#321: Handling Criticism with Humor and Heart

Hello there, health coaches. You know what? In the spirit of Christmas, I figured I would bring you an episode all about criticism. It seemed a little bit weird when I wrote that, when I was thinking of it that way. But really to me, this is where Hear me Out, this is where the spirit of Christmas and generosity and grace comes into play all year long when you're running your own health coaching business. So today we're going to talk about criticism from a slightly different angle. Now, speaking of running your health coaching business, this episode is brought to you by practice, better Practice better handles all your client billing, scheduling notes, private and group sessions, online programs, you name it, so you can spend less time with admin tasks and show up for your clients like a real pro. And guess what? For the next few weeks, only you can get a free 21 day meal prep challenge when you sign up for a free trial, and you'll also save 30% off your first three months.

Definitely check this out. It's all at healthcoachpower.com/pb. Now, I have a question for you guys. Have you watched Ted Lasso by any chance? I missed it. When it first came out. I was not watching, but just recently, my boys and I have been working our way through that whole series. Now, of course, the main character is Ted, and if you haven't watched, he is so amazingly positive and likable and able to take criticism with a smile and make everybody around him just feel at ease. It's a joy to watch. I think everyone walks away going like, oh, gosh, I want more people like that in my life. I wish I could be more like that. Now, of course, he has his own issues in the show. I'll let you watch it. But the point is, I think we all need to be a little bit more like Ted Lasso in our businesses.

We can learn a lot from his energy. I like watching this show at night. I try to absorb some of this. I like seeing how he can diffuse difficult situations. We got into health coaching to have a positive impact on the world, to make the world a better place to help people. This is a helping profession. We're not here to make a quick buck. We're not here to scam anyone out of anything. Health coaches are the best people I know. I love being involved in this industry. Just big hearted kind people. Yes, we are in this industry with our hearts absolutely overflowing with good intentions. Now, here's the funny thing. As soon as you show up and you put yourself out there, even me today doing this podcast episode, just trying show up in the world, offer value, do a good thing, inevitably you're going to be up against other people's stuff, their perception of you, their negativity, their criticism, their harsh word.

Sometimes it stinks, but it's true. And maybe you've heard this saying, I think it's attributed to Aristotle, but I've also seen it attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, so who knows? But I love this, and I often think about it. It says, there's only one way to avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. Well, we are not here as health coaches to do nothing and to say nothing. I mean, we're doing the opposite of that. We are here on a mission. So how you handle the inevitable criticism that comes up, that's going to make a huge difference in your quality of life and in the success of your coaching practice, and it is going to come up. I've had to learn this through the years, and I'm telling you right now, it has not always been easy. So I was thinking back all the different times that I've had these difficult, challenging situations.

I remember years and years ago, it was the first time that I got a barrage of trolls harassing me on social media. That had never happened before. And in this case, all I had done, I had shared a recipe. Oh my God, I had shared a recipe on Facebook. That's it. And later that day, I was at a park. I was with my kids and I saw all these notifications popping up on my phone. The post had gone, I'm not going to say viral, I'll say semi viral, but it was getting way more engagement than anything that I had shared in the past, and I'm excited about this. But then I looked and they were all these negative, terrible comments, insulting comments, snide comments about a recipe. You guess it. It's not like I had shared a controversial political opinion or something like this. So first of all, has this happened to you yet where you've posted something and you're like, what?

I cannot believe people have the audacity to even write this stuff back to me. I remember my heart sank to my toes. I felt this pit in my stomach, and instead of being present with my kids that day, they were still very young. They needed me, but my head was somewhere else. I spent the whole afternoon worrying about what should I say to this person and how should I respond to that comment and trying to defend myself against all these haters, haters going to hate? And they certainly did. I can't even remember the details, but I'm pretty sure the recipe was something chickpea based, maybe like a chickpea, oh gosh, I don't even know. But all the hate was coming from the no beans, no grains like paleo contingent lashing out at me for claiming to be a health coach, yet sharing a chickpea recipe.

It was over the top. People can feel so mean over chickpeas, seriously. And I'm thinking that was probably, that's the first time I can remember feeling that gut punch of like, Hey, I know my heart is fully in the right place here. And yeah, I was being so mean. People hate me. It was so incongruent with what I expected when I shared a recipe on Facebook that morning. Now, they do say that you haven't really made it in any industry until you have haters, until you are getting trolled like that. So that was a small consolation, but if I could go back in time, I totally wish I would've handled it differently. I wish I could have not let it stress me out so much. It threw my nervous system right out of whack. I would not, if I could go back, I wouldn't change anything about what I had posted.

Again, chickpea recipe, I think it was a chickpea flatbread. What could be more benign? I would share the exact same thing again. But when the criticism started rolling in, I wouldn't have responded to any of it unless it was in a positive way. You know what? My friend Andrea Beaman does an amazing job with this. I always notice that she's able to respond even to the haters in a real positive light. Just like, wow, that's so great that you shared your voice. Thank you. I love that you're speaking your truth. Have a great day. And not with sarcasm, but really being grateful for people, for showing up and speaking their truth, what's true for them. That's not where my head was at that day, though. I wish I hadn't stooped to trying to defend chickpeas or myself. Instead, I would have deleted and blocked anybody who was disrespectful, who was rude.

It's called boundaries. You're allowed to have them, and I would've celebrated all of the engagement. That's really the main thing, because all comments, even negative comments, tell social media algorithms to show your post to more people, and that is very good thing. The other thing I learned, looking back, I can see that, hey, this was an eyeopener. Clearly at that time, and maybe even today, there was a lot of controversy. It was like a hot topic to discuss. Beans, grains, legumes. Are they good? Are they bad? Maybe I could have done more with that. Maybe that was a hot topic to latch onto. People were probably very confused. I mean, some people certainly knew they thought one way, and I thought another way or whatever, but I'm sure there's a lot of people in the middle who were just confused. That could have been an excellent indicator that I should be creating more content around this.

Are legumes good or bad? That could have been a great blog post or podcast episode. So it's an example, and I'm going to give you more of how as business owners, we can turn the negativity around. You don't have to absorb it. You don't have to take the gut punch. You can get something positive from it and reflect that energy back out into the world in a good light. We can be Ted lasso this way. We keep ourselves from spiraling into, because if we're going to put ourselves out there, if we're going to do something, we're going to be something. We're going to say something, we're going to get criticized. Now, the scared little girl inside of me who was a brand new help coach, never wanted to share anything on Facebook or anywhere, ever again, I wanted to hide under a rock that day.

I was pretty sure I was wrong about everything. I probably felt the same way the day after and the day after that. Now, if I had done that, if I had hit under that rock, it would've kept me from the business that I eventually grew helping all the clients I've helped along the way around the world. So you got to be real careful about this stuff not bringing you down, and I don't think we talk about this enough. It's just a matter of time until you're going to come up against criticism in your own business. Again, if you're watching on Facebook or on YouTube or wherever, if you can comment and let me know, have you come up against criticism so far? It could be from perfect strangers, it could be from friends and family. It's going to happen, though. I can pretty much promise you at some point, and no matter what time of year it is, here's what I want you to do, invoke Ted lasso, invoke the Christmas spirit, whatever resonates best with you, and practice responding as your highest self.

These issues come up all the time in my business, even today, regularly. So here's an example. I'll offer something for free, value free, amazing gift. People will complain. They don't want to access it on the site that I've chosen. For example, maybe it's on Facebook and they don't like to use Facebook, or maybe it's a free live event that I'm doing, and they're busy that day. People can be pretty demanding. I'm not going to lie. Instead of them saying, oh, wow, thanks for this free offer, Michelle, how generous of you, they email me to tell me what's wrong about it. They do, and here's what I've learned, and I hope you will take this advice. You don't have to bend over backwards for everyone, and you can't, even if you wanted to, you just can't. I have a small team. I have limited time. So if I've decided to offer something for free, it has to be on terms that work for me in my business, that just has to come first.

I can't necessarily accommodate everyone's criticism about it, but maybe what I can do is figure out a way to do it differently next time so I can accommodate more people again next time. I can't fix everything right now in the moment. So instead of seeing those complaints as annoyances or disrespect, I see them as learning opportunities. I really do. It's taken me time to get there, and over the years, remember, I've been in business for 15 years now. We get less and less of those kinds of complaints because we've figured out different ways to preempt them. Again, you can't always fix things in the moment. You can't always please everybody right now, but you can take the feedback and get better for next time. Alright, here's another one. Oh gosh. Let's say, and I know a lot of health coaches want to do something like this, and I've done it in my own business.

Let's say you offer a scholarship. Does anyone want to be able to offer scholarships? Of course, right? Again, wanting to do good things in the world. So you're offering a scholarship for your program, for your service. In my experience, it's more complicated than you think. You need to figure out, again, the boundaries around scholarships that you're giving, how you're going to give it out, et cetera, and no matter how you structure it, you're going to get complaints that you don't have enough scholarships, or the scholarship doesn't apply to this particular person, or the scholarship isn't enough, et cetera, et cetera. It's like you can't win for trying. Meanwhile, you've spent a bunch of time setting up a process to offer the scholarship to announce it, promote it. You should be commended for that. It's an awesome way to give back, and you will feel good.
And I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. You should. You're going to get people who are like, wow, thank you. It's going to make a difference in people's lives, that's for sure. And be prepared to hear about all the ways that you're doing it wrong. It's fascinating, fascinating stuff. So again, be Ted lasso, right? You can listen. You cannot create new scholarships on the spot, nor should you based on one person's complaint, but you might think the turnaround in your head can be, wow, I am so glad people are interested in what I have to offer. That's amazing. Hey, look at all these people that want this type of help. I mean, yes, no, I may or may not have a scholarship for them or whatever, but they are interested in what I'm doing. That's a w, as my kids would say, real w Mom, that's a win.

And yes, maybe next year you expand your scholarship offering because you really are trying to do a good thing in the world, and isn't it fantastic that people are noticing what you're putting out there? Do you think you can make that turnaround in your head? That's the energy to hold onto. So again, I'm curious if you've experienced anything like this before where you're trying to do a good thing and you get this negative feedback. Here's one last scenario that comes to mind as I was prepping this episode. You send something to the email address somebody provided, right? Your psych, you want to send them this thing, it's a resource. It is access to your member site. Maybe they purchase something from you, whatever it is, and it goes again to the email address that they provided. But alas, the email is incorrect. They gave you the wrong address.
It's an email that they never check, or they gave you an address and it had a typo in it. They are going to complain and blame you for not sending the thing you were supposed to send. They might tell you how terrible your customer services, they're going to be very, very annoyed that they didn't get it, and you're going to have to deal with this. They'll want you to send it to them later. Could be months. It could even be years later, they're going to say, Hey, I never got that, and it's expired, right? It's no longer available, whatever. This kind of thing happens a lot. These situations where it's no one's fault. Mistakes happen, typos happen, and you always want to try and make it right, of course, if you can. But if this person is rude or insulting, I got to tell you, it happens and it really gets my goat, especially if they're insulting to my support team.

My support team works so hard. It is incredible. Some of the emails that we get, I see every email that comes through my business and what I think is, huh, isn't it interesting how this is just human nature? Like human's behavior reflects how someone feels about themselves, what's going on inside of them? For this person to lash out at my support team over, they didn't get their thing. This person must be in some sort of distress to be lashing out like this, right? So I never need to take it personally. The way that people send feedback like this to you as a business owner, you can just go, huh, I wonder how they're feeling right now. I wonder what they're going through. Once I even had somebody write again the next day and apologize, I was feeling so crappy about this email I received. I couldn't believe this terrible feedback, and it didn't even make sense.
The next day, they wrote again and they said, sorry, I was having a bad day. Please disregard. That happened 12 years ago, and I think about it pretty darn often. So today, I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not trying to tell you all the terrible things that happen. As a business owner, I am wanting you to be prepared and know that when criticism comes your way in tiny ways or maybe in big ways, you're not alone, happens to the best of us, and I know that you like me, like all the 15,000 health coaches in our community. We're coming from a place of service. That's why we're here, and we're doing the very, very best that we can. If you can keep a generous spirit, right? Oh, this person must be going through something. Oh, isn't that interesting? Maybe I can take that feedback for next time.

You can be really generous in your response. You're going to make it. You're going to be better for it, and just like Ted Lasso, you're going to turn the haters into your biggest fans, or at least they're going to stop complaining and leave you alone so you can put your energy towards those who are a little bit more appreciative and actually want to hire you. That is my best advice. Bring that Christmas spirit into your business year round. You're going to be doing very, very well. This episode has been brought to you by That Clean Life, a platform that makes it easy for you to add value to your programs and packages with recipe books and helping clients learn to meal plan. Just think of all the ways you can use recipes with your private clients and your online programs, cooking classes, even lead magnets. It's very easy with That Clean Life. They have tons of recipes for every dietary style and all the coaches in my community. That's, you can save 20% off your first four months when you join healthcoachpower.com/tcl. That stands for That Clean Life. Happy holidays, everybody. I'll see you next time.