I have been dealing with a very frustrating client who refuses to read his scope of work or review the emails sent since then, and makes hostile demands. The first time he came to me, I helped out and bent over backwards and solved his issues. Now his project is more than 25% out of scope and he refuses to pay an invoice he owed months ago. He sends multiple drunk emails late Friday night and doesn’t read the reasonable responses or think through what he wants.
My difficulty is that I get sucked in emotionally to messes like this. My business has grown to be large enough where this client is just a drop in the bucket, but even one irrational and hostile person can throw my whole mood into the toilet. I woke up last night at 2 am and couldn’t sleep for hours because my brain was just going nonstop on responses to this client. I even knew logically that my responses wouldn’t matter – this guy was not actually looking at reality and was just reacting emotionally himself.
I have a hard time cooling off and letting angry emotions go. I think the best thing to do is to give this guy the weekend to cool off and send a simple and reasonable email Monday and let him think about it. Emotionally though I want to argue every point and present all my evidence immediately.
I think my challenge is primarily in finding ways to let angry / frustrated / anxious emotions go, especially when it is related to my business. When I have big problems in the business that don’t involve anger, I have no problem resolving them and sleeping easy. But even small problems that get me angry throw me for a loop.
How do I control my anger / frustrations? How can I actually get sleep?
Some ideas I am coming up with now:
- Write a blog post like this
- Exercise (but I already work out every day and that doesn’t seem to help in this scenario)
- Talk to people about my feelings. Hard to do sometimes as a guy…. I am not embarrassed, I just don’t think about it.
- Try to put things in better perspective in my head
“He sends multiple drunk emails late Friday night and doesn’t read the reasonable responses or think through what he wants.”
Simple solution: terminate the contract and sue him for the outstanding invoices. Let his lawyer get paid to put up with his nonsense, rather than you doing it for free.
Good point! Our contracts are pretty strong, so I sent a detailed email that will hopefully either show him what he needs to do or just move to legal.