27. Fear of being cancelled, Part 3: Why cancellation can’t hurt you

In this final episode of our 3-part series on overcoming your fear of being cancelled for good, we'll explore why "cancellation" isn't real... and even if it is, it has far less power to hurt you than you think.

In this episode, you'll learn about:

• The vast gap between your loudest critics and those who actually make your business work
• Why critics don't get in the way of your work -- and may sometimes even help your impact
• The key differences between constructive feedback and bad faith attacks -- and how to tell the difference 
• What's really worth fearing (and it's not the opinions of internet strangers)

This episode will give you the shot of permission, relief, and courage to do your most intentional work that you've been waiting for. Because what's inside you matters. 

Transcript

Hello. Hello my friends. Welcome back. This is Liberatory Business, and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

Over the past two weeks, we've been dismantling the fear of cancellation that keeps so many of us playing small. Two weeks ago, in part one of this three-part series, we talked about how you might be canceling yourself before anyone gets a chance, and we talked about what it takes to build an uncancelable identity.

Last week in part two, we talked about why you are probably not even cancelable, and even if you were somehow canceled, why few cancellations ever last more than five seconds. But I know that there's probably still a couple things you're still probably worried about. If there are hater comments out there floating in the internet, won't that affect people who do see my content and like my content? Won't that impact my customers and my business? Won't controversy hurt my bottom line?

Well, let's talk about it. So I'm here with some more reality checks that are going to drive the final stake into the heart of this fear once and for all. And by the way, if you haven't caught the past two episodes, I highly recommend that you do so before we get into this episode.

So let's get into this episode.

Reality Check Number Three

Your haters aren't your loyal customers, and your loyal customers are the ones who build your business.

Your haters are not your loyal customers, and they never have been, and they never will be. Here's something that people confuse all the time: social media numbers has a very non-linear relationship with the number of true loyal fans.

Those who engage with you are not those who pay you, and those who are gonna contribute to your most sustainable success are not those who are the loudest online. Sometimes the gap here can be so stark, and most people don't even realize just how stark.

I actually see this all the time with my clients. Like someone will have really controversial posts that get hundreds of negative comments. Their reel would randomly go viral and it would get hundreds of thousands of engagement points. And they're panicking about negative stuff, right? And they're panicking about their business being ruined. Meanwhile, their sales are higher than ever before, and their email list is growing, more engagement than ever before. The noise—the negative noise—and actual business profit are operating in completely opposite universes.

The people who say the loudest, meanest things, the ones you're so afraid of, have never been your customers. They're the least likely to ever become your customers. They have nothing to do with your work. If they ever were your customers at one point, they were the kind of customers who saw you as a resource to extract value from, not someone that they ever had an intention of building a genuine, reciprocal, respectful relationship with.

It's never fair-weather fans that build a business or success. And by fair-weather fans, I mean like, "Oh, that person, that creator, that teacher seems popular. I'm gonna go associate myself with them. Oh, that person looks like they have something I want, I'm gonna go extract that from them." That's what I mean by fair-weather fan, right? Like, "Oh, being there is going to be advantageous to me and that's the only reason I'm there." That's a fair-weather fan.

Those people are never going to be part of your sustained success. If you are gonna make a genuine impact over the long run, if you're gonna have sustained success, it is always only going to be with the support of true loyal fans who deeply get what you're about, who believe in you, who appreciate you, respect you, and believe in your good intentions and your good heart, even when you're not perfect.

Like, just think about how absurd this scenario is, right? Like, why would you wanna ignore people who just adore you and desperately need you to step up and help them, who want to give you money, because you're mentally fighting with people who have nothing to do with your business, are never gonna give you money, right? So let's stop doing that.

Good Faith vs. Bad Faith Feedback

I wanna give you a little tip here about how to distinguish between who is really here to help you build a sustainably successful business—like whose feedback is really meant to improve you versus who is only pretending to do that, but is actually a hater.

I wanna distinguish between good faith feedback and bad faith feedback. You wanna listen to good faith feedback and you want to discard bad faith feedback, which is more of just like an attack, right?

Good faith feedback comes from people who respect you as a person, even when they disagree, even when they see things differently. Good faith feedback is always worth considering because the other person is actually trying to help you to improve and grow because they believe in your capacity to grow, because they have such high esteem of you. They see you in such high potential that they're like, "I wanna help you to grow" because they hold you in high esteem. They're invested in your success, not your failure. That's why they're giving you feedback. They're on your team, they're on your side. They're rooting for you, they're cheering for you. When someone gives you feedback from that place, you can feel it. That's good faith feedback and you wanna listen to that.

Bad faith attacks come from people who already decided that you're a villain, and that is just noise. When someone's already made up in their mind that you are a bad person and they're giving you quote-unquote "feedback," that's not feedback. They're just handing out their personal judgment to you. That's fine. That's their prerogative to do, but you don't have to receive it. And they don't want you to get better. They don't want you to grow. They just wanna be right about you being wrong. No matter how you respond or change, they're probably gonna find new reasons to criticize you because the criticism was never about your actions. It was never about you growing or you doing better. It was about their need to feel superior, their need to have an enemy, their need to feel right. And you can never win with such people. So stop trying.

Here's some other tells, especially—I'm really elaborating on this because there's so many people in my world with really sensitive hearts, soft hearts, who tend to maybe sometimes have people-pleasing tendencies, who tend to take all criticism to heart, right?

Good faith critics acknowledge your humanity. They might say like, "I know you probably didn't mean it in this way," or "I know that you don't intend to," right? They acknowledge your good intentions, they acknowledge your humanity. Bad faith attackers, on the other hand, they start out with the assumption that you have bad motives, that you have bad character.

Good faith feedback offers specific actionable suggestions. Bad faith attacks are vague accusations designed to make you basically defend your entire existence—defend that you're not a terrible person.

And here's a big one, the last one, the big tell: Good faith critics genuinely want to dialogue. They want to meet you where you are and work towards a solution. Bad faith attackers want one thing, and that is for you to grovel.

Now, once you start seeing this pattern, it becomes almost laughably obvious, right? Bad faith critics have this very specific energy, like they're auditioning for the role of righteous internet warrior. Meanwhile, good faith critics sound like actual humans who like you and are genuinely trying to help you improve.

It's like the difference between someone pointing out like, "Hey, you have spinach in your teeth," and you're like, "Oh my God, thank you so much for telling me," and you can tell that they're not trying to embarrass you. They just really want you to—they're looking out for you, right? They're on your team. Versus someone screaming like, "You're a terrible person who obviously hates vegetables and probably kicks puppies too." And it's like, what? Where'd that come from?

Reality Check Number Four

Now even knowing all this, even understanding that your real customers, real supporters aren't the ones who are leaving hate comments, I know there's still probably a nagging worry in the back of your mind, like: "Okay, my haters aren't the ones who are helping me build my business. But if I get negative attention, isn't it somehow gonna damage my reputation? What if it scares away my potential customers who might've found me and been attracted to me otherwise?"

That brings us to reality check number four—cold splash of water in the face number four—which flips this assumption on its head.

Hate does not detract from success. Hate and success are not mutually exclusive.

Here's what I mean. A lot of people think that the greater the numbers of people who love you, surely the more sales you get, the more impact you'll make. And on the flip side, the greater numbers of people who are angry at you, criticize you, attacking you online, that must somehow mean that your movement is compromised, your business is compromised, your personal platform is now tainted.

It's easy to believe that hate and success—or rather, the hate you get and the amount of love you get—are somehow a zero-sum game. And this is actually patently, categorically not true.

Because once again, in spite of myself, I have to ask you to think about a certain currently powerful politician. We'll see for how much longer he's powerful, but currently powerful politician who is absolutely reviled by a big chunk of the country and certainly large sections of the world. If anything, the hate he gets seems to just make him more and more beloved by his base.

And that's not the only example we should be looking at. People who are doing work that is truly good for the world, who are standing up for the oppressed, people who are icons of moral courage—these people are also rarely universally loved. They often also catch as much hatred as they are loved. And often the amount of hate they get has nothing to do with the amount of love they get and the magnitude of the success that their movements accomplish.

Mahatma Gandhi, in his lifetime, was just as hated as he was loved, arguably more hated than he was loved, and he still accomplished the liberation of an entire nation through nonviolent resistance.

Same with Martin Luther King Jr. You know what he accomplished? Advancement of civil rights in ways that transformed American society forever.

If you go back way further in history, a certain dude called Jesus of Nazareth who inspired a massive movement that's still one of the most powerful forces in the world 2000 years later—guess what? He got so much hate that he was executed.

Look, once again, I'm not saying you should go court hatred. I'm not saying you should do whatever it takes to provoke reactions and be polarizing. What I am saying is for every one of these polarizing figures, they commanded a huge movement and were incredibly successful in their accomplishments and had a lasting impact in the course of human history in different ways because some people felt powerfully—and I mean, powerfully—seen by them, served by them, connected to them, championed by them. Just some people, not everybody.

So here's the question that I want you to sit with: Who are your some people? Because that's all you'll ever need. That's all that matters. Who's gonna feel seen by you, served by you, connected to you, and championed by you?

By the time Jesus was killed, out of the whole wide world that largely reviled him, he had exactly 12 supporters. Yeah, the 12 apostles, right? And guess what? Those apostles—which by the way, the whole world hated the apostles too, and they killed them all—but nonetheless, those apostles' legacy would eventually go on and eventually turn like a third of the world Christian.

You get that I'm talking about Jesus, but I'm not trying to preach Christianity, right? That's just a good example of someone with a really successful legacy, despite them being incredibly canceled in their lifetimes. The success of their work has nothing to do with how much hate they got.

So again, who are the people who light up when they hear your perspective? Who are the people who feel less alone in the world because you are willing to say what you wanna say? Who finds relief, hope, courage, clarity in your voice that they can't find anywhere else? What specific struggles are your people facing that your unique combination of experiences and insights can actually address? What fears are they fighting? What dreams are they chasing that only you can speak to? Who are the people where they're gonna be like, "I'm so glad you exist. I've been waiting for someone like you to do this work, to speak about this, to look at things in this way all of my life"?

And when you know who your some people are—not everybody, the some people that are relevant to you—criticism from everyone else becomes background noise. 'Cause you are not ever building for the masses. You're building for the people who are meant for you. And the clearer you get on who they are, the easier it becomes to tune out everyone else.

The Most Important Reality Check

Now, final point and maybe the most important point I wanna end with, the most important reality check of all—one that puts everything that we've discussed so far into stark perspective.

So there's this comedian I love following on Instagram. His name is Nimesh Patel, and I was watching one of his reels and there was this interviewer that was asking him about how cancel culture has impacted comedy. I think he was essentially implying that cancel culture puts pressure on comedians because comedians are afraid to write a joke because it might offend people and they get canceled. That was sort of the subtext of it.

So this guy, talking about how Patel has been able to be successful regardless, asked him "Is comedy back?" And this was Patel's answer, and this is what I want you to remember. He says:

"Comedy never went away. Anyone who says cancel culture is a real thing is doing it for the grift of it. When I got kicked off stage at Columbia, it was around the same time that Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered."

[Editor's note: Simone interjecting to say Jamal Khashoggi is a Saudi dissident journalist who was killed by the agents of the Saudi government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.]

And then Patel goes on to say:

"That's cancel culture. Mahmood Khalil, the doctor who just self-deported to Canada, the hand transplant surgeon on an H1B who just got deported—that's the actual cancel culture in the sense like they're being prosecuted for things they have said, they're being prosecuted by the government, by institutions that are supposed to have their back. That's what's happening. That's cancel culture. It's never impacted comedy. Write a good joke and you'll be fine."

Let that sink in for a moment.

Now I wanna be very clear—it's 2025, and under the second Trump administration, the line between social discomfort and genuine safety concerns has genuinely shifted for a lot of people. When the guy in charge is threatening to revoke birthright citizenship and is targeting so many communities that have a right to be here and have the right to work and just have the right to live lives, many fears that might have just been like, "Oh, get over your discomfort of people not liking you" a few years ago are now legitimate safety concerns.

There are legitimate reasons—people have real concerns about speaking out about certain issues in today's political climate, and that is not what I'm talking about here.

What I am talking about is the idea that actually, a lot of what we're talking about in terms of expressing our creativity and our convictions and our beliefs, showing up for our creative businesses—our worries about being canceled are not about that. It's not about fears of persecution, deportation, real harm. Those are what can be called social discomfort: fears of not being liked, fears of people being mean, fears of losing followers, losing popularity, of having strangers on the internet thinking that we're wrong, that we're bad, we're unworthy.

So let's be honest about what category you're really in. Be really honest and ask yourself: What exactly am I afraid is gonna happen if I speak my mind? Is that real or is that just in my head? It's worth being honest about that.

If your fears include things like physical harm, imprisonment, deportation, threats to your family safety, or legal consequences, then yes, you have genuine safety concerns that deserve serious consideration.

But if your fears are just about your own feelings—about what happens when people say mean things to you, unfollow you, you lose some business, you feel embarrassed, people's opinions about you—then what you are really afraid of is discomfort, not danger. And there is a world of difference between the two.

Now, I'm not saying that social consequences don't matter, and I'm not saying that emotional discomfort doesn't matter. I say that as somebody who is very sensitive and who can be taken out for a long time by her own emotional discomfort. I take emotional discomfort very seriously. I'm not saying "it's nothing, get over it." It can be overwhelming. Of course it can have serious impacts, especially when you're supporting a family, building a business. It impacts how resourced you can be, how resilient you can be.

But that is still a very different thing from real danger, and it's a big error, I think, to conflate the two. Because when we frame emotional discomfort, even extreme emotional discomfort, as physical threat, existential danger, we rob ourselves of the agency to choose our response. We become reactive instead of intentional. We become victims of our circumstances rather than authors of our choices.

Think about what happens when you treat potential criticism from strangers like it's a life or death situation. You shrink your imagination. You shrink your world to fit the worst of your fears, rather than expanding your imagination, expanding your world to match your biggest visions for the world and to match your capabilities, your skills, your dreams.

This is about the fundamental nature of how you want to exist in the world. When you conflate discomfort with danger, you're choosing to live in a state of spiritual contraction rather than expansion. You're saying my discomfort is more important than my authentic expression. My fear of judgment matters more than my commitment to truth.

But integrity requires us to accept that some discomfort is gonna be part of the deal. Every meaningful contribution to the world involves some level of vulnerability, some willingness to be misunderstood or criticized. It's the tax that we pay on doing something that matters in the world, doing something different in the context of the status quo.

But when you recognize the discomfort for what it is—which is temporary, manageable, and often a sign that you are on the right track—you can make conscious decisions about what you wanna do, how you wanna respond. You feel the fear and speak anyway. And we're not trying to be in denial, right? You can acknowledge the risk and decide that it's worth it because your truth is worth it, 'cause you are worth it. You can prepare for criticism. You can even receive the criticism and be hurt by it without being paralyzed by that, without letting that dictate your next steps.

There are journalists who say the wrong thing about their governments and get acid thrown in their faces. There are activists who get threatening messages about their kids. There are writers who have to sleep in a different place every night. People who know that if they were to ever tell the truth, they might never see their loved ones again. That's what genuine fear of cancellation actually means.

Your Extraordinary Gift

So here's what I would love for you to consider. You've been given an extraordinary gift. You live in a time and place where you can use your voice safely. You have access to technology that can amplify that voice beyond anything that your ancestors could have possibly imagined. You have the opportunity to connect with your people anywhere instantly, to serve them, to make a difference in their lives.

This freedom to speak, to create, to make mistakes even, to build movements, to build businesses around your ideas, to reach people across the globe with your message—this is something that people throughout history could have only dreamed of, even kings and emperors could have only dreamed of. And it's something that people are still fighting for right now.

This is especially poignant to me as someone who lives in South Korea, as someone who lives in Seoul. There are people living like an hour or two north of me right now who do not have the freedom that I do to just say what they want because they live in North Korea, and saying the wrong thing about their government might get them canceled—like their lives canceled.

Your voice matters. Your perspective matters. Your people are out there waiting for you to speak. What an incredible opportunity and responsibility and a gift to steward.

So stop letting fear drive your decisions. You can have the fears—I don't think we can ever be rid of fears—but stop letting fear sit in the driver's seat. Be driven by what you care about, what you love, what you dream of.

So share that truth you've been holding back. Write that post that you've been drafting in your head. Record that video that you've been making excuses not to film. Have that conversation you've been avoiding. Send that email, start that project. Don't wait for the perfect moment. Don't wait for perfect confidence. Your people don't need perfection. They need you now, today.

Start small if you need to, but start.

You got important work to do and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.