1. Try hard to understand your clients, their situations and personality, and like them as people. 2. Honor your promises, so that clients can depend on you. 3. Always help your clients to see things from fresh perspectives. 4. DON’T try to force things on your clients. Help clients think things through, but let them decide. DON’T substitute our judgment for their own. 5. Help clients think, and help them separate their logic from their emotions. 6. Correct your clients’ mistakes and misconceptions, gently and lovingly. 7. Clients must be able to rely on us to tell the truth. 8. We get into our relationship with the clients for the long haul --- the relationship is more important than the current issues. 9. Give clients our reasoning to help them think, not just our conclusions. 10. Give options to clients, increase their understanding of those options, give them our recommendations, and let the clients themselves choose. 11. If necessary, gently challenge the clients’ assumptions, and help them uncover the false assumptions that they have been working under. 12. Make your clients feel comfortable and casual with us, so that they can easily discuss serious issue with us. 13. In front of your clients, act like a real person, not someone in a formal “role”. 14. While we need to safeguard our own fair interests, we must be reliably on the clients’ side and have their interest in our hearts. 15. In rare circumstances where our interests are in conflict with the clients’, we should always strive to find a win-win solution. 16. We must remember everything the clients ever said, without notes. 17. We are always honorable, never gossip about other people, and our clients must trust our sense of confidentiality and integrity. 18. Help clients put their issues in context, often through the use of metaphors, stories, and anecdotes, making the clients realize that few problems are really unique. 19. Have a sense of humor - it will help diffuse clients’ tension in tough situations. 20. We must make the clients understand that we are smart about what to do for them, and, more importantly, sometimes in ways that our clients are not themselves
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