Last Friday night I had something extremely upsetting happen and something else extremely awesome happen in my business in the span of 60 minutes…
UPSETTING THING:
An influencer who I looked up to left a super nasty/critical comment on one of my Facebook posts (where I talked about the most overused words in the coaching industry). She said that my content shames women, should be illegal, and I should be banned from Facebook (I’m not even exaggerating, those were her exact words).
She then went on to post how much money she makes and write a long ranty post about “people like me” on her own Facebook wall. When I lovingly responded she continued to be mean spirited (it honestly felt like she was trying to pick a fight/wanted me to be wrong/bad).
It would be easy to dismiss her as crazy, but she is a coach with a large following (bigger than mine for sure) and we have a lot of friends in common (though don’t know each other personally). The whole thing really shook me if I’m being honest. I can see how what I wrote could be interpreted as shaming (though it was not at all my intention), but I was honestly shocked by how she reacted. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me and am open to alternative perspectives, but expect a level of kindness among coaches. I ended up deleting her comments and blocking her.
AWESOME THING:
I had a call with a woman who writes for Inc and Arianna Huffington’s new publication, Thrive, about what it was like to travel to 12 countries in 12 months while running a business, and she wants to feature me in 2 upcoming articles, one in each publication. I didn’t pitch her, she reached out to ME.
THE UNIVERSE IS FUNNY LIKE THAT.
Sometimes we get upsetting and awesome within the span of an hour and it’s hard to know what to make of it all (and as humans it’s so tempting to make it all MEAN something, isn’t it?).
I think the truth is that it is up to us how we interpret what’s happening in our lives and the conclusions we draw.
We get to decide if we are “succeeding” or “failing”, which, if you think about it, is actually pretty cool.