That was useless.

I just wasted seven minutes of my life of watching your video, only to get annoyed with your accent. And looking at your ugly earrings. Ouch.

The Internet can be cruel.

This episode is for you if you've been afraid to get negative feedback, and it's actually holding you back from doing what you really want to do. Or maybe you've received negative feedback, and it hurt you to the point where really it hit you personally. Or maybe you've simply been wondering how to handle the different types of negative feedback that you've been getting in your business. If any of these is what you're looking for, then keep on listening.

Hi, there, I'm Hanne, host of the well balanced success podcast. In this weekly podcast, we explore how you can have it all how you can have a successful career, an active social life, a thriving love and family life, all of that while being healthy and happy. Now, if that sounds like something you would like, then keep on listening.

With the internet anonymity is one of the things that makes people so cruel, it's so much easier when you are this anonymous face behind your screen. And you can just insult people for no reason.

I feel like YouTube is one of the worst platforms, because there you have this profile that's not even attached to your name, necessarily. But the truth is that not all negative feedback is just cruel nonsense. And some of it can help you improve. So in this episode, I'm gonna go through a couple of ways that I think you can use negative feedback and how you can answer to negative feedback in a constructive way. But first of all, we need to triage just to be very, very clear. If somebody is trolling, if somebody is just insulting you for no reason, then just delete it. So for example, for me any comments on my appearance on YouTube, for example, it's not adding anything to the conversation. There's nothing that I should learn from that. It's just pure trolling. And so this gets deleted immediately. And just to be clear, I still get annoyed when these comments because it's never fun to hear negative things, even if they have nothing to do with the video that you published. And so what I actually suggest doing is having someone else remove those comments. So in my case, if anyone in the team sees one of these trolling comments, the goal is just to delete it, don't even talk about it. Don't even tell it to the person that did the video just deleted and forget about it. Now, when I see this type of comments, I also just feel really sorry for the person that left the common because clearly they have nothing better to do than to go on YouTube and throw people around for no reason. So it's actually really sad.

But unfortunately, it can still touch us. So if possible, just shield yourself from it. And make sure that somebody else deletes this trolling comments. But what if it's actually some valid feedback in there. So for example, if somebody says, This tutorial didn't teach me anything, or your product is bad, I never got it to work. It's really easy to get defensive about these type of comments, because especially when I see one of those comments, I just, I immediately want to tell people like really, do you think that nobody got anything out of this video? Or do you think that we would be selling thousands of products if it wasn't working like this is this is not a scam. But the truth is that if you do that, you're completely can overrun by your emotions, and you're not seeing the gift that could be in this feedback. And you're also not going to be able to turn the situation around. So think about it this way. If somebody is passionate enough to actually tell you that your product isn't working or that they didn't receive your freebie PDF or something else, it actually means that they are really passionate about what you're doing not that they care which in this day and age is actually huge. If you can get somebody to care whether they received your free opt in offer, whether your software is actually working, whether your video taught them something, it means that they really had high expectations and that they are disappointed. So if you put yourself into their shoes, and you You start by asking Okay, is this something that Not only this person experienced, or is this something that other people also experienced. So let's take the example of somebody saying like, Hey, I didn't, like I didn't learn anything from this tutorial, then I could ask myself, is maybe I set the wrong expectations, maybe the title of the video isn't actually matching up with what is taught in the video. Or maybe there is something that I can do better to make it less boring next time around and actually show them something new. Right? So this can then turn into a learning moment. And then you still have to decide once you looked at yourself, and once you you looked at what you could do better, as How can you actually answer to this negative feedback. So in my opinion, there are three ways to first of all address negative feedback.

So it depends how you got the feedback in the first place, of course. But if it is a comment on your blog, if there's a comment on YouTube, if it is somewhere where it's publicly available, then you have to decide whether you want to address this publicly, whether you want to address it personally, or whether still you just want to delete and not address it. Because this still is your house, if you don't want to address the negative feedback, if you after having done this work of putting you in their shoes, and thinking what you could have done better if you still decide that this was exaggerated, and that it's not supposed to be there. This, this is your house, you can decide what happens in your house, you can decide what you accept, and how people react in your house. And then even if you delete the comment, you can decide still to take it off the public environment and actually reach out to those people. Now you can only do that if you have their information, of course. But if somebody just leaves a comment without information or some feedback without information, then probably they are not expecting you to get back to them anyways. So now if you decide to actually address the negative feedback, how can you do that in a way that you can turn it around, and that it can actually become a positive interaction, both for you and for the upset customer, or for the upsets other person? The best framework that I found for this is a framework that is used or taught by Starbucks. And they are using the acronym latte, of course they do. And this stands for Listen, acknowledged, thank, treat and explain. And this gives you a really easy step by step way to address negative feedback. So the first step is listen, if somebody comes to you with negative feedback, if you read a comment, if you get an email, that's the listen part, then the next step is to acknowledge the fact that you got that negative feedback. Now try to avoid the I'm sorry that you're feeling that way. Because that's basically not really acknowledging their feeling. It's just being like, yeah, I'm sorry for you. But you could say something like yet it is frustrating when that happens. So let's take the example of somebody saying, okay, and this is a real example, there's actually really happened to me, I got someone at the time who sent me a super nasty email saying that they didn't receive the freebie offer that I promised them through email, and that it was a total scam.

So the first thing that I did was I acknowledged what happened. So I said, Hey, I'm, I'm really sorry, you didn't receive your your freebie. The truth is, this is technology. And so unfortunately, sometimes things go wrong. And I understand that that is really frustrating for you, because you were expecting this to receive this free opt in offer. And then you thank them for letting you know. So the thank you part is, thank you for letting me know, so that I can fix this. The next part is the treat. So this is the part where if you thought about ways to improve, or if there is something that you can actually do immediately to help that person out. This is where you actually do the thing. And then the explained part is where you explain them what you did to treat it. So the last part and explaining and saying like, Hey, I'm sorry that this happened, I looked it up. What actually happened was that you didn't confirm your email address, which is why you didn't receive this opt in. But here is the PDF, and I hope you like it. Okay, something like that. So in this case, What actually happened was that somebody that that person came back to me with like, oh, thank you so much for sending me this, this PDF, and she ended up buying all of my products afterwards. So it is possible to turn this very negative comment into something positive, by looking at what you can do better than by trying to treat it. Now, I find this really hard, I'm going to be very honest with you. That's why I don't work in Customer Support, I find it really hard, because I usually just want to go into the defensive mode. And I just want to tell people like, really, you think that were a scam. Or if you feel like you just waited seven minutes, you shouldn't have watched the video, or whatever it is. But I do find it very helpful that once I lashed out, and once that I got that just out of my system, to use this framework to address the negative feedback. And the good thing is, the bonus is that you can actually also apply this to, quote unquote, good advice. And when I say quote, unquote, good advice, it is when people say something like, Hey, why don't you just do x? I find this comments maybe even more annoying than then negative feedback. Because to me, they just trigger that other people think that I'm stupid. So when someone is like, Hey, why don't you just make the videos also in French? And I'm like, sure, never taught about that. Or recently, it was like,

Oh, why don't you just make your product freemium? Like, yes, we never thought about that. And cue, which you can hear in my tone, how annoying I find these comments. But still, I've actually found that when I take the time to explain to people why it's not like, why don't you just, it really helps to, for them to become fans to trust you more. And yeah, to feel to feel heard and acknowledged. So for the videos, for example, when somebody told me like, Hey, why don't you just do the videos in French, which was for the tutorial videos for Thrive Themes. I explained to them, that me doing the videos in French meant that our video editor who does not speak French would not be able to edit the videos, that our support team would not be able to help the people out in French, and so on. And so the moment that I explained that the person was like, Oh, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. Like, I didn't think about everything that was implied in just doing the videos also in French. So it is really helpful for negative feedback or even for helpful feedback or good advice that you want to answer in a way that makes people feel heard and acknowledged.

So now it's over to you. Have you not done something because you were afraid of negative feedback? Have you gotten nasty feedback that got you into a downwards a negative spiral? And or maybe there was a situation where you turn it around by answering in a certain way, I would love to hear from you. So come on over to the website, wellbalancedsuccess.com and leave a comment underneath this episodes. Thank you very much for listening and talk to you soon.