Dealing with negative comments & feedback

Today I want to talk about how to deal with negative comments that you might get. And specifically I'm going to use a couple examples from my life, a couple of trolls and haters that I've encountered in the past there. But also I'm going to share with you the three things that I use, three strategies and little frameworks that help me to really sift through helpful versus unhelpful feedback and make sure that I'm putting my energy into improving things and growing and helping others. And I'm not letting needless crappy comments from other people that are just designed to bring me down. I'm not letting those get in the way. And this is something that you will encounter throughout your career. It'll happen. It might be somebody you're chatting to, the pub who makes a snide comment about, oh, you're a chiropractor, blah, blah, blah, whatever, or it might be another colleague who's just like trying to bring you down so they feel better about themselves at a conference. It might be a patient who's in a bad way. Or if you spent more than 15 minutes on the Internet in your life, it'll be somebody on the Internet. Like I guarantee this happens. And this happened to me recently. It's something that does come with the territory. I've been putting my thoughts and my opinions and free content content out online for years now. And ultimately, if you're putting out anything that's valuable, you are not going to make everybody happy. Some people are not going to like it. If I'm making everyone happy all the time, I'm not doing anything meaningful. So I know that I'm going to get the odd barbed comment stuff thrown my way. And this happened recently. You know, when I had the certification courses open for enrollment, I dared to include some promotion for this course in my emails and in my in my content that I was putting out there. Now, you know, those of you followed me for a while know when I have something to offer, when I have something to sell, I will sell it and I will mention it. However, I never just send stuff that is just selling. I always want my marketing, so to speak, to be helpful for the people who don't buy anything. So if I include that, there's going to be some sort of lesson, some sort of story, some sort of bit of advice and then, yeah, if I have something I'm promoting at the time, I will mention that. And I put this out in one of the groups I'm in. It is a bit of a funny group Sometimes I do get more people deliberately misinterpreting and twisting my words in this group than other ones there. I won't get into that for now, but somebody just went like, oh, is this another advert for your course? Like yet another ad, or something like that. Because in two weeks I'd been including some promo in that stuff. And I've been sharing stuff in this group for a couple of years now, but apparently they didn't like the fact that I wasn't just sharing free advice of time and I occasionally had something to promote there. Now, this person, you know, they put that comment out there and it made me think of, you know, it's water off a duck's back. Like now, it doesn't bother me, but. But it reminded me of the first time I ever got, like a unpleasant comment on a. I think it was a video or. I don't even remember. First thing I ever put something online, I had some kind of snarky comment. Not like somebody questioning it or somebody engaged in genuine debate, somebody who just wanted to try and make me look bad so they looked better. And first time this happened, it got to me, you know, it did. It kind of like wheedled its way in past my defenses a bit and it bothered me. And I'll be honest, I kind of sunk to their level a little bit in my response. I was trying to sort of mock them a little bit, you know, and it was. I muse myself in the moment, but I remember looking back and going, I didn't like the way I handled that. I'm still thinking about this afterwards. That means that I didn't really honour my core values in terms of how I approach that. And also, you know, if people like me, they might have thought what I was saying was funny, but I could see how if you didn't know me, you'd be like, oh, this guy's taken that personally, or something like that. So I didn't really like that. But, you know, I responded. I thought about, how would I respond, what would I do differently now, funny if this guy ended up being a bit of a troll for a little bit. Funnily enough, a couple of months later, he left another really snarky comment. And I didn't actually have to say that much this time because fortunately I had quite a few people jumped on and replied to him already, which is. Which is really nice and I really appreciate those of you who did that. But this time it didn't bother me. And the difference was I'd really come across this quote and it gets attributed to Denzel Washington. This is the first of three things I'll share with you. Him. I don't think Denzel Washington said this. I looked into it. I can't actually find any proof he did. But I really like the quote. I. And the quote is, you will never be criticized by people doing more than you, only by people doing less. And I'd come across that in the meantime. And when this guy left this other snarky comment, I thought about it and went, that's 100% true in this case. I know that might not be true, you know, 1 or 2% of the time, but most of the time it really is. And it made me go, okay, this guy's not doing anything to help anyone else but himself. He's a chiropractor. He's treating his patients. Hasn't ever, never done anything, as far as I can tell, to help the rest of the profession. They're not out there, you know, mentoring, educating, anything like that. So I thought, well, they're doing nothing and I'm doing something. So I'm not actually going to worry too much about this one off person's opinion, because they're not. They're not in the trenches. They haven't tried it. They don't know what it's like to do this. So I'm not really going to worry about that. And then another one I came across a bit more recently on a podcast I quite liked. It sort of applied to this more recent one where they. I was quite clear this person was really just trying to put me down to feel better about themselves. And I don't remember who said it, but the quote was basically something on the lines of, like, you know, most people deep down don't like themselves, so why would you trust their opinion on whether they like you like, if they don't like themselves? Well, their opinion of my stuff has got to be a little bit suspect, right? Because they don't like who they are. So if they like. If they don't like something, they probably shouldn't even trust that. So why would you trust that when most people are, you know, unhappy and don't know what they want to do? So that was another one. I remember thinking, like, yeah, you know what? People who leave these kind of comments, a lot of the time, they're generally not happy people. And I'm pretty certain there's a correlation between the number of negative comments somebody puts out on the Internet and the degree of, you know, unhappiness they have within themselves and that's not really my issue. And if somebody really doesn't like themselves, they're gonna have a pretty warped view of reality, I think. So in that case, I would say, okay, I disregard that. Now, the third one I want to share, this goes a little bit deeper, but this really helped me the first time. If I think I ever sold anything, I think this is the first, first little course or first ever online thing I ever did. And I basically was kind of stuck in a bit of analysis paralysis because I was really, I couldn't, I really couldn't work out the right price to charge this thing. And part of me really wanted to charge really, really low. The figure I wanted to charge was embarrassing considering the huge amount of content that I was putting out there, the amount literally about 100 hours that went into this thing. But part of me really felt uncomfortable charging almost anything. And I sat down, I did some work and hang on a minute, I've got this amazing thing that I know because it's tried and tested material, I know it's going to help loads of people. It's just a new thing because it's online. That's where the imposter syndrome is coming up. Because I haven't done this before. It's not like a live event that I've done that I was experienced with. And I was wondering to myself, like, what am I worried about happening? And I thought, yeah, I'm worried that somebody's going to say, oh, Chris is charging loads of money. He obviously cares more about the money than he does about helping people. Or you're clearly just money oriented and all that kind of thing. And, you know, I was thinking about, okay, who's going to be saying that? It's not going to be people I know, it's not going to be people who like me. It's going to be strangers on the Internet. And I sat down, I thought about it, I went, okay, this doesn't make a lot of sense because I've put a huge amount of time into this project and this product. You know, that's time I've taken away from my family. I could have been working in the clinic and earning money to support my family, or I could have been spending that time with my wife and daughter. I took that away from them. And if I say, hey, guys, and I didn't do this, but look, I came back and I, you know, with a couple of hundred pounds, like charged so low is what I wanted to, I came back with a very small amount. They'd be like a Couple hundred pounds and we've not seen you for all this time. We could have had way more time with you. That's a bad deal for them. They're at the core of my life. They are the people who matter to me more than anybody else. So I really need to prioritize them after that. Then I've got. I think of it as like concentric rings. Then we've got our, you know, our relative immediate families, Cas and I, and our extended families and our friends and colleagues and co workers. And it all sort of ripples out from there. On the very, very edge of my life were these people I worried about might say, oh, Chris likes money. Those people are so on the edge. I don't really care what they think compared to what Cass and Alexandra think. Why on earth would I prioritize their opinion of me at the expense of these people? So that's something I really thought about as well. If you worry that people think you're being selfish, if you worry that, oh, you know, do I charge too much? Do I not give enough? Do I not do this or that, I would encourage you to think about the people who matter most to you in your life. And that should include you, by the way. That doesn't. We're not disregarding you here. That's also at that core there. Think about, okay, would they be happy with what I'm doing? And if they're happy, then who cares what people out here think? And if people around here are reasonably happy, then who cares about them, too? So those are kind of three things that I've used to really help me process. When I get negative comments and to allow me to think, is this something that I should look at? Because sometimes I've had some, you know, critiques and I've had some constructive criticism, and that's often from people who are doing more than me, or at least, you know, doing similar amounts. They've shared something that's trying to help me, and I might let that in. I might go, oh, thank you for that. I might act on it, I might not. But I'll think about it and I'll consider it. But if it fails any of those other things, if it's from somebody who's doing less than me, somebody's not doing anything there, or somebody who seems to just not be a very happy person, or it's somebody so on the edge of my periphery and they're asking me to sort of contradict, you know, what the people who matter most to me would want, then I'M not going to let it in. I'm not going to just entertain it. And that way I can focus on the stuff that really matters most and I can disregard the stuff that doesn't. So hopefully that's been helpful for you. I hope that makes sense there. Like I said, I've done it as a video because it's a little bit harder to misinterpret. People aren't just going to take the first line and go, here's what I think about that. I'm not going to put this in all the groups because I know if I do, this person is going to know who I'm talking about. Anyway, hope that was helpful for you and have a little think about that and I'll see you soon with some more content. Take care, everyone.