142: How To Powerfully Handle Haters As An Online Coach

In this episode, Christine tackles an often-unspoken challenge faced by online entrepreneurs – dealing with haters and online trolls. 

The fear of having haters can stop many coaches and online creators from putting themselves out there and sharing their authentic selves. Hearing negative comments d

In this episode, you’ll hear about….

• How the fear of trolls and haters online is a common experience for entrepreneurs, and can be highly dysregulating to our nervous systems
• Why overcoming this fear is a rite of passage for every entrepreneur, and it can help us to develop resilience and the capacity to hold space for more clients and visibility
• Why negative comments and criticism can actually indicate that your message is resonating with someone, while repelling others (which means you're reaching the right audience!)
• How to ground yourself in the understanding that your mission is more important than the opinions of haters and trolls

…and so much more! 

The world needs more of your authenticity, so don’t let the haters stop you!

Have a question or topic you’d like to see covered on the podcast? Go to www.lifewithpassion.com/podcast and I’ll create a custom episode just for you!

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to Let's give visible entrepreneurs. This is the podcast where we bring you the secrets behind what it actually takes to get seen, get known and get more clients. I'm your host, Christine Amerman. And I'm sharing my best strategies from over two decades of experience as a media marketing and messaging expert, to help you expand your exposure, grow your personal brand, attract dream clients, and more, all while staying true to your authentic self and unique vision. If you're a passionate, heart centered entrepreneur, thought leader, or expert looking to stand out from the crowd with confidence, you're in the right place. Are you ready? Let's get visible. Welcome to this episode of Let's get visible entrepreneurs. Today we are talking about the fear of having a troll having a hater, or maybe even multiple, how do you deal with those trolls and haters on line? Oh my gosh, you all if you're listening to this, there's a good chance if you resonate with me that you're highly sensitive, or that you've had this fear, or both. And I can remember, I have a friend with like a massive amount of followers. And I can remember reading some of the comments that they were getting, and me like my stomach hurting with like getting really uncomfortable. And then not even directed at me. Right. So sometimes we're really empathetic, and we feel for other people. And hey, they may already have the thick skin required to hold space to energetically be able to grow a massive audience, right? They probably didn't develop that thick skin along the way. But maybe you've already had a difficult or traumatic experience with the troll or maybe you're playing just small enough to keep yourself from dealing with a troll, or a hater. So what do you do? What do you do? Because honestly, this is a rite of passage. For everyone, every entrepreneur, even before I was an online entrepreneur, I was a professor. And I remember my very first semester, the boss, my dean telling me, Don't read your evaluations, your reviews, essentially just don't do it. Just do not read them for the first semester. Like there's no point there's no of course I read them. And you know, I still remember 2019 years later, 21 years later, what what they said, because our brains have a negativity bias, we are 20 times more likely, just basic neuroscience 20 times more likely to go with a negative thought than we are a positive thought, yikes. Now, we're in personal development here. But I think it's important to remember that we that's that's how we were born like yes, of course, we can overcome that we can train it out of it ourselves, we can, we can, you know, catch ourselves and rewire it and all the things and this is something that just about every entrepreneur goes through. Even if you maybe have a thicker skin, there's probably a fear of something bad happening. I know there are times that I was afraid that maybe somebody that I unfortunately am not that close to in my family was going to do something to sabotage me, right, even though that would be undeserved, just to be hurtful, you know, maybe you've got that early on, I was told to run Facebook ads. My very first coach told me to run Facebook ads because that's how she had blown up and become a seven figure coach. And I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't know what I didn't know. And I checked my online brain Mart online marketing brain at the door because this was you know, a new field for me coaching. And I ran ads and I was honest about my my journey to strangers. Now my journey trigger warning pregnancy and infant child loss this business The reason I switched from running an online marketing agency in 2015, to founding life with passion, this business was inspired by the full term loss of my daughter. And so I had this really, really big why of like, if I'm going to be here, and I'm going to keep being here and she's not well, the way that I know to create a legacy for her and to parent her since she's not here is to create a bigger mission is to create a bigger why and help these high achieving women who want to show up for their purpose, their passion, their calling, and help the world. So we're still doing today helping you create a business where you attract all of the clients that you want so that you can continue to do this or grow this to the level that you want to grow it. So I'm running out ads to these women. And once you know, they get in front of some people who are nasty, and I had people even questioning, challenging saying that I had made the loss of my daughter up to get attention. Which is of course, like my biggest fear, one of my biggest fears at the time. I was so upset by that, and like, How dare you I was still grieving. I mean, always still be grieving, but it was very raw at that time. And I had to figure out how to live with that that had happened. I have a client who was running ads to her live workshops and had somebody in the chat at one of her live workshops, trolling and saying hateful mean things while she was trying to conduct a workshop. It was really distracting. I also had a troll early on, it's been at least five years, I would say. And I was running a webinar, and I had somebody criticizing me in the comments. And I said, You know what, that's okay. I'm not for everybody. If this doesn't resonate with you, like move on and find somebody who does, and that's fine. And I said it with like, a lot of detachment. And it's actually something that I had learned from watching Denise Duffield Thomas handle it, I'd seen her do something similar. And I thought, well, that's such a gracious way to handle somebody who's critical. instead of ignoring them, just call it out, address it and be be kind and firm. And I did that and don't you know, I have a long term client and friend who still talks about seeing that example. And how that gave her like, some comfort of okay, I have something to say if somebody shows up like that. So hopefully that's helpful to you. So much of this is overcoming this fear, this inherent fear that we have of judgment of criticism, of ostracization, because back in the day, when safety was in numbers, safety was in the tribe, doing something that would get you kicked out of the tribe was deadly, so often, right, because you would be alone, you would be abandoned, and you would be left to the elements. Now, often, we react as if a hater or a troll online is going to end us, right, or our fear of that. And the like, one thing that I can tell you, is that, okay, that's normal, it's normal to have that primal fear, because it's been passed down, right, a lot more generations where that was true. And that wasn't true in our DNA. And, you know, it's like my students who are terrified to get up in front of their peers, and sound ridiculous, or appear, you know, less than smart, when they were giving speeches, when I taught speech, I say the same thing to my clients. Now, essentially, you get up, you do it, you realize you don't die. And then that gives you the confidence and the courage to do it again. Because confidence comes from doing something, it doesn't come from waiting until you feel confident to do it. And in a way, if somebody is offended by what you say, triggered by what you say, that's great, you're eliminating something that means your message is resonating with someone because it's clearly repelling somebody else. And that means you have someone that it's clear for, and you want to become known to your Cloneable clients. This develops resilience, this helps you develop the capacity to be able to hold space for more clients for higher prices for more visibility, it means people are seeing your stuff. It means some of the wrong people are seeing your stuff, which means a lot of the right people are right. And you can also use it to create content to get a little bit meta, just like I am with this episode. Listen, haters and trolls. It is terrifying. And I'm not going to be one of those people to tell you to just get over it. Right. This is highly dysregulated to our nervous systems. And in fact one of the fight or flight responses that isn't as well known. I learned this from a client who does trauma healing for women genius. Dr. Amy Hawaii. Thank you, Amy. She taught me that beyond fight or flight. You might have also heard freeze. You might have heard fun. Then there's a fifth. And because most of the neuroscience around trauma, trauma research has been done on men, specifically veterans, that's the majority of the body of work. It's changing and yet that term PTSD was invented for for veterans. The Fifth Element there is flock. And this is something specific stereotypically stereotypically to women. Were in the tribes under duress, under fear. Women would flock together they would create a tight circle they would put their kids in the middle think about what we see other mammals doing right in order to protect themselves from threats. So flock is a really natural human In response to having this fear, we want to be around our people. We want to be insular, we want to self protect, right? And you can really ground yourself in this ability to go. I'm going to use this as an experience to prove to myself that my fear can come true and it's not going to kill me. I'm going to prove this experience to myself that my mission is more important than these haters and trolls, who have something that's making them so unhappy or choosing to focus on something that's making them so unhappy, that they're projecting their unhappiness onto other people, I eat me how sad for them. Right, instead of just moving on to the next person, they've got a project. And that's about them. That's not about me, I survived this, I'm gonna get greater confidence from having done it. And now I can move on and hold more space for more people and more clients because I'm on the other side of this rite of passage. Hope you enjoy this episode. Let me know what you think. And if you haven't already subscribed and followed the podcast, please do that so that we can reach more people. These messages. Were here for the, you know, the people who are doing really important healing work, transformational work, making the world a better place, living their callings, living their passions, I truly believe that we each live our calling in our passion, the world is served. I believe that we each are here to serve the person, we're here to serve for a reason. If we all listened to that, then we can have a more holistic, more healed world. So listen to your calling. Don't let the haters stop you. And if you've been having this conversation, maybe with a business bestie someone else has been telling you, oh my gosh, I'm just so scared that what happened to XYZ will happen to me or you know, you know, they're playing small because they're scared of criticism. Would you consider sharing this with them as well? If they would benefit from it? I'd be so grateful. Thank you for helping us further our mission. And thanks for joining us for another episode of Let's get visible entrepreneurs.