AP 0698: How Do You Shift Your Mindset When You Face Adversity?

AskPat 698 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 698 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

All righty, here's today's question from Karyn.

Karyn: Hey Pat. Karyn here from Australia. You can find me at TheRemoteCoach.com and my question is about mindset. What do you do when you reach some kind of adversity or something goes horribly wrong? Do you allow yourself some time to grieve and have a doona day where you stay in bed and just be a real misery guts and then what do you do to get out of that funk or is your perspective so strong that any time you come up against a major challenge that you just can brush it off?

The reason I ask this was many years ago, I ran a YouTube channel and had a rather large following but I had some trolls and haters as you do and generally people wouldn't bother me, but one particular person harassed me constantly and picked on my physical appearance and my gray roots and was very, very nasty to me. In the end I ended up you know just giving up the channel because it wasn't worth it and I was affected by that and when I now come back to start a YouTube channel or a podcast, I am just very wary of feeling quite flat about the process and a little bit of a Debbie Downer about it because of past experiences.

So any tips that you could give me on how do you stay positive or you know in the face of adversity do you allow yourself that time to you know just have a day were you eat chocolate and you feel sad or are you immediately able to brush things off and keep moving? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks Pat. Love your show.

Pat Flynn: Hey Karyn, thank you so much for the question and your honesty and the support for what I do at SPI but you know here I was very upset listening to your question because I just…shame on people, right. I cannot believe that people and this happens all the time, right. I see it, I experience it myself. I have haters who leave comments on my blog. Haters who leave comments in other forms and I find them later and I remember getting some hateful comments on Amazon as reviews and iTunes reviews. I mean there everywhere and that's the struggle and the risk I guess you could say when you put yourself out there and you're trying to make a difference right. There's going to be some people who just don't believe in what you're saying or who are like you said, trolls who just want to knock you down because they have nothing better to do.

There are a lot of times in my career as an entrepreneur where I almost gave up and I did take those ice cream days in bed and I did that at one moment for two or three weeks because of something that one person said too but I'm not going to get into that story. I talk about it a little bit in Will It Fly, I think, but yeah or in the audio book at least because the audio book has some bonuses but man, just shame on people for that. I mean especially when talking about other people's appearances like…

You know what I now know how—first of all Karyn, when you have haters, you might have heard this before, it probably means you're making a difference. It probably means you're going big enough that you need to and could potentially go even bigger and what I mean by that is it means you're taking a stance on something and when you do that, there's going to be groups of people who don't agree with you. It's those who take the safe route who don't have haters, that are probably not going big enough to make a difference. You know they're playing it safe and when you think of every successful entrepreneur they always have a story where they didn't play it safe or they took major risks. The other part is these haters.

They have other things going on in their lives where they feel like they have to take it out on other people, easy targets and YouTube is a very easy place to leave comments and harass people because people hide behind their user name and that's it. It's just very unfair but it was Derek Halpern who when I was struggling through this, Derek Halpern from Social Triggers, he put out a good video saying you know every second you waste is a second you take away from those who actually need you and so I'm very sorry that this happened to you Karyn, and you know I apologize on behalf of the human species, I guess you could say. But I think in giving up, you had forgotten why you were doing what you were doing because you were obviously gaining a huge following. You were making a difference, you were doing amazing things and it just took one person to tear that all down and it's because all of us as entrepreneurs, we have this weird math right where it's like one negative comment is greater than a hundred positive comments. I'm sure you're getting a ton of positive comments Karyn and you have to realize that this isn't never going to happen again, it likely will and that's okay.

If you ever need somebody to talk to Karyn, if you ever doubt what you're doing, you can talk to me. You can talk to those who you know who support you and your followers who actually believe in what you're doing because even just one single chat with somebody who does appreciate what you're doing, can change everything and make you realize that this person or people are just, man. They're just sad, just sad and that's how I feel about people who leave hateful comments about me. It does happen and I can't help but smile every time I see it, for the reasons I have already mentioned.

Now sometimes people leave comments and it's very obvious that they just misread something and sometimes they'll take time to make sure they understand exactly what's going on but other times it's easy to see that people are just wanting to pick a fight. In that case typically I just laugh it off Karyn and then I block those people. I mean if it's on your website, your website's your home. You can do whatever you want. You can kick out whoever you want. IP block them, block their emails from ever leaving comments. You have every right to do that. You have every right to on your videos block people from commenting or delete comments and yeah, it's your space so you can do whatever you like.

Karyn, I would just encourage you because it would seem like, based on the large following that you had, that you have so much to offer. Again I'm sorry that you had pulled back, back then but I completely understand. There's no shame in doing that. Sometimes even now I'll take some time to just think about something, if something didn't go the way I wanted it to or if somebody said something hateful, but then I kind of jump right back into it.

One more thing that helps me is thinking about I don't know, along the similar lines of what I was saying earlier, you know my audience. I'm very lucky to have access to a lot of them through social media but also I have a lot of emails and thank you notes and what not and when you get those, keep them, because that's what's going to help fuel you through all the tough times. So for me I have a board in my office that has all the or most of the thank you notes that I've gotten in my mail. I have a whole bin in my Gmail, a whole folder that's all thank yous. That's not to just go in there and make myself feel like I'm awesome. I don't go in there all the time and be like hey look how great I am, I go in there when I'm down, when I'm depressed and I forget that I have so much to offer and you can do the same. I would recommend everybody do the same to because you know people need you.

We need you Karyn and I hope this is encouraging to you and I can't wait to hear more about what you're up to next and again if you ever need anybody to talk to just let me know, shoot me an email. Thank you again for your honesty and being so open and you know shame on those peeps because man, what value are they adding, none. So don't even worry about them because they don't deserve it.

Karyn thank you so much for your question. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show, just wait up for an email from my executive assistant and we'll get you hooked up with all that. For everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much and as always I like to finish with a quote and today's quote comes from Will Rogers, he said “Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.” Very appropriate. Right guys take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.