What You Tolerate, You Attract

A client didn't pay one of my invoices. I delivered the work to a high standard and even went beyond. They benefited, and then they simply chose not to honour what we'd agreed. It cost me a great deal financially, and in time spent chasing it, but it has also taught me some valuable lessons.

The anger came, and sat with me, growing as I tried to understand it. It was exacerbated also because this was someone I considered a friend.

Maybe they ran into problems, had different views on the value delivered (I doubt that) or they calculated that I was too small to matter in their grand scheme of things. Who knows, but once the initial layers of anger cleared, a sharper question took its place, everything changed. "What did I do that made this possible?"

Firstly, I'd assumed a signed contract was a shared commitment. The contract was clear, the expectations were explicit. But I got complacent: clarity in a contract doesn't create compliance. I've realised that some people view signed agreements as binding commitments, and honour them. But others view the contract as a negotiable starting positions, or even as a way to get someone to do what they want without a plan to honour it. Same document, entirely different paradigms.

So for me, this wasn't a contractual or communications problem. If it were, and I had not delivered I would have been told, and non payment would be justified.

What I did next was to reframe the problem, determining it was a selection problem. I selected the wrong person to do business with, and selection problems get solved with better filtering.

So the real question for me is, "how do I filter out people who don't share my operating principles or values?"

This is still work in progress, but these three steps help a great deal.

1. Screen for character and track record, not just ability to pay. Past behaviour predicts future behaviour more accurately than present promises. Check references and look for patterns (it's not just the employer that can do that, use GlassDoor). Trust what people have done, not what they say they'll do, and importantly, trust your intuition.
2. Tighten your tolerance before you begin. Every standard you lower creates space for the problem to live in. Raise the bar on what you accept at the outset, the quality of the client, the clarity of the fit, the alignment of values, and you reduce the impact of any issue before it ever arrives. The tighter the tolerance, the less damage anything can do.
3. Make breaking the agreement more expensive than keeping it. Clear consequences. Social proof. Reputation systems that extend the cost beyond the invoice itself.

You can't control other people's integrity, but you can control who you work with and how you structure the terms. Your standards aren't conditional on other people's behaviour. When someone breaks an agreement, they're showing you who they are, and you are responsible for showing them who you are.

You can choose resentment and let it erode from within. Or you can look for ways it teaches you, or provide you with a new perspective. I am calling this a form of self-respect, and self-respect compounds. Every time you enforce a standard, even when it costs you short-term revenue, you strengthen your identity as someone who refuses to operate from scarcity. Every time you let something slide because you need the work or don't want conflict, you weaken it. Your current outcomes, the clients you attract, the agreements that get honoured or broken, are the sum of your past decisions about what you've been willing to accept.

What you tolerate, you attract. Change the tolerance, change the attraction. Change what you accept, change what arrives. It was an expensive lesson for me, and I scratched the surface telling it, my "friend" was always going to do this. Shared with you so you don't have to experience it.

If you're ready to examine the standards you've been accepting and rebuild your selection criteria around what actually matters, let's talk.

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An idea. Your outcomes mirror your self-image. If you see yourself as someone who has to accept poor behaviour to survive, you'll keep attracting people who test that boundary. Change the self-image, change who shows up.

An observation. Every battle is won before it's fought. The client who doesn't pay was always going to not pay. You lost when you accepted them, not when they broke the agreement. Victory comes from choosing which battles to fight, not from fighting harder in battles you should have avoided.

A question. What standard are you currently accepting that a future version of yourself, operating from abundance rather than scarcity, would never tolerate?

Ready to examine the standards you've been accepting and rebuild your selection criteria?

Let's talk about designing better filters and stronger standards.

Get in touch.