If you are constantly late for appointments; if you are always on the mobile, whether tweeting or texting with your head held down or always with it pressed hard against your ear, trying to get a word in edgeways; if you're always in a hurry to get somewhere as if your time was on somebody else's clock; then you're not going to get anywhere with any client whatsoever.
If, however, you're always the one to arrive punctually, or even a little early (to scope the battlefield and to rehearse your spontaneity); and if your phone stays in your pocket because it's you who rule over your contacts, not the other way around; and if you always appear focused, rather than distracted, because you are in control over your present surroundings; then you're going to command respect far more easily, even among potential clients you're only meeting for the first time.
When in public, you have to maintain your public image: the perception the general public, and your potential clients, have of you. The two strongest weapons in your arsenal are grace and the ability to defer gratification.
Grace
Typically expanded to the three word phrase "Grace Under Pressure," this is the ability to stay calm in the face of stressful and/or confusing situations, which could cause lesser minds to crack. The point being, you're a 'tist. You control minds for a living; that has to start with your own.
Dealing With Irritants
This is an immense challenge for you. There is a way of dealing with irritating things that crop up in your life. Getting irritated isn't the way.
Learn to stay chilled. Embody the line from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If:"
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you
Practice disinterest in people, particularly the uninteresting and the irritating. Remain courteous, even kind, with them, but always be mindful of the line about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas. Arms' length. No need to be unkind - kindness towards an irritant actually deflects the irritation back upon its source - but remember to keep them out of your life, in public and in private, if only because of the effect that you know they have on people.
Coping With Time
This one's a vital lesson to learn. Become the master of time and of timing. Let yourself, not others, be the judge of when you must act - and when not to act.
An example: if you are hard at work, writing out a script, and you have to pack up and leave at 15:30, if you know that it will take you exactly 15 minutes to prepare yourself to leave you can time your work so that you finish at 15:10. That gives you 15 minutes to pack, and five minutes to spare; five minutes in which you can enjoy a moment's meditation.
Work out the timings of things - how long it takes for you to go to the bathroom, how long it takes for you to eat a sandwich or a snack, whatever. Work them out in advance. Stick to your knowledge. Keep it a secret. To others, you will appear to be a master of timing: a king of clocks.
There is another side to this. Some people will always come along and remind you about the time. However well-meaning, they can be an irritant. Worse, if you follow their "advice," you'll effectively be operating to their clock; not yours.
Have the strength to shut them down. Tell them that the more they talk, the less time there'll be to do what needs to be done, so they are the only ones wasting time with all their pointless needling and badgering. And remember the above point about dealing with irritants.
Deferred Gratification
This one's more subtle. It starts with learning to be happy with being the last in line. Last in line to the buffet. Last one to the bar. Last one to jump in to the pool feet first. Last in the queue at the till.
Even, if you can develop the muscular fortitude, last in line to the toilet cubicles.
When others rail against such things as the weather, how there always seems to be a crowd in front of them at the till, why they always seem to be passed over for promotions at work and so on, it pays to cultivate disinterest in such petty annoyances; but it pays so much more if it looks as if you are equally disinterested in the free, quick and easy pleasures. Subliminally, if it looks as if you are in such control over your own reflexes that you control how, and how little, and under what circumstances, you indulge in your own wants, you will be showing to potential clients that it is you who will be leading in the sessions; furthermore, that they can enjoy letting go more during the sessions, knowing that you will be focusing more on them as clients than on your own needs.
Dealing With Desire
Desire is a killer, when you're looking for a relationship. A lot of the sort of people who study the techniques of pickup artists, for example, fixate on one goal, and it is a horrific one - to close a deal. To get laid. To make a conquest.
Desperation is an unseemly look to wear. And it is the last thing you should ever display - in your face, your tone of voice, your choice of words, your body language. To kill the desperate, you have to do the one thing you probably swore you would never do - drop the desire. Kill the cravings. Put aside the need to focus on that end goal, and instead pursue each moment with studied disinterest in the outcome - you get laid or you do not. Life goes on regardless. Sex is not a result. It isn't even the process that leads to a result. Just a momentary pleasure, one which you can either do with or do without.
Either way, act as if the whole business of getting it on is really no skin off your nose.
If you always appear to be the opposite of needy, your selflessness, self-assurance and self-control will be noticed by potential clients, as it shows you to be the sort of person in whom they are able to place their trust - an essential currency between 'tist and client.
Conclusion
But don't just ape the appearance of selflessness and so on. Become that selfless, self-assured, self-controlled person who runs off your own clock, who puts down irritants with a mild smile and a steel glare over horn-rimmed glasses, and who lives a life free from dependence on the end goal, the product, the result.
To summarise; to court your clients and potential clients, be cool to people at all times.
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