LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Pssst…I have a secret. No, it’s not a new tutorial on Google Sheets charts or PowerPoint secrets.

It’s something much more personal. You see, my greatest passion is storytelling, and I’d like to do more of that with the things that matter to me most.

The secret is…I have a little girl inside of me who’s still terrified of trolls.

Internet trolls, that is.

AKA, people who send inflammatory messages over the internet to incite discord for personal gain.

This fear has grown alongside my increasing visibility in the world of digital analytics and marketing.

As someone with a childhood riddled with bullying and rejection, trolls and I don’t mix very well.

Luckily, I am blessed to receive mostly glowing feedback from my audience.

Other than one particularly unkind tweet referring to a podcast episode, I’ve managed to evade the troll’s den.

An Unfortunate Email

That is, until I received a message from a subscriber several weeks ago in response to my new guest post on Beautiful.ai, about 6 Effective Presentation Techniques inspired by Marie Kondo.

Here’s what that message said, verbatim:

“How about doing Marie Kondo on your site? I see  21 trackers on even the login page. I know  you do web analytics but that doesn’t give an excuse for being so messy about it.”

Oof! went my belly. I reread the message several times to be sure that someone actually wrote to me this way.

Then, I proceeded to experience a sequence of emotions and reactions that went something like this:

First I be like:

Then I be like:

Finally, as is characteristic of my deep family legacy of fiery retaliatory energy, I be like

Now, I had put an exceptionally large amount of blood, sweat, and tears into this guest post for several months, and created it from a deep place of service to others.

So to have my theme used as fodder for this person’s sour words wasn’t exactly the way to get on my Christmas card list.

As such, I had to work hard to stow my itchy trigger finger and prevent it from firing off a scathing response poste haste.

Instead, I went through a specific process that I’d like to invite you into.

The Two Tasks of Confrontation

I believe that in every challenging situation, we are charged with two tasks (in no particular order):

1. Receive the lesson within the challenge


2. Decide how to respond to the challenge (if at all)

Regarding the first task: several years ago, I made a conscious commitment to view life’s ups and downs as a compendium of learning opportunities rather than a series of unfortunate events.

This episode was no different: I had a choice to stop ruminating and start illuminating.

Once my steam kettle got back to a simmer, I was able to see more clearly and work on having the humility to see the lesson. Because this was an asynchronously loading email conversation, I had time to formulate my response.

Part of the reason I was so triggered was that he had hit on something really sensitive. For a long time, I’ve struggled with maintaining my own website analytics simply because building a business as a trainer in the field of data presentation has been all-consuming of time and attention.

Converting my private data presentation and storytelling workshop into a web class and now into an online course has eaten up the better part of the last year.

I was still regularly monitoring my site stats, but I was aware that there were major gaps. Which was why I set out to hire a fantastic consultant to audit my site analytics.

I was just weeks away from kicking off a major audit with them to tie some of these loose ends. But this email subscriber shown a bright light on the cracks I already suspected were there.

I almost allowed my “Imposter Syndrome” to kick in, wondering how I could help anyone in the field of analytics if my analytics were jacked.

And then, I had compassion because I’m not out there teaching analytics implementation with shitty analytics on my site; I teach data storytelling and that’s where the bulk of my available time goes.

Regardless, the lesson was received: prioritize “tidying up” to ensure clean results for me, preserve the integrity of my reputation, and avoid provoking sleeping analytics dragons.

I silently thanked them for taking the time to illuminate me and then moved on to the second task of response.

Choosing To Respond from the Space Within the Moment

If you listen to my podcast, you may have noticed that I’m a bit of a quote junkie; quotes frequently pop up in my life at the precise moment I need to remember something important to teach myself or others.

One of my favorite quotes of all time came to mind as I pondered my next move, beautiful words to live by from Victor Frankl:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response, in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Having the presence of mind to take a space within the moment before response to choose the response is incredibly difficult, and I f*ck it up all the time.

My first choice was probably what most people would recommend and just ignore it. Why feed into an obvious attempt to antagonize me?

It’s a fair question. And yet, I am a teacher, and in my assessment of this situation, I decided that this was an opportunity to spread the message of one of my brand’s value pillars: kindness.

And, I didn’t really care whether they were open to the lesson or not.

On top of that, there are medical studies that show that the root of illness is a lack of expression and withheld resentment.

Emotions are stored deep within our tissues and can cause rampant health issues. Unfortunately, in our incessant drive to please everyone, we don’t let people rightfully know when they’ve crossed one of our personal boundaries.

So, I got myself out in nature, made myself a mug of soothing lemon balm tea, and contemplated all of the, erm, elegant ways to communicate what I was really thinking…

As I considered my response, I felt saddened to remember how rampant judgment flows through the corporate world, with the digital marketing