the cost of operating in permanent fix mode. The vigilance. The anticipatory reading of every expression and tone for signs of dissatisfaction. The overwork that happened in the space between sessions because she was always addressing things that hadn’t been raised yet.
The shift came out of a simple question in a conversation with a colleague: “What would happen if you let a dissatisfied client say the full thing before you responded?”
She sat with this for weeks.
The reason she moved to fix mode so quickly was that she couldn’t tolerate the client’s dissatisfaction being in the space between them. It activated something that felt exactly like the feeling she’d had as a child when a parent was disappointed — a feeling that required immediate action to resolve.
She began practicing something small: when a client expressed dissatisfaction, she waited three seconds before saying anything. Then she asked a question instead of offering a fix.
What she found was that clients often answered their own complaints in the course of explaining them. That what they needed wasn’t her fixing something — it was her presence, her willingness to hear it without fleeing into solution.
The practice made her a better practitioner and a less depleted one.
The daily practice builds this kind of regulated presence — the capacity to stay without fixing.
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