Episode 80 - When the Internet Mob Comes for You with Sandy Connery and Jeni Barcelos

This week, my guests and I invite you to join a conversation we’ve been having over the last few years about women in business and the power of using, or not using, our voices in the face of cancel culture and online scrutiny.

I’m thrilled to welcome Sandy Connery and Jeni Barcelos, friends, business owners, and co-founders of Marvelous Software. Sandy and Jeni, with their courage and resilience, share their experience facing the internet mob in 2020, how they navigated the situation while keeping their business afloat, and what they wish they could have done differently. 

As we delve into this timely topic, we’ll explore how to show up thoughtfully online and engage constructively with one another, even amidst social unrest and differing opinions.

We might stir up some controversy, but we believe that sometimes, embracing your authentic self is worth a bit of trouble.  I can’t wait for you to listen!

Find Jeni and Sandy here:
https://www.heymarvelous.com/
https://www.instagram.com/heymarvelous/

Find Sara here:
https://sarafisk.coach
https://www.instagram.com/sarafiskcoach/
https://www.facebook.com/SaraFiskCoaching/
https://www.youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
https://www.tiktok.com/@sarafiskcoach
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Transcript

0:51

You are listening to the X good girl podcast, episode 80. I have two of my favorite women. Business owners, friends, Danny Connery, Jenny Barcellos here. And we've been having this kind of ongoing conversation for the last couple of years about women in business, women's voices in business. How we use or don't use our voices. And we have a lot to say a lot, we might get in trouble here today. Sandy, why don't you introduce yourself and then Jenny, and then I'll just say a quick word about what I do. Yeah, sure. Um, I'm Sandy. I am the, CMO for HeyMarvelous, an online streaming platform. And Jenny and I both do business coaching in a program called the luminaries where we help online, business owners scale and succeed. Yeah. So same. I'm the CEO of Marvelous and it is the most beautiful, comprehensive online teaching platform out there on the internet. I'll just to give folks some context, we've been working together since 2015. So a long time our software company is about 10 years old. So we've been at this internet business creator economy thing for a long time. We're dinosaurs in the space. 2015. That's a long time. It's your 10 year anniversary. Is that? It is. Yeah. What is that? Paper, gold, silver. We'll go to France, Sandy. Trip to Paris. That's what that is. That's right. You probably need me to go with you to, you know, get your coffee and handle your bags and stuff. I don't want to like, um, people please in France. So I need my coach right beside me. Yes. Oh my gosh. Can you please the French? I don't know. The couple of times I've been there, they seem thoroughly annoyed that I'm in their country. I'm Canadian. So I'll like mitigate the whole situation between the French and the Americans. And I'm Sarah, I am a master certified coach and instructor who teaches women to stop people pleasing and perfectinating. And so it's kind of in that context. Of, um, patriarchy and how women are programmed from the very beginning about how their voice matters about where it doesn't matter about, just what they're allowed to say what they're not allowed to say. And there's just, there's a lot, if we just want to run through some of the programming, right? Like, I know as a woman that if I am going to speak up about knowing something or having some information, I better know it. Because usually one of the first thing that's coming at me is like, Oh, are you, are you sure like some kind of discounting or prove it? And so women tend to over explain. Over research, you know, over give all of their very well thought out reasons because we know in a lot of ways, anything we say isn't going to be taken as factual. It's going to be offered as the 1st point in a debate or a back and forth. That's some of the programming that women are up against. What have you seen in your business life and in the relationships you have with your clients about patriarchal programming that shows up when they're sharing or talking? Yeah, it's a conversation that Jenny and I have been having almost daily for a couple of months now. And, as she said, we've been doing this for a long time and we know each other very well. And we've also gone through a lot of things, you know, waves of ups and downs through business. But more recently, probably since 2020, I would say we've really witnessed within our business. Clients, these little stories or concerns that come out it would come out like, you know, I really want to go on Instagram and talk about my business in this way. But if I do that, that is going against what the Instagram influencers or the bigger voices say. And so I'm hesitant to go stake my claim or state my opinion for fear of. Reprisal publicly, right? Or I might get in trouble or someone might say something and people will think I'm wrong or whatever. And it, it breaks our hearts because. As a woman in business, you should absolutely go and say something perhaps contrary to what the norm is, or if you have a little different twist on something, go speak it, that's how you build a business by being unique and maybe a little bit controversial, but we see this like Swallowing of the words or tamping down or muting so self censorship and we kept saying like, why, why, why? And it was like, you know what? Just keep the peace. Don't don't rock the boat. That's what it's about. That's people pleasing. So we kind of came to this theory, Okay. In that, in that way, Jenny, do you want to maybe share what you've observed? Yeah, I'll just say, so we primarily serve folks in the wellness industry because that's 90 plus percent of our platform users. And so those become our coaching clients. And what I have found is that Our audience and our clients end up using these, very fluffy, meaningless, amorphous words or phrases like self care, wellness, or healing because they don't want to be specific, I think, for fear of excluding people or offending people, and we all know that by using fluffy Amorphous language that you're going to have worse results in business. Like it's terrible copywriting. No one really knows what you mean, but it's considered safe. And so I think, some people just need to learn the skill of copywriting. And Sandy is a great copywriting teacher and coach in our programs. But, I think it goes beyond that, where they know that they need to be specific and talk to a specific audience, but they're so afraid of hurting someone's feelings, of excluding someone, or of being specific for fear of, just being judged or called out, and I think that has gotten worse and worse since it's gotten worse. Like, say, 2020, the pandemic really, I think, made people nuts and caused a lot of other social unrest. And I think people just generally don't trust themselves and we as women need to trust our intuition in order to achieve what we're capable of in business. that's my belief is that we kind of have this, Innate sense of what's right and what works. That's where our genius comes from. And when you start discounting that you're not only going to harm your business, but I now am of the mind that you're harming yourself. There's a very significant personal impact that happens when you're biting your tongue all the time. Yeah. I want to zoom out for just a second. Because I just want to kind of give this discussion some context. There are very real reasons. Like, we are programmed to belong to groups, right? We are programmed with thousands, millions of mirror neurons that pick up on the reactions or perceived reactions of other people to try and, guide our behavior for belonging, for connection. We are told from such a young age that. Maybe we're not as smart as we think we are. Maybe we do need outside experts to tell us what to do, what to believe, how to behave, what to wear, what makeup to put on, how our body should look. I mean, I could go on. If you are feeling Disconnected from yourself. Like, you don't trust your intuition. Like, you want to use these fluffy amorphous words because you don't want people to be mad at you. You come by that honestly. It is not your fault. Right. It is, however, your opportunity and your responsibility to do something with that. If you are a business owner in either whether it's the wellness space or just the online space, because what you are sacrificing is the individual magic that you bring to whatever it is that you are doing, that only you can put into words that only you can offer the world. And if you don't do it, no one else will. But I just love to start from like, listen, fellow human socialized females, this is not your fault. So if you're identifying with some of the things that Jenny and Sandy and I are saying, we all have this as well and it is your opportunity. So I would love for either of you to pick up on that and either share thoughts or stories where you have experienced with it. Yeah. I just want to say, of course, absolutely all of that is true. And I think for women who are experiencing this, this self censorship and understand the root of it. But also we see so many women who are stuck in business at very small revenue, levels, like under 50 K. Like they just can't get the momentum to go beyond that. And they're upset and they have big dreams and they want to earn revenue and yes, yes, yes. But I think this is such a huge part of it. So yes, we want you to bring all that magic and all that uniqueness to the world, but also it's going to get you to making more money ultimately. Right. And that is safety. That is freedom. That is deciding how you want to live. It's taking care of your family. It's all those things. So I just want to make sure that that's clear for if you're like stuck and angry at business, let's just. Start to look at where you're holding back. We know why, but let's start to change that behavior. Yeah. And I'll just say as an entrepreneur, my belief is that you're a leader. You've taken on this task of building something that didn't exist in the world. So with that comes the responsibility of being a leader and sometimes being the first person to say something out loud. And if that is not Comfortable for you or not something that you're willing to get comfortable with and practice, then I would question your drive to be a business owner and an entrepreneur, because this is part of what goes, especially on the internet. Like you, I believe that this is the whole package. You have to be willing to be a leader. Um, and especially if just growing a business, like you're going to be managing people, you're going to be having an audience that you're interacting with. Like that's just part of the job. So if that's like a really not a good fit, there are other jobs where I think you can have a more private, quiet life that feels safe. And there's nothing wrong with that as an entrepreneur. Like this is part of your job. I think that's such a good point, because the skill that we are talking about that is at the heart of all of this is the ability to tolerate discomfort. And you have to have the capacity for more and more discomfort as your business grows, because Whatever discomfort you're feeling at 20, 000 a year is going to double at 40, triple at 60 exponentially. And so that's the central skill to tolerate the discomfort of other people possibly being mad at me or other people actually being mad at me and letting me know that they don't like what I'm saying. Right, right. Which is extremely hard for all the reasons you just laid out with the socialization that sometimes I think that women just don't expect that side. Like, they're just going to trust that people are word of mouth and that my work is good. And then I'm a kind person. And then that people will talk about me and I won't have to mark it and I won't have to say anything. And it's just going to happen. And it just doesn't It just doesn't. So yeah, as Jenny said, have to step out into this leadership, into the super scary place and be willing to hear criticism, be willing to hear like, what are you talking about? Or who are you to say that? Or all those comments. Right. And I think a lot of your work there is like real relationship. And what we're talking about is like public, like let's go market your and whether. The crap that comes your way, right? Cause it's going to the more and more you succeed, the more that you will receive. Yeah. Because you have a relationship with the people you are marketing to, even if it just exists in your own head, right? If you're worried about what they're thinking, when they read what you say, that worry is part of your relationship. If you are scared that they are going to come after you, if you say something that steps out of line with whatever you think they want to hear, that is a component of your relationship. Even if it's with a nameless, faceless crowd. Right, right. Yeah, and I think one trick that's helpful for me is I don't spend a lot of time on like social media, but I spend a lot of time on YouTube and even people I deeply respect and admire who have like incredible lives or businesses or channels. Just go in any video and read the comments like this is just part of how the internet works. If you have a public persona you're going to see this person that you admire and have this great respect for as a creator, and they're just going to get torn apart. And that's, unfortunately, like, we can talk about how to solve that as a society or whether that's even possible at this point, but like, that's reality. So you have to come up with a way of handling the discomfort that comes in the comments of a YouTube video in order to succeed at this. Whether you're on YouTube or not, that's like real life on the internet. and I would also just add like that's usually a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall comments or the overall experience that people have in the relationship to a creator or a piece of content, but it's still there. No matter what, if you're serving enough people, a certain percentage of them are going to be disappointed or angry or frustrated or what, and they're going to tell you. Whether even privately, like they want a refund or, something you did, like your credit card charged them 12 hours earlier. it's just going to happen. And people, we all have complicated lives so as like a public person on the internet doing business, you're just going to get like mingled up in people's drama. This is part of it. So how then do you as business owners decide? What feedback to listen to, what not to listen to. Tell me how you have shaped your playbook for dealing with feedback. I can take a first stab at this. So we've done it very poorly at times. And I think very well, and Sandy and I have each other, which is super helpful. I don't actually have a framework for how I would navigate it without the feedback. Without Sandy, other than I would have to have some trusted group of people that I consulted just to have a second pair of eyes. Like, ultimately I have an instinct and a decision, but I need sort of, I don't trusted resource there to like bounce those ideas off of. But I think back to my experience in college and graduate school and law school and early in my career, I just had such a sense of myself, a strong sense of purpose of what I'm here on this planet to do, what I believe in. And so for me, the last year or so has been getting back to who that person is before I allowed that to waver. And I remembered how strong I was. And then I sort of backtracked and looked at the last decade and where things started to waver for me and what actually took place there. And so for me, it's been a process of like some coaching, some therapy, like really analyzing where that broke down. And then remembering myself. So I know Sandy probably has a slightly different answer than that, but for me. It's like a lot of internal work. Yeah. I think it's the relationship with self, right? Like if you have a body of work and you believe in yourself and you know what you're doing. Yeah. And it's important, some of the stuff that Sarah said earlier, you have to believe that first and you have to believe in your work. And so if you put it out there and someone criticizes it, it's okay because you believe in it. Right. If you are unsure. About yourself. And you have a ton of uncertainty. Should I be doing this? Maybe I need my PhD or I need a few more years experience, like all the things that women can come up with as excuses for not being legitimate. That's all going to come up when the first comments, like this is ridiculous or whatever it may be, or you don't know what you're talking about, but if you believe, you know what you're talking about, then those comments won't hurt. As much, right? Like, of course, no one wants to read them, but I think it is just a belief in yourself. And the second thing is when something happens, because it inevitably will, I think for most of us working publicly to have community around you that you can trust. You cannot trust public comments, but I would go to Jenny and to Sarah and to our other friends who are work in the same realm and like, just turn to you for support and for love and it's fine. It's not you. There's some nastiness going on out there. I think the community who actually knows you, that is what you need around you when something happens sort of publicly, like negative comments that happen publicly. I love that you just touched on kind of the two, like interdependence, like internal, external. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we do need communities of other people, other women to remind us like, no, this is you, you really are this person. You really are Sandy fucking Connery. Right? Who really, is able to, do this amazing thing. Like, yes, that is who you are and who I know you to be. And also. I have the interdependence of community, but then I still have to go back on my own at 11, 12, 1 o'clock in the morning when I'm laying in bed, maybe still worrying about the comment. I have to know that I believe in my work and that I will figure it out. And I have to have the individual ability to tolerate that and like external validation and internal validation. It's both pieces. Right. And your external validation is not your Instagram comments. It is the people who truly know you, not your social media following. That's not where you're looking for it. You need actual real human beings face to face. How did you learn that? Well, I don't know. I think Jenny said, do you want to tell the Nama stream story? I'll just start with the context that, um, cancel culture is something I'm still deeply analyzing and trying to understand and wrap my head around. And that's the work of a lifetime. I think it's only a matter of time until, it comes for you as you rise and success. So I'll just give that caveat. Um, Yeah. So our software company was originally called Namasteam. We were built for yoga studios. Like that's what we were created for. And then we, quickly expanded to yoga teachers and just other wellness folks. And then now we serve all creators, but mostly in the wellness industry. And we started to get like, Like a message a year, sometimes people were uncomfortable with the name. It was pretty much always white women in the industry that would let us know that they felt like it was cultural appropriation. And I imagine that they also felt like that around the names of all of the studios where they would work also, because there's a lot of Sanskrit used in the industry because that's the, the lineage of the practice. And so we would take those comments and thank people for letting us know. And it was something that we would discuss. And that was just like kind of an ongoing thing for a couple of years, like maybe four or five comments came in out of, you know, hundreds of thousands of users on the platform. And then in 2020, we had what felt more like an organized group of people coming after us on Instagram, mostly in the DMs. And then we found out that someone was running a paid program where they were training folks in the industry to kind of go after brands that were using Sanskrit, with the claim of cultural appropriation. It was very challenging. This happened. It hit us really hard in the summer of 2020. And the world was, especially the United States was like, there was a period of great unrest, you know, around, obviously like COVID and race, and there was a reckoning. A lot, a lot of appropriate reckoning going on. And then I think a lot that spread to kind of other parts of society, right? So there was a lot of questioning going on. And so then we started to get this, kind of organized mob of people coming at us. Um, on an email and on Instagram and, and then it started to get more and more threatening. So like basically change your name or else. and like, we need a date of when you're changing the name of this brand, or we're going to have more people coming after you. We're going to make sure basically that your company dies, which is not a comfortable thing to be dealing with. It really felt like that wave came out of nowhere. And again, it was primarily based on what we could see from who was sending the messages. It was primarily, white women in the wellness industry who were kind of waging these threats at us. We consulted a ton of people, including folks who are South Asian, including folks, who've been on our platform for years, including customers in India. It was like a very big. Conversation, but ultimately I think Sandy and I felt and Sandy feel free to chime in. We felt like we didn't have a choice, we sort of had our own inklings of whether it made sense to change our name. And we had other reasons we had been exploring changing the name of our company because we were serving people beyond the yoga industry as well. And we obviously want to listen to concerns that were raised by our clients. Like that's something that's always been important to us. But a lot of these threatening comments were not coming from clients of ours or people on our platform. They were coming from the outside. Again, we traced a lot of it to this I think multi thousand dollar paid program, where this was like people paying to be trained to do this. And when that happened, We panicked and, we're terrified that we were going to lose our company. So we made a very quick decision that was painful to change the name. We were terrified of what name to pick. Like we were terrified that we were going to pick another name that was going to be problematic or offensive for other reasons. Right. So it was just a very challenging thing it felt like having a gun to your head and being told like you do this or else, like you're. Going to lose everything you have. And at that point we had like 20 some odd employees we were serving hundreds of thousands of people. It wasn't just like our decision. Like we didn't want to do anything that was going to jeopardize the businesses of other people. And we also were terrified of offending our clients too. Many of whom had Sanskrit words in the names of their businesses. Right. So it was like this very tricky. Place to be because we were not authorities on what is appropriate to do or say in this industry, we're running a tech platform and didn't feel like it was our place to really decide can people in yoga classes end classes in the United States with the, in Canada with the word namaste those are the debates people were having and We weren't the thought leaders to have those debates and to host those conversations. And so it was a very awkward place for us. Ultimately, we picked a name that has roots in French lineage, the word marvelous. We both love, I'm happy with the name of the company, but certainly not happy with the process and the cost. It was almost a year for significant amount of money. It was many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and time for our team that would have been used making the platform better and serving our customers and our users. It took almost a year to get the trademark. And so the whole time we were just getting these threatening messages, even though we had already committed to changing the name of the company, we couldn't publicly announce it until the trademark was finalized because we were afraid, what if we don't get the trademark, and then it's more complicated, but that's the gist of it. And, it's something that I think has not sat well with either of us. I think that that was a moment for me, that was a. Life moment, a turning point where I was like, I don't even know if I want to do this anymore. Like, I don't want this job. Like, This is a thankless. I don't know when the next thing is going to come, because again, you do enough on the internet and people are going to get mad. So. Yeah, it was a time of just fear. Every day we were. Scared, like legitimately scared and it was that summer, you know, March, we saw when COVID hit and everything shut down. March, April was just a mammoth growth for us that we could hardly handle it. It was just awful. It was the worst period of my life, I think. And then to have this threat on top of it. And here we are every yoga studio, Pilates, fitness, gym is closed down. And they're all coming on to at the time, Namastream to survive, right? Like they were their businesses. They were able to bring in money, pay staff, pay their mortgages, buy groceries because Namastream existed. And it felt so petty that we were talking about the name when there's much bigger problems out there, right? People would write into us and I would just bring us to tears because they're like, thank God for you guys. Because I could pay my entire staff this month. Thank you for the platform. Thank you for serving us to this crazy time, you know? But then we'd have the threat and the expectation that it was like a blog that we could just. Broke a new logo and changed the name and all would be well, they had no idea that we literally had thousands and thousands and thousands of businesses creating revenue and paying groceries and mortgages, with that name in it. And if we change the name. All that goes away from them. We have to navigate this very carefully with links and so on. Right. It was very, very complicated and that was never really thought of. And then every time I read that, I just wanted to throttle those people, like they just have no clue what they're talking about. And there are. Other businesses doing some really awful things that maybe you could go spend your energy there, but I could not say that because whatever we said would be screen captured and shared. Right. So we just didn't say anything to them. Nothing. That's so important, Sandy, that you say that. Yeah. We couldn't argue back. We couldn't say, look, did you realize, you know, because it would all be construed or whatever. Who knows? we've never said a word other than message received. Got you. Thank you. You know? Yeah. It's such an awful collision of programming that we get as women. Yeah. Business owner. You know, the cost of running your business and supporting the people who use your platform. Tell me what, looking back, what would you have done differently and why? I would have ignored it. I 100 percent would have not responded to a single message. Like, we didn't manage our Instagram account at that point. I would have told everyone on our team. Just leave those messages alone. Don't block anyone. Just don't respond. And I think we would have had our own process, Sandy, of you and I and our C suite of deciding on our own timeline. What the name of our company would be moving forward, whether or not we would change it. And that would have been to me as now thinking of myself as the CEO and the leader of this organization that would have been the responsible thing to do. So obviously Sandy and I meet and I'm sure I played a large role in driving that made that decision out of fear. And that's never the reason to make a decision, especially in business. In the emotional weight of that taking over that period of time in our business, we were experiencing thousands of percentage points of growth, month to month. We were, providing jobs for 23, 24 people. Learning how to have a team handbook and how to have vacation policies for people in different countries around the world. And we had so much, we were learning and let alone serving the hundreds of thousands of people we were serving and making sure that the software had all this uptime and that things were loading quickly. We had a huge job. We didn't take days off for a year, like not even a weekend. I think I took one weekend day within 12 months, maybe like this was around the clock every waking minute, all hands on deck. Other people were making sourdough and like planting gardens during the pandemic. And we were. Working 18 hours a day, seven days a week to try to keep something afloat. And just to give the context, in March and April of 2020, we had so many people using our platform that we had downtime, like Netflix would go down and we would go down. Servers were crashing. Like we actually fried a server. We killed the server, the hardware of the server, because the usage was so heavy. So we had real problems, right? We weren't. Like solving COVID, but we were helping people be paid and other people like to access healthy resources while they're, in their home and have no access to gyms or, wellness care. So I think that that was the mistake. So, so ignoring it and putting it on a little shelf and taking it seriously and coming up with our own process for taking it seriously in our own timeline would have been the responsible thing to do. But in our defense, Jenny, we did witness two people lose their business in front of our eyes. Yeah. Right. So we knew it wasn't just like, we're being ridiculous. They can't take us down. Oh yeah. They can. And we saw it not in companies as big as ours, but they were women, women run business, women, mid size. Like it's never the giant corporations. It's usually women and it's usually just sort of smaller business, you know, that never guys, it's never ever because somehow we still have the Kansas city cheat. Right. Right. Right. Great. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the other point is like the other messages that we were getting, which I'm sure some of your listeners were getting as well, who are business owners and coaches during that time was we were running Facebook ads and Instagram ads because we were a business and, so the summer of 2020 was very, um, Complicated in North America, but we were running ads. We turn them down. There's a few periods of time where we turn them off, but like all of our competitors ads were everywhere and they were way better funded than us, and our biggest competitor just like we're primarily bootstrapped just to give you the context to our listeners and our biggest competitor has had their last round was 550 million. So, like, just to put these things in perspective. So we were getting all these comments as well. Basically you're racist because you're running ads right now and you should be like much more sensitive to what's going on in the country and in the world. And it's like, dude, this whole thing is going down. The ship's going to go down. And I'm just wondering, do like Mark Zuckerberg and people like that not get those messages or does it just like not even matter? do, like, dude founders of venture backed companies just, like, no one even bothers to, like, call them out for advertising during, a sensitive cultural moment? Or, or does it just not matter? Because nobody cares if they do it. I don't know. That's a bigger question. But, that's the other crap that was going on we had to navigate, like, how to be. Appropriate women running businesses in that moment in time, where we were not violating any unspoken social norms for women. I, I think that's part of the rub, right? Is that. You're not going to make everybody happy. I mean, the ultimate joke that I love to ask people who are stuck in people pleasing. I'm like, name three people who are pleased with you right now. Very rarely can you do it right because it's a lie that you can please people on an ongoing basis. So you make a decision here. Someone else doesn't like it. You make a decision here. Someone else doesn't like it. What I love about what you said is that I knew this obstacle to work through again, you would go internal internal to your own, guidance your own intuition your own feeling about what you wanted to be putting your time and energy toward you would go community your small community and you did some of that and you would trust that. Here's what we're going to do. No matter what happens. We're going to figure it out together and we're going to have our own backs about this because, to be fair, your definition or someone's definition of cultural appropriation is going to be different than someone else's, right? And we're not all going to agree. It's like trying to agree on the definition of a feminist right? I can't be the kind of feminist that pleases everyone. So it has to be guided internally and by the community of people that you serve, that you answer to, in terms of, service and agreement. Anything else you'd add to that? No, I think that's exactly right. I think, Now, for me, that sense of like fear, when that comes up, that's a bit of a wait, what is happening here? It's a signal that I'm starting to fear what other people are going to say. Like, it's a people pleasing signal, right? Like, wait, what, why am I so scared? Why am I so afraid? Why, what is happening here? And I think it's only now that we're comfortable talking about this because time has passed and things have settled. And there's just all these stories coming off of women who have had the same experience. And I think some may still be afraid to speak up about what they experienced. But, I think what you said is very accurate. It's mostly, just don't react, do not silence. No justifying, no defense. I was just going to say, I think that this is different publicly again, if a client of ours writes in, we respond to them. Our team they're instructed to respond thoughtfully, or sometimes we need to jump in. If it's really sensitive, like we always respond to the people that we have a direct obligation and relationship to. But when it is a mob. And that is what. The Internet is like, it's a mob. It's a collection of mobs and it's a giant mob. I think that's the biggest lesson I've learned is you just don't engage with the mob and if you're going to fail or things are going to fall apart because you don't engage, they were going to fall apart anyway. If you did engage, there was never anything you could have said or done. So I think that's the answer. And in public, as a business owner, if a mob comes after you, you just don't engage. That's it. that's what my answer would be. And then you thoughtfully go inside, you come up with your own talking points, your own thought leadership, your own way of talking and seeing the world. And then you share that when you're ready. And when that's appropriate from your place of power versus from a place of I'm being attacked and I have to retaliate or I have to defend myself. That's a powerless place to be. You're not setting yourself up for success. and if you want examples, Sarah brought up Andrew Huberman before we started recording, he's picture perfect on what he's done, right? Like he's got attacked, there were claims made, didn't acknowledge it, didn't talk about it. Nothing. It's perfect. Right. Whether you agree or whatever, however you feel about him, it doesn't matter. The way he handled that attack was like, that's the way. So, what I love about what you said, and regardless of how you feel, because there's so many questions that we're not going to answer all of them here, right? So, for Huberman, what effect does that have on his public life? Not a question we're going to be able to answer, because again, you can't please everyone. There will be people who have different opinions about that. But what I love about what you said is, going internal going community, who are we responsible to who have we do we have contract with who are we committed to that. Is applicable no matter if it is an entrepreneurial business setting, or if it is a personal setting. When I decided that being a member of the Mormon church was no longer going to be compatible with having children who were queer, I had to do the same thing. I had to disconnect from a larger community. That had a lot of opinions and had a lot to say about the decisions that I was making, sending me private messages, and, making some public statements nowhere near. I'm not trying to compare the two. I'm just trying to borrow, like, this process of going internal and staying in your community. I stuck to my community, my family. We talked about, the impact for us. The decisions that we would make, and we just decided my husband and I, no matter what, we're going to figure this out and we can handle it. Because leaving and not engaging with the broader communities opinions was what served the people to whom we were responsible our children and our family. And so. If you're not a business owner, and if you're not a business owner in an online space. What matters is that. You were intentionally separated from your knowing and intuition. And there's a lot of programming that you get about how you need to explain all of your decisions, and you need to make people agree with you, and you need to have outside validation for the moves and decisions that you make, and that when you see yourself censoring and editing, you can go internal. And you can go community and that's going to be very uncomfortable. It sounds lovely, right? I'm just going to go internal and trust my community. It's actually terrifying and awful because you still have to deal with the discomfort of choosing to ignore all of the outside, whether they're DMs or people telling you you're doing it wrong. But that is the skill that we all have to develop the ability to tolerate. The discomfort of choosing ourselves. Right. And I think also culturally or societally, I just want to say like two opposing opinions can exist and it's okay. Like we don't all have to believe like the Mormon church can have their opinions on, queer people and Sarah and her husband and her family can have different opinions and it's okay. Right. We don't need to force our own thoughts and beliefs down someone else's throats. And that's where we've lost. Conversation and debate and what do you think? What do you think? You just like write them off and you make them bad and you try to take them down if they don't agree with you. And I think, I don't know, Jenny, if this is right, but I feel that for me, I witnessed that. 2020 and on, I didn't see that as much before, just free speech, just to say what I want and know that someone will disagree with you and it's okay. Like that's how the world works. We don't all believe the same thing, but somehow something happened. Wires were crossed. And if you say something on the internet, you'll get taken down. And if maybe you've been part of that mob maybe just think about geez, you know, that's fine that they believe that or they said that it's fine. I don't agree with it. I don't have to listen to it. I don't have to buy the program. I don't have to do anything. I just disagree. Yeah, I would say that there's something that's gotten lost in the last five to 10 years. That's really, really important for any kind of democracy or democracy leaning culture. It's so important To be able to make mistakes without it ruining your life. Yes, that's right. Jenny. That's right. It's so important to be able to have an idea that isn't that thought through that you say out loud and then you can constructively engage with people without being, labeled a Bad person or an enemy and I think that what's happened is, there's been this mob mentality that's really risen up primarily from a certain group of people with certain political beliefs, which I think all of us probably generally agree with most of those beliefs, but I think that they've been weaponized in a way that has silenced people to the detriment of everyone. And this to me, this is what played out in its own tiny way in our business in 2020. And I think it continues to play out in people we all have so many different experiences and we all have our own inner sense of knowing. And I just see when I go on Instagram for like pet videos. Like I won't even look at my feed and I haven't posted since 2021. And we, as a brand went off Instagram years ago now, because I think it particularly shows up there, which is where a lot of women hang out. And I think that we are only seeing one version of life or, one very, particular way of seeing the world to the harm of all of us, because that is not all that exists. And, I'm just waiting for a much bigger implosion of the whole thing. I think our culture is headed to a reckoning around this and that might sound dramatic, but we have to be able to talk to each other without being labeled as problematic or having our career or job ruined. I think what you said is so important about the mistake because that is huge, right? We don't want people to disagree with us, but also part is like, what if I'm wrong? There's no way you can say something that you're not certain about. And, If people are criticizing you, and then you'd be like, Oh my God. Yeah. You know what? I'm totally shouldn't have done that. There's no apology. There's no opinion. There's no space for an apology. You're just wrong and written off and canceled and taken down. Right. And so of course, we're going to mute ourselves. Like, why would we put ourselves up to that? So just broader again, I just wish that we could be like, Hey, did you realize, Oh no, I didn't realize. Thank you for pointing that out. Instead of like, I'm coming after you. Right. Or you could say, no, I did realize this is my, my position. You know, you can disagree, right? This is not how it happens. That's so interesting because I have been on both sides of, what we're talking about. So someone that I, really have admired and listened to is a doctor named Peter Atiyah and he does a lot of writing about, longevity. He had a post a while back where he was arm in arm with Kevin Spacey. And, Kevin Spacey has been accused by a lot of, people about sexual misconduct. And I commented how disappointed I was to see his picture. And I wanted to do it in a way that was like, listen, I am here as a fan and I am disappointed with what looks like the endorsement of someone who though not criminally convicted, there's a picture. There's, a lot of, of evidence and a lot of corroboration between stories. And so I felt like if I didn't say that as someone who is a fan, and then my husband was like, you think he cares what you think? And I was like, you're right. He probably doesn't. What I love about this conversation is there just isn't a right way. Like other people might look at my comment, like my husband be like, Sarah, he does not care you know. Your comment made zero difference to him, but it made a difference to me to say something that bothered me enough. I actually thought about it for like 24 hours. Do I really want to throw my name, on the pile of comments here? And in the end I did because it mattered to me for personal reasons, but there isn't a way to do it right. But again, I just kept with my own internal self. And my own internal self was like, listen, if you don't say something, yeah, there's, there's a little bit of something that feels like a loss here. And I think it's interesting that only that internal check in can tell you what matters to you. That's when you get to tolerate the discomfort of doing what matters to you and having your own back around it. With yourself, with your community, with people who know and love and trust you. And I also think we need to recognize that people we admire like Peter and other physicians or whomever, that they're human and you can accept that they're the bulk of their body of work. You have learned so much about longevity from him. And there's this one part of him that you don't really like with his association with Kevin Spacey, right? But you don't have to throw all the work out, you can like express like, Hey, I don't like that part of you and leave it alone, but still accept, I think the counseling is you're a bad person. You were seen with Kevin Spacey. You got to get out. Let's take him down. He'll never write a new book, a book again, but it just counts. Yeah. What he's done, right? Like nobody's perfect and you're not going to agree with every single thing that comes out of one person's mouth. There's going to be parts where you're like, ah, I don't feel as strongly about that or whatever. Right. But you can still accept the person. You don't need to cancel them. I think the outrage machine. You know, the social media outrage machine that just is churning constantly that is going to go on. And I think that's the implosion that Jenny is, talking about the reckoning that it's coming with the way we just feed this machine. That is not what I was hoping to feed. And maybe I did right. Maybe I have to acknowledge that what I meant to be a well intentioned comment from a person who wants. To see this man succeed, didn't land that way. Right. But what I think matters the most is that I decided to do that based on an internal guidance system and I stand by it. And even if someday I'm like, you know what, maybe I shouldn't have said that. I'm not going to beat myself up for it, because at the time it was what I thought was best and right to do, which is the other part of this is that we're all going to make decisions, either in our business. Relationships, our personal relationships, but later we. Think I wish I had chosen something different and it is still part of having your own back at that point to not beat yourself up for a decision that you made with different information and different perspectives. That's right. Well said, Sarah. Well said. Any last words as we kind of wrap up here? Anything that you didn't want to say that you want to make sure you get? I just want everyone especially women running businesses, which as we know is our sort of core market focus here, our niche. It is the saddest thing if you silence yourself because you fear someone else being upset with you. And I just want people to go about their next few days and week and start to question, for me, it'll be like, oh my God, I'm so excited. We're going to do this. And then instantly it's like. But someone's going to say this, this, this, Oh, I probably shouldn't do that. So where is that sort of internal battle happening for you? And I would just challenge you to feel the discomfort and go do the work. Because right now I just feel like, especially on Instagram, everyone's saying the same thing, everyone's doing the same thing. And I think as a society, we're just. Desperate for some unique voices are desperate for something interesting or remarkable or contrary. Someone say something that I haven't heard before, please. That's my plea. Yeah. And I'll just say that we didn't get a chance to get into this in this episode, so maybe we have to do a follow up at some point, Sarah, but. for me, what happened when I started to quiet my voice publicly is I started to doubt myself privately. And that's the most insidious part of muting, I think, is that we start to question our own thoughts, our own beliefs. Like maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm not capable of actually understanding how the world works. And that is a really dangerous, haunting. Thing that can happen that affects your entire life. Like it, if it affects and still does, I have to actively work on this. This is an ongoing process, but it caused me to question everything about myself internally as well. so I would just say like, this is bigger than just your brand or how you show up on the internet. I think this affects how we live our lives and the risks that we're willing to take and how we express love. It just can kind of take over. So Yeah, allow yourself to think and feel and say what you believe. And that's a part of your humanness. Your humanity is at stake. One of the things that, I really love that you said, I think we kind of both touched on is that when you don't do that, a part of you is lost. And there's this great Martha Graham quote that I alluded to and kind of butchered, but it's like the one unique thing that you do, if you don't do it, it will not exist in the world. No, 1 can do that. The unique way you say it, the unique way that you present it, the way that information mixes with your experience and you offer it to the world. There isn't anyone else who can do that. And so developing the skill of tolerating the discomfort of doing that. Whether it's the mob that comes for you or whether it's your mom, quick story. I was putting some things out online about leaving the church and my feelings about that. And my mom said, can you come over so we can talk about some of the things that you've been putting out online? And I was like, sure, because my mom matters to me. Right. And so I chose to have that conversation with her, but it doesn't matter if it's the mob or if it's your mom to be able to internally know. This is who I am and what I want to say and how I want to move through the world and then developing the ability to tolerate the discomfort of that is everything. Thank you both so much for being here today. We're definitely going to have a follow up conversation about this. Thank you, Sarah. It was fun. Thank you so much, Sarah.