614: How to Listen Instead of React
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Business owners often feel compelled to defend every policy and decision. We share a recent incident that brought that into sharp focus. We explore why learning to observe rather than react is a skill worth cultivating. From dealing with difficult client feedback to navigating aggressive Facebook comments, we share some personal stories and hard-earned lessons in restraint. Observation leads to better leadership, stronger boundaries, and a healthier business culture. Remember, not everything deserves a reply—sometimes the best response is no response at all.
Main Topics
Emotional regulation in business
Handling online criticism gracefully
Responding to client complaints
Leadership through observation
Protecting energy and mental health
Main Takeaway: “Remind yourself that not everything needs a reply. Some things need maturity and margin and a deep breath.”
In pet care—and business in general—it’s tempting to fire back immediately when someone questions your work, your policies, or your prices. But not every situation calls for a response. Often, the wiser path is observation: gathering context, cooling down, and responding with clarity rather than emotion. Protect your energy. Reserve it for the pets and people who trust you day in and day out. Leadership starts with emotional discipline.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter, observation, reaction, business policies, client feedback, employee communication, emotional regulation, leadership, problem-solving, patience, empathy, professionalism, mental health, business growth, customer service
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:00
Me Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. We are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. We'd also like to thank pet sitters associates and dog co launch for sponsoring this episode, and we can't forget our Patreon people who find value in the show over 600 episodes now. Thank you for being along the ride in this journey with us. Thank you for wanting to give back and supporting the show. If you are listening and you are not yet a Patreon supporter, but you'd like to be one. You could go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, to see the ways that you can help out. I saw this quote earlier today, and it really struck me. It said, learn to sit back and observe. Not everything needs a reaction. It really hit home for me, it is so hard to do this. There are times when I can be a very reactionary person of somebody says something to me, and I immediately want to come back at them with a little quip. That is not always the best solution. It's very hard to sit back not react, just listen to what somebody else is saying, or observe their behavior. Our identity is tied to our work, so when someone critiques it or misunderstands it, or questions a policy that we have, or doesn't understand why we do something in our business that we do, it feels very personal. Oftentimes, we are the one that created the policy, but we have to resist the urge to defend ourselves, which is incredibly difficult, because we care about the business. We care about the procedures that we have or the way that we structure things. It's also hard to sit back and observe, because we are hardwired to solve problems. Pet sitters are typically fixers by nature. We want to jump in, we want to do something. We want to serve people and their pets to the best of our abilities. But sometimes when we observe and we're patient, that's what the moment actually calls for.
Collin 01:43
We started a business to solve problems. We spend every day thinking about how we can serve our clients better or better equip our employees if we have them do what do what to solve problems. And so when a problem arises for us to just sit on it feel like we have to sit on our hands and keep our mouth shut while we watch it unfold and watch it take place. This is torture to us. We feel like we have to do something in order to make it better, or
Meghan 02:10
we feel responsible for everything again. We're the ones that made the policies, made the procedures, made, the documents, the contracts that the client had to sign when we are the face of the business any complaint or a bad review or comment really feels like a reflection on us. We often tend to take it personally. Silence can feel like negligence, even when it's the Wiser path. We're not saying never respond to bad Google reviews because there are instances where you need to, but sometimes taking a moment to sit back and reflect on it can lead to a better outcome. If an employee is really hyped up and they're agitated and firing off words at you, take a breath before you respond, and wait a moment.
Collin 02:49
We said that about it, feeling negligent again. This gets linked back to us needing to solve problems of well, if I only spoke up about X, Y, Z, or if I only tried to explain this a little bit more. Maybe that would help. Maybe there needs to be more talking in this space. And really what we need a lot more of, and what we need to do a lot more of is is listening and that observing aspect. Because, like you said, Meghan, like that, that is something that has actually happened to us. Somebody comes to us, they're amped up, they're firing off tons and tons and tons of messages, and we want to immediately react, right? We need to our blood pressure goes up, we feel flush, we feel angry, or we feel frustrated about what's going on, and we want to start firing back messages as well. But what we found in those situations, at least with the people that are around us that we're working with, if we let that kind of initial wave go over, then we can engage once everything is calmed down, just a little bit, just letting that a little bit pressure to release this, even just a little bit, allows for a much more healthy and constructive conversation to take place, meaning that we can actually end up with a resolution a whole lot faster and an end point that works for everybody than if we would have just jumped in initially and kind of gone to battle right away.
Meghan 04:05
And obviously this can come up in a lot of facets of our business, particularly with clients. If a client sends a passive aggressive message or leaves unexpectedly, you want to jump in. You want to fix the problem. You want to say, Hey, what's up? What's going on? Tell me more. Talk to me. If a client sends a long screed of five, 610, things that they feel that are wrong with your business, you want to go on the defensive, on the attack, saying, well, line item two, it i is because of this. And point three is because of this. Trying to explain everything is not always the best approach. Sometimes the better move is to step back, listen and choose your next step in a more calm manner. Take a few deep breaths, step away from your phone for 1520, minutes. Go for a walk. It's what we do every day, but be more intentional about the walk. Of taking deep breaths during it, just having a more calm head before you respond to the person
Collin 04:59
well. Most of the time when these things come this way, especially when they've got that long laundry list of complaints, this really is just them trying to be heard about something, and we don't know also what's going on in their life. They could have just gotten laid off from their job, or had something relationally happen to them, or have an illness or something that we don't know. And so we can't take on that burden into ourselves. And it's not just saying that we're going to stand here and being a punching bag for people, but what we can do is make sure that when we respond it doesn't make it worse, it doesn't make it worse. And this, again, is where we have to have that mindset that we've talked about so many times of there is me, and then there's this big veil that is my business, and it exists out and in front of me, the business is the one interacting, and that's who I interact with. And through That's the voice that I use whenever I have these conversations. And when we step back and we listen, when we look at that message, we can say, Okay, what's the heart behind this? What's actually being said here is, oh, this person doesn't feel seen or heard, or they don't. They don't. There's a lack of trust happening here. And here's a bunch of things that instigate that. And so what I have to do then is talk to that point. Is the overarching theme, not like you said, well, in line one, you said this in line two, and here's this explanation, and then here's the third explanation for this thing. And you don't understand this, because then it's just going to go, tucka, tucka, tucka, tucka tucka, back and back and back and back and back and back and back and back, and you'll never actually satisfy them. I think that's something that I had to learn really early on, is it didn't matter how good of an argument we could come back to argue the points, because we weren't arguing facts with a lot of our clients, were arguing feelings, and you're never going to win that one. And as businesses, we know the facts, we know what happened. We've got the logs, we've got the transcripts, we've got everything here. I can give you everything, but it doesn't matter, because feelings were hurt, and when we recognize that, that's what we're working on here, when we think about that next step of I'm not talking about facts, back to this person. I'm actually talking about emotions and feelings that I learned this whenever I was a biologist, right? It was people would come to us. They were landowners, their banks on their streams were eroding, and they were angry. They were really angry about this. They weren't angry about the land. They were actually angry that this used to be the swimming hole where their granddad took them and where they learned to swim, and now they were wanting to take their grandkids there to swim, and they couldn't anymore, and they didn't understand why. And it was all really confusing. We could talk to them about stream mechanics and bank erosion and what was happening about land development all this, it didn't matter, because their feelings were the ones being hurt. And when we work at that level, we actually make a lot of progress in our conversations. But it
Meghan 07:53
is important not to fight fire with fire, because their feelings and emotions are hurt, but also our feelings and emotions are hurt, yes, so we have to be the professionals in this situation. It's kind of like dealing with employees. When an employee is yelling at you and cursing at you and saying, Why, I don't understand why you put me on this visit, and it's so hard and I didn't want to do it, and I'm having a terrible time and a terrible day, it can be very easy to snap back at them and say, Well, this is the route I had planned, and I thought that this was what was best, but I really just need you to do the job and be quiet and just just do the job. But if we react too quickly, it can really hurt the morale of the team or that individual observing first often gives us a fuller picture. To step back and say, Okay, I hear what you're saying. I understand. Here is a plan for moving forward and respond in a more empathetic way, because people, again, oftentimes just want to be heard. So responding with an empathetic statement is going to win you a lot of points moving forward.
Collin 08:53
When you do have that initial outburst, or somebody is coming to you really frustrated, something that is quite disarming to people in that situation is just to say, thank you for bringing this and talking to me. I know that that was really hard, and that took a lot of guts for you to do that, and so I want to talk about this in maybe we need to talk about now, or can we talk about this later? Schedule a time in three days to come back to this when we both have time to think about and put all of our thoughts together, adding structure to the chaos can really be beneficial, allowing everybody time to think, to put together thoughts, and to, most importantly, cool down. This is what gives you a lot more of the full picture that Meghan mentioned. It's a picture of where is the other person coming from, but it's also the picture of, where are my thoughts? Where's my head? Do I have information about this? Well, what? I haven't processed this at all. So just diving headlong into a situation without having processed it first is really dangerous. So really giving yourself time, and it's your business. It's your employees. Many. That time. Hey, I don't have time right now to go over this, but I have time tomorrow at three o'clock, so I'm going to schedule a meeting for us to talk about this, and then being intentional when you show up to that, something that you should definitely act on right now is getting Pet Sitter insurance. All professionals should have specific pet business insurance. As a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who's got your back? For over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros just like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out, they make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at Pet sit llc.com and as a listener of the show, you'll get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's pet sit llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care.
Meghan 10:55
Sometimes the pit that we fall into is not responding soon after they send the message and then just kind of sitting on it for a while they feel like they're ignored in that moment. So you don't have to respond immediately, but maybe 20 or 30 minutes later, then you can say, I hear you. Message received. Let's, let's think about this for a couple days, and we can come back and discuss this, then just making sure that the other person doesn't feel like they're ignored. One of the hardest areas to sit and observe is on community, Facebook groups and next door, someone complains, someone complains about prices or questions In Home Pet Sitting or post misinformation. That is the hardest because you just want to be a keyboard warrior for your business. Go on a long screed of all of your qualifications. Say, No, I am the best for these reasons, but at the end of the day, you're probably just screaming into the void.
Collin 11:46
I mean, we recently put, put a post out in our local Facebook group, just really talking about who we are and what we did and that we were there to serve people. And got some some hearts, some good reacts. And then we got a comment that basically just told us to, quote, get a real job. And what a joke it was. And I was had to put my phone down and breathe heavily, because it just went red. Because not only did I know the amount of work that Meghan and I pour into this business every waking moment, but also all of the hard work and dedication of our employees and all of the 1000s of really satisfied clients that this person had no idea about. And here it was, I was ready to jump in. I had typed out the sentence. I was ready to react, engage and go into battle, and really having to take a beat and sit and talk with Meghan about him, and understanding that, look, dealing with trash, dealing with that kind of stuff, nothing ever good comes of it. You're not going to change that person's mind. You're just going to get drug down into this with more name calling and things, and it's never going to make us happy either, because we're not going to get that satisfaction of being, of proving the other person wrong. And so in this example, in this thing that kind of we have this general policy of just when these kind of things come up, we don't engage, we don't engage with this because we know it leads down a bad path for just how it looks optically online, but also a really bad mental health thing for Meghan and I, because it eats at us and gnaws at us while it's going on. And we don't want that. We want to have a better peace of mind, and we want to be able to forget about things, so we have to just leave it alone and walk away.
Meghan 13:40
No, that's not to say that we didn't start crafting messages of kind of snarkly.
Collin 13:46
Of course. Yeah, it was absolutely. There's so much snark.
Meghan 13:49
And going to hit his point on the head of, we are super qualified. This is an actual job. Here's the reasons why. But at the end of the day, we did not send it because, again, the mental health side of this. Of, he's a keyboard warrior. There's no profile picture. It's some fake name. He just wants to get his 15 minutes of fame and drag down a small local company. No, thank you. I'm not going to participate
Collin 14:12
in that. Yeah, that urge to just quote, you know, set feel like we're setting the record straight. Of, well, you don't know this and you don't know that and you don't know this, but it can really spiral out of control. Can often look defensive, and it doesn't have that professional feel that I know we want for our business.
Meghan 14:27
And so it's not, it's it's not a good use of time either. I mean, no, you don't want to be sitting here 30 minutes or an hour later, still commenting back to this person and typing on your phone. You could be using that to go market your business and get more clients, or go do some yoga or a puzzle, or whatever you whatever it is that you choose to do for your happiness and your hobbies, but choose your time wisely, and responding to keyboard warriors is not a good use of that time.
Collin 14:53
And it's not just people online. It's all other facets. It could be other businesses in your area that are. Either denigrating you for various things about you, about your business, maybe not you specifically, but they have, quote, unquote, they have thoughts about the kind of care that's required. Maybe they're mimicking your messaging, kind of taking these things from you, undercutting your pricing, spreading gossip around the Internet and other places like this. These, these tactics, it is easy for us to feel threatened by because we know they're wrong. We know it's not good, we know what it does. But here's the thing, right when, first off, when people resort to these kind of tactics in their business, they are the ones who are actually threatened. They are doing this out of desperation and out of fear, not out of positions of strength. We have to just ignore Okay, boom. When I see that out there, I immediately know that person is afraid and scared and doing this because they are worried. I don't have to engage with that. I'm not worried. I'm happy about my business. I'm happy with where we're going. I don't need to respond publicly or emotionally to this, because, then again, it's all about how we address this. We don't want to have anything come back to us and really just going, I can leave that alone, and I don't need to engage in that. Because that is that is beneath me to even engage and get involved in that
Meghan 16:17
for my business well, and that's a really good point, because if you engage with the person and you just have a hour long slug fest, and other potential clients are reading this, maybe even not right now, but a year from now, they're reading that your business, which is supposed to be professional, is responding in a very unprofessional way. You may even get bad reviews because of how you respond to that person. So in our mind, it is best to just leave it alone, let people think what they want to think and move on. Okay, so instead of rushing into a situation where sitting back or being observant, but what does being observant in these situations actually best? You may hear observe and think it means to be passive or inactive, not actually say anything back or moved, just be kind of a stone wall and take everything that comes at you. But it isn't like that. It's intentional patience. It's the discipline of paying attention long enough to act with wisdom instead of impulse. When you want to be that keyboard warrior, don't do it when somebody's firing off cuss words at you. Don't respond in that same way. It's being intentional in that moment to say to yourself, I am not going to respond. I'm going to wait,
Collin 17:25
yeah, it gives us clarity over our emotions, instead of just acting out of what we feel right then and there. This stepping back to observe really helps create space between what had happened and how we feel about it, and in that space, we're able to process things. We're able to actually come to terms with not just what the actual facts were, but our own feelings and emotions around those facts, and making sure that we're not acting out of assumptions because some, you know, there was a tone of voice or we misinterpreted a text that somebody sent us, this leads to better decisions, instead of just constantly reactive ones, we
Meghan 18:04
can better suss out patterns too, and not just problems. When we pause and observe over time, we start to see these patterns of, oh, is this client always unclear in their communication, or are they always expecting a certain thing out of me? Do certain employees challenges show up over time, similar problems over and over and over again. Or are there specific types of feedback connected to certain service offerings? Maybe there's a really big pain point in your wedding pet attendant services, and you didn't realize it, but clients are starting to have the same question or the same complaints over and over again. When we pause and observe and recognize these patterns. It can help us fix these systems, not just the symptom. You know, you give a medication for a fever reducer, but it just suppresses the fever for a little bit, but it doesn't actually make the whole body better, and that's kind of similar to this of we don't just want to fix the one thing. We want a whole systemic fix here,
Collin 18:59
yeah, if I get feedback about our wedding, pen attendant services, and I react immediately. And I react because I feel affronted and offended that they said something about things that we put together and we worked really hard to do, and then we get and then it kind of goes away, and then we get some more feedback, and I react again. And we're always reacting with each individual occurrence. If I'm not tracking, if I'm not in the moment, if I'm not paying attention, I lose the connective thread between all of that, and then we become the problem. We become the ones turning off clients. We become the ones that our teams cannot come to, and we become the bottleneck in making things better and the improvement necessary in our businesses.
Meghan 19:37
And there's, again, that problem of being too precious, as you like to call it, about being something that we've created, or we feel defensive about it, because it's like, oh, well, I thought this was great. I have no problem with doing it this way. And and clients keep saying, No, well, we don't we. We don't like this about you, and it can feel affronting, but when we have that emotional regulation, we. We are able to observe from a higher perspective, not just like be in the moment, but take a 30,000 foot view of the problem and say, Well, I do want the process to be smooth for everybody, for me, for the clients, and if they're having a pain point in this, I need to do things to make the whole thing better. This observation is really a form of leadership, and remind us that we are in control of our reactions. We're not ruled by them. Emotions are not bad, feelings are not bad, but we do need to take control over them and be the master of them. It gives us this time to cool down, to ask better questions, not be in the heat of the moment and and feeling affronted and saying, Well, I don't understand why I think it's perfect. I think the system is perfect, and I don't understand why you're feeling why you're feeling this way, and I don't validate you at all. But when we do that stain of cooler heads prevail. We take that time, and then we're able to lead with compassion, rather than that defensiveness.
Collin 20:53
Well, when we stop being reactive, we can actually start understanding what's going on, which allows us to have a better perspective on how things are going, this allows us to view situations from a client's point of view, right? We can say, Oh, I actually see where this is concerning, right? I'm actually listening to you, and I'm putting myself in your shoes now. Or maybe you're able to see from the employee's experience why the onboarding was so tumultuous. Or even you can look at a competitor strategy and go, Okay, I get while you're doing I get why you're saying these things. I understand what you are trying to do. I might not agree with it, I might not like it, but at least I understand it, and then I can, I can actually do better, instead of just reacting all of the time. And it's way more powerful and way more long lasting than just that quick reply, that quick you know, as Meghan said, those keyboard warriors to just shoot something off and then kind of have that battle instead, think long term. How do I want this to play out in 510, 15 years? What can I learn now to set myself up for
Meghan 21:51
success later, which will hopefully lead us to have better boundaries. Watching without engaging lets us see when something isn't our responsibility to fix it really does help us to learn when to step in and when to let go
Collin 22:04
and just recognize when is something actually in my control, is the complaint is the feedback? Is the thing, something that I have direct impact and control over, or is it outside of my control? Right? A great example, maybe the client complained to you that you were late, but that was the day that they started road construction, and you were unaware of that there's nothing that you could have done to make that go better. And so here you have to understand, okay, I understand that you're angry that I was late. I had nothing up to do with us being late because of the road construction that popped up today. And it's not worth really, me really engaging with this and really putting a lot of effort into this when we weren't at fault, and it can still feel bad when you get that feedback or that comment about being late and untrustworthy and blah blah, you can state the facts, remember that you're dealing with emotions, and then you have to be the one to move on and realize this is not a fight that I can really go after, because there's nothing we could have done better
Meghan 22:59
if people In Facebook groups are commenting about how pricey you are. That's probably not a fight that you want to enter into, because you are you're not going to change their mind about your price if you have employees, that is something that is extremely costly, and not that we're here to defend our prices. But there's a certain point where I have to pay my bills and I have to pay other people's bills, and there's a price,
Collin 23:22
right, right? And that's what helps give you a strategic advantage in your business, is when you understand the basics, the foundations, the person in business who listens more understands more. We understand perspectives, we understand feedback, we understand the mechanics behind how things are to operate. And so we can actually track market shifts. We can track how people are changing their spending patterns or their habits around pet care. We can understand our local clients, our local economy, better whenever we listen to people have conversations, or who our ideal clients are, and how that's changing from year to year, and we really stay grounded with with other when others are chasing out the noise, when we can listen, we're grounded in reality. We're grounded in the things that we can control, while others kind of just sporadically and spaz out and go hither tither and yawn and never are actually focused on one thing for long enough to see whether it's going to be
Meghan 24:21
successful or not. We say this a lot, but this does not mean that you have to go with their feedback that they're telling you. Just because you are listening and observing does not mean that you have to go with every whim that your clients are saying. It is still your business. You are here as a sounding board for your employees, for your clients, for potential clients in Facebook groups. But the key thing here is to listen and observe. You're just taking in data. That's what you're doing right now. You are able to make more informed decisions when you have a bunch of data. If you just have your emotions or the emotions of the people giving you feedback, that's not really going to tell you a lot. So lean into the power of observation and take control of what you can and now. Word for Michelle with dog co
Speaker 1 25:01
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Meghan 25:24
So if you are like me, you are a little on the spicy side of life. How do we get better at listening and observing instead of firing back first, we pause and gather context. We take time to ask, is this feedback? Is this just drama that we don't really want to get dug into? Is this projection. Is this something to make our future selves better? Not everything is ours to carry. And that is important. Again, we are just we are sounding board. We are taking in data. We do not have to take everything that everybody says to heart. Take it with a grain of salt, lots of euphemisms there. Now
Collin 25:56
the flip side to this, I think, Meghan, you spoke to this a little bit earlier, that we can kind of fall into the trap, then, of just dismissing everything and dismissing feedback and comments and criticisms as well. That doesn't apply to me, because you're just projecting your own insecurities, and you're just trying to stir up drama and drag me into this instead, again, that when we pause, we're able to actually focus on the important stuff, and when we get the context of what's happening, then we really understand how to engage or not. It's about understanding that context is really that superpower,
Meghan 26:27
understanding the context and then figuring out how to it fits in with your business. When we respond from our values and not our ego, it usually goes a lot better. We try to filter reactions through our mission. What is your mission? Your vision, your values for your company. Does this align with it? What are you wanting to say to the person? And then, was that not really on your mission of supporting pet parents? You know, we support pets and and their people, not defend our pride. Of course, our businesses are important to us. Of course, there are babies. We love them. We've built them, we watch them grow and and continue to thrive every day. But we also want to make them better, don't we? We don't want to be stuck in the same rut right now that we are going to be in five years from now or the past five years. We want to keep evolving, changing, adapting, meeting our clients needs.
Collin 27:16
Yeah, and when we put our pride aside, we are able to do that. We are able to both respond appropriately and adapt as is necessary when we put our pride aside and understand that this isn't about defending me or making making sure that my ego is taken care of. It's is this on mission, and does it align with our vision and our brand and our voice? Is it in that direction, or am I inserting myself and ushering usurping usurping our business? And instead of putting myself in front and going, No, I'm more important than the context of my business and what it's actually doing, making sure it's all in alignment, really helps. And when we put our mission forward, that controls and helps our response as well.
Meghan 27:58
It's also important to let time speak for us again, to take that step back, to take that time, maybe you don't need just five minutes or 30 minutes. Maybe you need a full 24 hours or a couple days to fully process what they've just told you. Clarity comes with time. Cooler heads prevail, right and in business, the best response to negativity is a well run, thriving business. Ignore the haters. You're never going to be able to satisfy 100% of people all of the time. Know that with anything you do, there is going to be feedback, both positive and negative. So choose your energy wisely. Every reaction takes emotional energy, again, the positive and the negative. We get so hyped up on the positive, the ooey gooeys. Oh, they love my service. They I had such an emotional connection with Baxter that over time, we got to know each other more, and he opened up, and I was able to finally pet him by the end of the fourth visit. And the same is true for feedback. We get really high on the highs and low on the lows. Every reaction takes energy from us. We reserve our energy for the pets and people who count on us day in and day out, who keep coming back who want to see our company succeed and thrive and love what we do,
Collin 29:04
and importantly, keep and protect your energy for yourself. First and foremost, if I spend all of my time, my energy, my brain power, responding and reacting to things that I see online or that I get in emails, there's nothing left for me or our family, right? I can't do the things that I love and want to do. I'm not living a full and happy life. Instead, I'm just reacting all the time and I'm responding and I'm irritable and I'm not a really nice person. So managing that energy, understanding, okay, I only have so much energy in any given day. Who gets that? Importantly, who deserves to get that and that when you can respond instead of, you know, that person who left that denigrating remark about us in our business and our choice of, you know, the our our lack of a job, right? And our choice of profession, really what we instead are doing. Okay, you know what? I'm going to take that and I'm not going to respond to it because they don't deserve that. And. Instead, I'm just going to build a better business because of it. I'm going to focus on growing and being an amazing embassy, you know, Ambassador for this industry, to showcase really what it is capable of doing, and highlight more about the amazing work that our employees do that's fuel for us to now act and move forward, instead of standing back here and getting stuck on this one thing that this one person said, and that's
Meghan 30:23
important, so instead of responding publicly, potentially use private outlets to process this, whether it's Slack channels with your employees or your mentors or your spouses. I know Collin that I do a lot of committing back and forth
Collin 30:36
screaming into pillows too is awesome, or just in your car is very therapeutic.
Meghan 30:40
Yeah, there are safe places to vent and process before we act out publicly again. With that guy, we had sent messages. Collin and I back and forth to each other. Oh, I really want to respond with this, or we should definitely say this, and cooler has prevail. We ended up saying nothing, but we got to process it together and kind of emotionally heal from the trauma the guy inflicted on
Collin 31:01
us. Yeah, we could process it privately instead of out there in the public. Because when you are processing things in real time, out loud for others to see, that's when things get said that you don't intend. That's when intonations can't be read, and really that people don't read it charitably, or they don't take it in the best light. Instead, when we can have this, these more private conversations, take it to trusted people in your life, process it. Have that good vent session, or, yeah, just screaming your car for a little bit. Always feels good. Always feels good. Do that there. You're directing your energy to something. You're actively processing it in a way. And then once you have that clarity and that space and the facts all aligned, then you can make that good decision. Often. We
Meghan 31:46
live in a world that rewards speed and volume. Get it done faster and quicker, and respond right now immediately, because I can't wait. Well, that means restraint is now a form of strength. You are stronger when you have that patience, when you are listening, when you are observing and as business owners, let's normalize observation as part of leadership. We always we don't want to be always reacting that is not a good that's not a good sign of being a leader, because ultimately, we don't want to be responding harshly or rashly. We want to take time for these things. Remind yourself that not everything needs a reply. Some things need maturity and margin and a deep breath, it's okay to take the time to respond.
Collin 32:25
Be the even keel that your business deserves, that your clients need and that your employees expect out of you, be the even boat, the straight and narrow path that allows the decisions to be made that are consistent. I think that's really another big thing about this, is that when we're constantly reacting, we very rarely make consistent decisions and choices in our business, no matter how it's applied. When we have that space and time, when we have the clarity, consistency really shines through, because we make sure that our response, our reaction, is based in our mission and our values, both as a person and in our business. This even keeledness, this is what allows businesses to thrive and last for a long time. This is how you navigate the stormy weather and the waters and the changing economic conditions and all sorts of things is when we instead of react, we observe and pay attention. And we're not saying
Meghan 33:26
we're perfect at this either. We are still a work we are still a work in progress. Over here, if you are a work in progress too, and you want to tell us how you're processing all of this, you can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook and Instagram. At Pet Sitter confessional, we would like to thank you for listening, and also pet sitters associates and dog co launch for sponsors. Launch for sponsoring today's episode and our Patreon people, thank you so much. We will talk with you next time bye. You
