"My clients distract me too much during the week and ask dumb questions!"

Today I got a question from a coach who asked: 

"Hey Ben, 

How do you deal with parents who want to call you and ask you dumb questions and they just wanted to talk?"

If you find yourself in a position where your clients are texting you all the time, they email you all the time, they call you randomly and just want to talk with you all the time? This is how I deal with it currently and hopefully this will really help you. 

The first thing you have to recognize is all coaches want to be of service to our clients and we always want to help our clients in a positive way. But often times if people don't understand how you value your own time then they will call you whenever they want, they will text you all the time and ultimately they will treat you as a call centre than as a human being. 

When you answer to every parent right away this will become an expectation from them. What I would rather you do is tell people how you operate. Give them an expectation that when they work with you everything has to be scheduled and that you don't answer to random calls throughout the day. 

A mistake I made with my business was that I allowed parents to call me whenever they wanted and what started to happen was that while I was eating dinner I would get unscheduled phone calls by parents and this interrupted my time with my family as I would start to get into "work mode" when really I should have been relaxing and unplugging. 

When I was very soft with clients I would take every phone call with parents and I would get on these phone calls and the things we would be talking about ended up having nothing to do with anything (we started travelling to Pluto with the phone call LOL) instead of talking about something that was important. 

What I started doing and anybody can do this is I made it a rule that if any client needed to speak with me then they had to schedule a time during the week to do so. A software I use is called Calendly and on there I can create my own personal schedule with the days and times that I am available to talk with parents. If any parent wants to discuss something then they will need to book a time with me through my schedule. 

On Calendly you can set up 5 minute calls to where parents can only talk with you for that amount of time, which means if the parent really wants to talk with you they will have to be prepared with real questions and a time slot of only 5 minutes. If you really want this to work you will have to let people know that if they want to chat they must schedule the call before and on Calendly they must provide you with details to why they want to talk with you. 

When you get on that 5 minute call you can be more useful and much more well prepared rather than simply answering the phone at any time of the day. 

I hope this helps you, 

- Ben