Podopheleus has written an excellent blog post on the importance of being true to yourself when sessioning with a pro-domme. Drawn from his own experiences and missteps, it has a bunch of good advice and is well worth a read.
My personal learning has been that it’s important to be clear in your own mind what aspects of the dynamic are negotiable and which aren’t. What you can’t negotiate you either need to make peace with or walk away from.
For example, the activities you do and the general dynamic of a scene should always be things you can discuss and adjust. If humiliation is a hard limit, then negotiate that up front. If a domme keeps sliding into that dynamic despite the discussed limit, it’s an easy call to walk away.
Where it gets trickier is around the more intangible elements – chemistry, style, intuition, empathy, etc. Those are things that you can’t negotiate. They’re an intrinsic part of a domme’s character and how she approaches her sessions. In a perfect word every submissive would be perfectly aligned with their dominant. In reality it’s a question of how much alignment there is and if you can live with the areas of misalignment. The mistake to avoid is being unhappy with parts of the dynamic, not recognizing those parts as being non-negotiable and then not being willing to walk away.
To pick a very prosaic example of my own: I played with a domme who took a pretty relaxed approach to timekeeping. I’m very punctual. She wasn’t. The first couple of times I was kept waiting for lengthy periods I was understandably annoyed. The third time it happened I realized that this was just how she conducted sessions. If I kept booking and kept getting annoyed by the same predictable behavior, that was then going to be on me, not her. I didn’t think it was something I could bring up with her. She obviously knew she was late and didn’t particularly care. So either I needed to come to terms with that and enjoy all the other great elements of our sessions or I should stop scheduling sessions. Starting off every session in a bad mood because I’d been stuck killing time in a local cafe for 45 minutes wasn’t helping anyone.
I’ve no idea what kind of image would best illustrate the themes of the post, so here’s something simply fun any eye catching!
Lady Lola in a London based pro-domme. You can find her 
Mistress Estelle is a Melbourne based pro-domme. She may have lost her Instagram account, but you can still follow here 
Yumine’s tumblr was recently wiped out, but you can follow and 
This is another old image I dug from a tumblr archive. It’s original from the 
Domina M is currently based in Paris and you can find 
