There's a moment that often happens when potential clients reach out to spiritual directors - it’s subtle but significant. Someone reaches out, curious, maybe a little tentative. And something in us tightens. Will they sign up? Can they afford it? Are they serious?
The moment we start scanning a person for “buyer signals,” we’ve turned the dial away from the spiritual frequency that is our home.
I understand the shift and the pressure. It’s so easy to feel inadequate and to want more clients. And running a practice has real economics.
But the minute we see a potential client as a transaction, we've reduced something sacred to a commodity. And it’s so easy to do.
Consider a common scenario that unfolded with “Carol”, a spiritual director I was supervising. A woman reached out to her, describing a painful season after leaving her faith community of twenty years. She was raw, uncertain, and honestly not sure what spiritual direction even was.
Carol quickly launched into the logistics - her approach, session length, frequency, fees. All reasonable things. But when we reflected on it together, she acknowledged that something felt flat. She realized she'd been so focused on closing the “sale” that she'd barely registered what the woman had actually said. Twenty years. Gone. Raw. The person didn’t call back.
Carol and I talked about what it would mean to flip the script. To shift the focus onto the woman and her story. I suggested that next time she give the person a mini spiritual direction session, and let the details emerge at the end, if appropriate.
By the next time Carol and I met, another person had approached her. She focused more on the fears and desires beneath the woman’s struggles than the path to procuring a new client. The person decided she wanted to work with Carol. But more importantly, she arrived at her first session already feeling seen, feeling trust.
Carol didn’t sell the client on coming to that first session. She opened the door with a sacred initial conversation, a conversation that would’ve been spiritually significant even if the person hadn’t decided to become a client.
That's the difference. Not a sales technique dressed up in spiritual language, but a genuine reorientation that serves the person in front of you.
Your practice grows not because you learned to close the deal better, but because you learned to listen more deeply.
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If something in this post stirred you and you'd welcome a fresh set of eyes on your practice, I'd love to join you for a free 30-minute supervision session on Zoom. No agenda, no pitch. Email me here to set one up.