Flat Work
If your entire professional identity is organized around serving clients, you’ve collapsed yourself into a role. You’ve become the helpful expert. The reliable partner. The one who always delivers. But that’s a persona, not a person. And when you only show up as a persona, the work might look great on the outside, but something essential is missing.
Most people in client-facing work will tell you that clients come first. It sounds noble. It sounds like good business. But I think it’s quietly ruinous — not just for you, but for the clients themselves.
Two cutouts facing each other.
Here’s what happens when you lead with your professional avatar: you invite the client to do the same. Now it’s two cardboard cutouts facing each other. Everything is legible. Predictable. Flat. The consultant says consultant things. The client says client things. Everyone performs their role, and the project moves forward in the most expected way possible.
What’s missing is the creative friction that makes work actually good. The weird tangent that leads somewhere better. The honest admission that changes the brief. The moment where someone says “I don’t think this is working” and means it, and the other person hears it, and something shifts.
That can’t happen between flat personas, between cutouts. It can only happen between people.
And clients can feel the difference. They may not name it, but they feel it — that flatness, that vague sense that they’re being managed rather than met. You can’t build real trust through a performance. And you can’t do your most creative, most alive work while performing.
Mutuality isn’t a category — it’s a way of showing up
The fix isn’t to deprioritize clients; it is to stop sorting people into categories and start being generous and honest with everyone.
A client can be a peer. A peer can become a client. The labels don’t determine the quality of the relationship — you do. What matters is whether you’re willing to show up as a person rather than a cutout. Whether you mean what you say. Whether you’re being generous with your attention or just managing the interaction.
Mutuality isn’t reserved for people who aren’t paying you. It’s a choice you make about how you relate. It means telling a client something they didn’t ask to hear because you think it matters. It means letting a conversation go somewhere you didn’t plan. It means treating every relationship as one where both people might be changed by the exchange.
The opposite of this — the transactional mode — is easy to spot once you’re looking for it. It’s the call where you already know what you’re going to say before it starts. The proposal where you pattern-match from the last three. The relationship where nothing surprises you because you’ve made sure nothing can.