If Someone Calls You a Horse…

On a recent Facebook group, someone asked whether you should care what other people think about you and your business. The answer was overwhelming in one direction. Whenever I see that in business, I start to feel uneasy. As soon as EVERYONE is in agreement, I tend to think something is wrong.

I know, I am weird. I blame it on growing up Irish Catholic. For some reason, Irish Catholics cannot accept that something is simply “nice” without assuming something will go wrong. It is a full-blown cultural neurosis.

The entire group seemed to jump immediately to “Of course you shouldn’t care what they think. What do they know?” . If you have been reading this blog for a while now, you can probably see why I can buck against this.

Let me be clear, my career was a mess until I started listening to opinions other than my own. I needed to open up my circle to more people because I was totally convinced I was infallible. Because I was young and pretty good at what I did, I thought there was no way someone could tell me something. That was until my ego came crashing down hard.

You see it wasn’t until I crashed that I knew I should have listened more. There were plenty of people warning me that I was doing the wrong things, I just wasn’t willing to listen. I thought that I had all the answers.

I had plenty of customer curse me out for being too high pressure or manipulative. I laughed it off and said “what the hell do they know?” every time. I was wrong. If I took the time to do a little self-reflection after the critiques came up, maybe I would be farther along on my journey than I am today.

I didn’t and I am not.

Now I am not saying you need to listen to everyone who says something negative about you and your business, but you have to start looking for trends.

There is a movie I love that most people never heard of called Lucky Number Slevin. In it Ben Kingley has a line that has always stuck with me.

“The first time someone calls you a horse you punch him on the nose, the second time someone calls you a horse you call him a jerk but the third time someone calls you a horse, well then perhaps it's time to go shopping for a saddle.”

No, you shouldn’t listen to everyone who says bad things about you, but if you start hearing the same things over and over again, well, if the saddle fits…