Improvability Blog

“Hi Kim, I met up with a dear friend last week and was going to ask her to be my first free client, but chickened out when she arrived with red hair! I can’t believe she’s done that!

I’m 99% sure she is a cool, but the red is all wrong so where does that leave me? She actually looks quite ill, but unless she asks me I can’t tell her that, she seemed so pleased about her hair.

I hadn’t told anyone I was doing the colour training so she still doesn’t know and now I feel bad that I still haven’t told her. Now I’m not sure what to do… Help!” Baumburger

Dear Baumburger,

You first have to get into a position where your friend wants your advice. If she doesn’t, then leave well alone. It’s not your job to ‘save’ all your friends and family. Your job with them is to be a friend or family member. Leave it to another consultant to take them on as a client.

However, you will get some friends or family members asking for your professional opinion. This is what I say, “Do you want the truth from me as a professional, or would you prefer me to give you my opinion as your friend?”

As long as you deliver this with total confidence in your own voice and are fully committed that whatever they choose is exactly what you are going to deliver (without blurring any lines in a pathetic last-ditch attempt to save face), this works every time. Why?

Because everyone wants to know how to look fantastic and here you have given them a choice – professional advice or amiable woolliness – and you have laid the responsibility for that choice fully at their door.

A word of warning here; when they say, “The truth, of course!” usually with a very worried look on their face, I always give them a second chance to bottle out. I say, “Listen. I’m not messing about here. I have a professional opinion and also that of a friend. Do you want the truth or would you prefer me to lie to you?”

If they still ask for your opinion, you cannot have been fairer. You’ve given them two chances and they must then be prepared to take the consequences.

However, you don’t have to be rude about how you deliver your opinion.  It’s not what you say; it’s always how you say it. I would never, ever suggest that a hairstyle or colour is hideous – even if I felt like retching into the nearest bush.

What you feel is totally unimportant

You need to find out how SHE feels about her hair. What you feel is totally unimportant. If you don’t like red hair, or cut-off trousers, or perms, or marcasite jewellery, or sky-blue-pink lipstick or whatever your personal hang-up is, and you’re letting that personal dislike get in the way of your service, then you’re in the wrong profession.

If this client’s dyed red hair is going to stop you from doing a great job for her, then you need to learn how to get past the red hair and deliver what your client wants.

This isn’t about you. It’s about your client

As a professional, you should be able to deal with all these situations. That’s what a colour analysis training course should offer – a toolbox full of great tools to pull out – when appropriate- for each client.

And that’s why I went beyond Colour Analysis in a Box and put all my own 31 years’ experiences of such heart-stopping moments into an advanced course, which – rather suprisingly – I called Advanced Colour Analysis .

Feel free to pinch this little pearl

Assuming your friend does want your advice and you are able to discuss this in a professional manner, then you might like to pinch this little pearl…

I always finish with, “This is purely my professional opinion and what I would advise you to do if you came to me as a paying client.  However, as your friend, if your hair colour or style makes my friend smile then it’s ok with me!”

At the end of the day, friends and family are fraught with danger:

• you think you know them
• you’re shocked when you actually start to analyse them
• and then you find you can’t tell them what you really think because of your history together

Why even go there?

You could destroy a good relationship if you tell the truth.

You have a choice to make

And this will be driven by your personality

My own friends and family are used to my very direct straight-between-the-eyes approach, and expect me to give them nothing less than the absolute truth. Those who don’t want to know don’t even bother asking! However they all know that any professional opinion I give will be delivered with love and humour – because nothing is important enough to risk upsetting anyone, least of all a good friend.

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