When People Hate You on Yelp

Bad reviews online stink. Google, or Reddit, or Glassdoor...

I won't lie. It's upsetting, and you're going to have a lot of reactions. For one, it seems like someone really doesn't like you.

You'll worry, too, about the consequences: Will people be afraid to call you for your services? Will your current clients spot this and begin to wonder about their choice to work with you? Will colleagues see the reviews and lose respect for you?

"We have to move quickly on this," and it turns out there are a number of companies who do this for you (presumably by posting made-up reviews). It's a sort of disaster-recover plan for  businesses.

But take some time to think.

Getting over yourself

People have been ragging on one another since the stone age, I'm certain. What's changed is that there's now more access than ever to places where that ragging (and some raving) can happen, and be found by a lot more people.

Once your bruised ego begins to heal, get some perspective on the situation. For one, reminded yourself that you do good work. While anyone can be prone to doubt, I'm pretty confident about that. At the same time, I'm not so foolish as to think that everyone I've worked with likes me or has gotten the help they've needed from me. I'm into growth, and that involves being open to hearing about ways I've fallen short, and recognizing that doing hard work involves a fair amount of failure.

Would you have preferred to hear about this particular failure differently? Of course. But being reminded that you can fail, even if it is in a more public way than you'd like, simply isn't a disaster.

In fact, it's worth celebrating!

Failure is one of those hot topics in my therapy practice. I've often said that if you're not failing, you're probably not challenging yourself enough.

I in no way mean to make light of your failure with whomever posted the bad review. Because this person (if in fact it was someone you've worked with) hasn't talked directly to you about it, you don't have much chance to make amends. Failure can really sting, and can come with very real consequences. It is that sense of failure, the big whopper of a failure, that you should celebrate. Not because you don't wish you hadn't failed--I'm not proposing we should set out to fail, of course--but because even the seriously big, seriously messy failures are worth celebrating. Perhaps those especially.

And maybe doing that in a very public way is the best way to do it.