Ask HN: Coping when your client is an asshole?

One of my pet favorite tips: pretend you're a research psychologist observing a patient with a rare mental disorder (doesn't solve all of the problems, but at least helps to cope).

https://www.amazon.com/Asshole-Survival-Guide-People-Treat/d...

I read a great advice once that if you "dont react, you will not overreact". The flood gates of pent up emotion will cause severe problems for your business which will lead to outcomes unexpected even by you, and your team.

But suppressing negative emotions are proven to cause psychosomatic diseases, which is a boring way to say all this suppressed anger will kill you. What to do?

The problem begins to become a problem when you value the emotion more than it is worth. If you think this is making me angry, emotionally you will easily slide into feeling much more anger than is actually warranted. The reason for this is because our built up stresses want a release point, and when you feel angry, those release paths become known to your anger.

First, exercise in the morning, intense, fun like basketball and your team, so as to prevent daily stresses to seek release paths.

Then when the client starts to get on your nerves, your nerves will handle the client without becoming frazzled or excited. This calm will unnerve your client, and cause them to feel the futility of behaving like that towards you.

If it does not make you angry, they will not be likely to behave aggressively because they could wonder: they are so calm! But this would also make them behave even more aggressively sometimes. However, this will all come to an end if you remain calm.

In the mean calm time, you can seek clients that are less belligerent and reduce reliance on clients who want to vent it on you. But until then, treat it as a case study in abnormal psychology.

The best advice I can give you is to grow your business in other areas and diversify your client base. Really this is the only thing that gets you out of the hole in the long-term because it makes you less beholden to these people. Sounds simple but it's obviously not easy.

You should also give your team space and time to talk about it, and enlist your manager for support.

If you can formalise communication (e.g., through regular meetings, or via a ticketing system) all to the good, although I hold my hands up and say this didn't work in our case because the person involved was absolutely incapable of following any kind of process properly.

Finally, and this is the shitty end of the management stick, I'd recommend you shield your team from them as much as is practical: it's time consuming but funnel all comms through yourself. At least it means your team aren't dealing with the pummelling. Again, a good opportunity for your manager to help but you'll need to suggest concrete, practical steps for this because it sounds like they might be overcommitted already based on the lack of support they're providing.