129: How to Avoid the Excruciating Public Shaming from Cancel Culture: Lessons from Rachel Hollis

It's been a rather turbulent week for Rachel Hollis. I know some of you are saying who she's a massively successful self help guru of the moment who's having another moment in the world of crisis and cancellation.

Someone commented and said, you are privileged af. And I was like, you're right, I'm super freaking privileged. But also, I worked my ass off to have the money to have someone come twice a week and clean my toilets. And I told her that. And then she said, well, you're unrelatable. What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable?

Welcome to the Confident Communications Podcast, where we help communicators create the right response at the right time and deliver it in the right place. You heard the clip and now you're still thinking, who the heck is Rachel Hollis and why do I care? Even though I know some of you know who she is. But here's why it matters. No one wants to defend their reputation in public. It's never fun, people attacking people, knocking them off the pedestal. It's happening every day. Today on the podcast, let's talk about why the one trait we're going to focus on that causes the destruction of a reputation. What is it about people who are a target for cancellation? Why do they make the list? What is it that they do in particular that leads them on a road to cancellation rather than just taking the hit? You know, the one bad story in the press, why do people go the extra mile to bring other people, often in a position of power, down to flat out destroy them? I think I know the answer when I hear of someone in the news getting excoriated over something they've said or have done, when that pot happens and all the calls of cancellation have started. I've seen it play out a million times. And the cause, in my opinion, always lands in the same place. Now, why does this matter to you, the listener? Because the threat of cancellation can happen to anyone. These character cancellations, they don't just happen on Twitter or in the Daily Mail, you know, they happen in real life. They can happen with your customers, they can happen with your employees. It can happen to anyone running a business or working for one, communicating on behalf of one. And it's not about the complaints. Everyone deals with complaints in their business. No matter what they do, someone's going to complain about something, but it's about the charge. It's about the accusation. Most people feel confident talking about their job. Think about it. If I were sitting next to you right now, or if I were running next to you. If you're listening while on a run, I. And you wanted to tell me about your job, you would be very, very comfortable speaking from the heart. You'd probably be very excited about it, very happy about it. But now toss in judgment. What if I said something back to you that was judgy? It's going to sting. It's going to hurt. What makes it hurt even more is when it's the general public, when it's the public's out there and you don't even know, sometimes the faceless public, or sometimes even worse, you know who it is. But when that happens, the added rub is that they're coming after your character. That's a whole new ballgame. It raises the stakes on vulnerability and also stress and the risk of what could happen. Now, this often happens in politics. And just. It's funny, last night a friend was texting me screenshots about someone in town who we both know, who's running for an open position on the town council. And. And I was reading some of the texts that came. All of posts that popped up in naturally, I'm sure you can guess Facebook. And normally when people run for office, I mean, of course, coming out of this election, there's going to be a lot of dialogue, a lot of conversation. But what made these texts interesting is because it took that slight deviation where it became personal, where people did not want this person to run, and if they did, they did not want them to win in their particular reasons why, due to, you know, previous actions. And then some of the responses, you know, on Facebook were the charges, naturally, but what they were going to do about it, and people said, why don't we get signs and put them all around town saying what you've done. It's that action, right? It's that direct retaliation. Because you've heard me say this before so often on. On this podcast or if you've ever heard me speak on a podcast or at a workshop or even I was speaking this week and is what I had said. I'd also said this in an Instagram post. It all comes. Which, by the way, I felt stupid doing. See, we all feel that way, but it all comes down to this, you know, same place of putting yourself out there that someone could bring you down. Because we all want to be honest, decent people. I mean, unless you're a serial killer, of course, but everyone wants to be that, right? But we also want other people to know that we're honest, decent people. And in order to do that, you need to find a way to show it. The problem is that so much of our communications now is happening online, especially with the pandemic, but just the nature of technology. So much is happening online and social media, and that makes everyone feel nervous. Like, I believe people who are good, people who work hard, who have passions, they deserve to be rewarded for all of those things. And the reward is having the confidence to share who they are and what they do to help people, to serve people. But there's a fear that comes in if you think that you're going to be attacked, and especially attacked again. When people think that something's being taken out of context or there's misinformation out there. You don't want to tarnish the brand. Like, another quick example. Last night, you could tell I was bored. Last night I fleeted something about a project that I have coming out that I'm going to mention at the end of the podcast. And I posted it on Twitter through Fleet. So I fleeted it and it went up there and I looked at it and I said, that was stupid. Like, it was just dumb. And not only did I do it, I accidentally did it twice, but I didn't care about it that much. It's not like everyone's going to come down and cancel me because of my stupid fleet. But the point is, like, I get it. Like, sometimes you put things out there that make you worry that you look, you know, like an idiot. But I want to give you advice for the one big thing to do beyond that. It's not just about looking like an idiot, but what happens when that fear rises up, the fear of cancellation. How can you not be a target? What are some of the things that you can do to make sure that it doesn't happen to you? I'm just going to give you one trait that I find in the people who are targets for cancellation. And we're just going to extrapolate what not to do by that example. I want to help you become indestructible, because after all, that's my brand. Indestructible pr. It's helping leaders, helping communicators create the right response at the right time and delivering it in the right place. Now, going back to someone who had the wrong response at the wrong time and delivered it in the wrong place was Rachel Hollis. Now, Rachel is this mega successful mom of four turned self help guru, motivational speaker. She's an author. She has millions of followers online. She has podcasts, conferences, and she has a number of speaking engagements out there. She was on one of Oprah's tours and her books, girl, wash your face girl, stop apologizing. And I think it's, I didn't see that coming. That was her last book that she wrote that came out during 2020. She is wildly successful, got a lot of her start and her success in the whole Christian realm. That's where you find a lot of people who are authors and self help, that's where they get a lot of their heart. And she has a strong following with women. She also started getting a lot of speaking engagements and started to amass her wealth speaking to a lot of MLM groups, multi level marketing groups. So already there with that history, people have been calling her someone who takes advantage of people. MLMs are known for taking advantage for a lot of people, usually women, women who may not be financial stable. They feel that Rachel is like the self help guru version of an mlm. That's where it's starting. So last week what she did is she started to go on, she has these lives and she went on a bit of a rant. Now I will tell you, if you're not familiar with her work, her philosophy is just hardcore bootstrapping. If your life sucks, that's because you're not working hard enough. If you're unhappy, that's because you're not taking the time to make yourself happier. If you're out of shape, if you're overweight, she's got a fat shaming thing too, then that's because you're not moving. It's a lot of it is that things are wrong with you and she wants to fix you by telling you what you're doing wrong. So here's a clip that got some people, lots of people to grab the pitchfork and come after Rachel.

I never look at comments on social media, but I went into, you know, Ford was on Rach Talk last week and he was so cute and you guys were so kind. You wrote the nicest things. And I happened to come across a comment from a Karen.

It's the I never read social media comment. For me it's her son on the live show with her. For me it's the calling out of Karen's. For me, I'm no Karen, but can we dispense with calling people like annoying people Karen? So on behalf of all the Karens everywhere, I feel you we need to come up with a new line. But what Rachel is doing here, you're starting to get a sense of who she is. There is a. Oh, I don't know, what do we call this entitlement that's starting to come out of her. Let's listen to another clip.

Literally every woman I admire in history was unrelatable. If my life is relatable to most people, I'm doing it wrong.

So after outlining some of the ways in which she sees herself as truly exceptional, she wakes up at 4am she does all the hard work. When she started to get angry at this person who called her unrelatable, she then went into a tangent where she said, literally every woman that I look up to is unrelatable, which I don't think makes any sense, and says if my life is relatable to most people, then I'm doing it wrong. There's something about that line that hits people in a certain way, especially all these women, because that is how Rachel Hollis amassed her millions, by being relatable. That's her brand. It's no different if I told you that I have this indestructible PR brand. But I'm going to tell you that if you get canceled or say something stupid on social media, well, that's your own fault for saying something stupid on social media. The video caption read, harriet Tubman, rbg, Marie Curie, Oprah Winfrey, Amelia Earhart. All women relatable af. Okay, so she was trying to take her rant and spin it into a pro woman type of a statement. But what's interesting is she was ranting against a woman. Now, on April 4th, Hollis made her first apology. She clearly was starting to get the sense that things were awry, that things weren't right in Hollisville, usa. And it sounded like her team was letting her know that there was a lot of chatter online because as we heard, Rachel Hollis, who makes millions off of her followers, would never demean herself to actually sit down and read what her followers have to say on social media. But in that first apology, she displaced all blame for what happened onto anyone else. And she ended up blaming her team, quote, unquote team, because they didn't do their job. They failed to do their job. So that post I saw saw it on TikTok. It's now deleted. Everything is on TikTok. It's now Deleted. But she was saying that she had not actually been comparing herself to any of those women that she had mentioned, but she mentioned them because she wanted to align herself with other just the idea of being unrelatable. In other words, what she was trying to do was take that rah rah moment like pro woman. But what she was doing is she was being completely unrelatable AF as she would say. So in that apology, one of the biggest reasons why I failed is because she threw her team under the bus. And as we know, with Ted Cruz or anyone else out there that tries to do that, if you shift blame, remember Andrew Cuomo, like the last couple podcasts, if you shift blame, you're already digging a hole. You might as well just grab. Just look for your shovel and start digging right there. Then she had to come back for a second apology and she posted it just in screenshots on social media. I'll just read part of it. You had to swipe a couple times. There are many things I would like to say to reiterate just how sorry I am, but the important thing for me to do now, something I should have already done, is honestly be quiet and listen. Yeah, no kidding, Rachel. I'm not even going to read the rest of it because it doesn't matter, because I am certain it was not written by Rachel. It was written by a PR person. So it's not relatable. But what will happen to Rachel here? Will she be canceled? No, she's. She has so many followers. She still has so many people who believe in her. She has her base and people who have a strong base. Even if it starts to diminish, they still have that base. She will still sell books. She will still sell her her workout app. She will. People will still listen to her podcast. But what will happen is the story will have legs every single time Rachel steps in it. And she will. She'll keep doing it over and over again. These misfires will keep coming back to haunt her. It may not be a full cancellation, but she is likely taking a hit right now to the bottom line because her last book didn't see it coming. I'm sure she didn't see coming that it was going to be her least popular book out of the three because her fans are noticing the hypocrisy of who she is. And that's what I want you to notice, is when you start thinking about yourself first, your messaging is in the self and not in the others. You're going to start using language and the intention's going to come out that you perceive yourself to be better. Now, part of the whole debacle for Rachel, that she just very quickly made this statement, but it's what resonated with everyone. She minimized a person who worked for her as cleaning the toilets. And in fairness, when she explained it on the long live she did say, this is a lovely woman. She comes to my house. But the clip she used in that second rant is she said, just clean the toilet. So that's kind of what happens when we get emotional, is we're not thinking rationally. We're thinking with emotion. We're thinking with our hearts instead, our wounded hearts, often instead of our head. And then Hollis goes on and she's talking about the reason why other people, you know, aren't as successful as her. They're just not working as hard. So here is the reason why it matters to you. Whether you know Rachel Hollis or not doesn't matter. But just my description about her, I hope was able to bring you here to this point about the cancellation. And when it happens, if you're in a position where you're creating a response for yourself or on behalf of someone else, look at the intention behind it. Who are you writing to? What are the words saying and where are the words pointing? Is it just about you, you, you, you, you, you, you? Or is about your fans, your customers, the people you serve, your members, your constituents, whoever it is, who is it about? If messages have the double down, I'm doubling down on this. I'm going to kick and scream. I'm going to just talk about the injustice of what's happening to myself. It's when you're betting on your brand, you're betting on you over your public, your fans, your followers, whoever it is, you are smarter than them. You don't deserve this scrutiny. You are above it all. That's the type of response that starts engaging the calls for cancellation. Now, most people, here's a little, little, little piece of the cancel culture. If you look historically, who gets canceled? People get canceled when they break the law, when they go to jail, when they lose their job, when they've been fired. That's how you truly cancel a person. But a lot of these people, like the Rachel Hollis's in the world, they're just taking these massive hits right now. So. But it's still, it's like the calls for cancellation are what is can just be as damaging as the cancellation itself. So when it comes time to look for these cancellations, or if your business is in the middle of something, or you're writing a statement for someone, or even if it's huge, or even if it's small, even if it's something that happened in the office, or if it's a reply to Facebook, look for the excuses, look for the blaming, look for the injustice of it all, look for the how dare you attitude. If any of the response that you are creating smells of any of that, all you are doing is creating a culture for people to call for your cancellation. It's as simple as that. That selfishness leads to cancellation. That's it. Too selfish. You too shall be canceled. Now, does the idea of public backlash, humiliation, or even that idea of being canceled stress you out? It should. It stresses most people out. But if you're someone who finds yourself reluctant to put yourself out there because you are worried about that blowback, or are you a communicator? You are a whiz on all things social media, but you have a knot in your stomach every single time you open the company Facebook page because you're worried about what you may find. A person calling you out on your company or for a task that took too long to do, it makes you feel uneasy. You know, recently I was working with some communicators, and they were masters at social and creating content and just beyond clever. They're millennials, naturally. But where some of the hesitancy comes in is the response. You know, really, it's. It's the public relations, it's the crisis pr. It's. It's handling the response. People don't have a lot of confidence when they have to do that because the risks are so high. They're so incredibly high. So every time they write something, they were worried that it was going to trigger this chain reaction that something else is going online. And I know many of you feel the exact same way. I do, too. That's why I take the time to make sure that I respond in a way that speaks to the person who I want to help. And that's really the key. If you make the mistake, though, it's on the Internet, and once it's on the Internet, it's there forever. So it is understandable you're going to feel nervous. You're going to feel uneasy about putting yourself out there. So you're not alone. We all feel that way. But what if I told you there was a way that you could respond with confidence in this new era of media without that hesitation or fear of destruction to your brand? Whether you're a communicator, you're a leader of an organization, or you're running for your town council? You know you're a trustworthy person, you know your heart is in the right place, you know you have good values. You know you're capable of having a conversation about any situation, about anything that you touch. But as long as it is with someone in person or on the phone, you have confidence. But as soon as it happens online, you get nervous. So if you serve your customer offer a product or if you are on the brand, no matter what the commodity is, if a customer comes to you for something, it means you will always have to come up with a response for a complaint or a concern. Which can be good in some times because you can turn it around and you can show the benefits of your business or the benefits of what you do. But it can also be bad because it can just lead to stress and it could take all your time. Like your whole day can be sucked away because one person is complaining to you on Facebook or left this horrific Google review. And it can also lead to even bigger problems if you don't manage them. Because when your customers want answers, they want their answers immediately. So you have to live in this world of the speedy response. And of course you have to be transparent where you can, but you're still uncertain how to respond. Well, here's my solution for all of you beyond listening to the podcast, of course, is to check out my new book. Finally, as I said, a couple podcasts back, if Oprah were to do it, it's my book, Indestructible. Reclaim Control and respond with confidence in a media crisis. The pre sale starts on Tuesday, April 13. It's a big day. I love April. It's spring. It's my birthday month. It reminds me of going to school at bu. It reminds me of living near Fenway. It reminds me of living near the Boston Marathon. I lived right off Beacon, so I was tucked in between like the Boston Marathon and Fenway park. And Boston Marathon day was just like so much fun. I watched it every year. And I always remember one year we were eating and drinking for a long time and we were staying there till like the last people were running on the marathon route. And I remember sitting on the sidelines and I was wearing this awful orange raincoat and I felt like a complete blob after eating and drinking all day. And I was watching the people running the course at the very end. And there was this one guy who I absolutely remember, like, exactly what he looked like. He looked me in the eye. He was miserable. He, you know, is a little portly. He was, he was just shuffling at, at the most. I mean, he was probably shuffling slower than he would is if he were walking. But I remember just watching him thinking, I feel exactly like you do right now. I'm not exhausted like you, but I feel like I look how you feel right now. And right after that I said, you know what? I'm going to run a marathon. I've never run a marathon. I'm going to do it. That guy, I don't who he is in this days running somewhere around Boston right now, but that's what got me to do a marathon. But anyway, that is a complete tangent. But I ran my first marathon, the Twin Cities Marathon, a few months after that. But at any rate, the point is, I love spring. I'm starting to drift. So the pre sale of my book starts in the spring and that's the reason why I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it in April, I wanted to do it this week. This is the week that reminds me me like when the Red Sox play at home. Tuesday, the day that it comes out, the Red Sox happen to play my hometown Minnesota Twins. I'm drifting again. But spring being a time for renewal. It's a time for renewing your reputation if you need to, but also a time for building your reputation. Why not? There are so many channels right now to communicate who you are and what you do and the passion that you have. So part of what goes into creating your online Persona is what strengthens your reputation. It's, you know, we all have a goal of wanting to have a strong reputation, but that really isn't the goal. That's just an objective. The goal is to be someone who's open and honest and communicating in as frequent of a manner as you possibly can. But the goal is to have the confidence to do it. The goal is to be able to share what you do and you should be proud to do that. That so that my friends, is the key to indestructibility. It's being confident, to tell people and to show people what you believe in, what your value systems are. So when you show people ego or self importance or narcissism, when you hear intimidation and bullying from anyone, that's just a sign of fear. It's a sign of weakness that allows for destructibility. So the presale for the book Indestructible starts now. So you can head on over to my website and you can purchase the book for pre sale. So you want to look for the button on the homepage. So in this book you will learn how to display truth and transparency online. In this time of outrage, you're going to get tips for how to manage a crisis on social media. We'll help you be a modern age communicator who understands how to avoid that reputational shrapnel when it comes your way. And importantly, it tells you how to lead in a time of crisis. So it's perfect for anyone who runs a business or communicates on behalf of one who want to increase the value and reputation of your business. And when you pre order the book, there is a bonus. It's a free audio download. So make the most of the book by buying the presale offer. And then when the book comes for sale, you will get a link to the Indestructible Insider. It's a companion audio feed designed to bring the lessons in the book to life. So it is an audio feed. It's just like a podcast. It has audio chapters. It's not me reading the book, it's not the audiobook, but it's a companion piece. I wrote the book in 2020 and you know how quick quickly events happen. So the Indestructible Insider audio bonus brings every chapter to life in real time. So each episode is going to be a chapter that provides an overview of the chapter, but I'm going to tie it into a real time event. I'm going to provide you the one big thing you need to know from that chapter to help you gain the confidence in your communications. Now, bonus for the people who get the Indestructible Insider, I have an interview with someone in the book book who was involved in a very big news story that went all the way up to the Oval Office. There are a lot of lessons in this interview to learn about how to manage a crisis that happens on social media. The power of viral social media, of hashtags. It's really good and it's a story that I know all of you are going to know about when you start listening to it. But, but I interviewed this person for the book and then we did a follow up interview which is going to be a part of the Indestructible Insider. So when the book is officially released in May, you're going to receive the audio feed. You can listen with one click access using your favorite podcast app or you can scan a QR code and you point it right to the screen and then you'll be listening. In other words, it's super easy. So don't let thinking I don't understand a fee get in the way of you purchasing the preset sale. So head on over to my website right now@mollymcpherson.com go right to the homepage and you're going to see a section for where you can pre order the book and you can claim the bonus by uploading your receipts. You can just scan it and upload it and you will receive the special indestructible Insider bonus when the book is published. Thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. I'm very excited about this book and I cannot wait to share it with you all. Bye for now.