How do you handle the haters? We've got the answer to that conundrum and so much more on this edition of the inside BS show. Hey, now I'm Dave Lorenzo. I'm the godfather of growth, and this is the show you've been asking for.

That's right. I've gotten six phone calls this week, including one just a few moments ago. I hung up just a few minutes ago with this person, and the question that I've gotten in each of these phone calls is, Dave, this person's throwing some shade at me, what do I do? Dave, there's a ton of hate being thrown my way by one person in particular.

What do I do? Dave, I put out a podcast episode and two people disagreed with me. 180 people thought I was a genius, but two people disagreed with me. How do I win those two people over? That's the question we're going to tackle today.

Before we get into the answer to how do you handle the haters, I want you to realize something. You are not doing your job if everybody loves you. That's right.

You're not being opinionated enough. You're not providing enough guidance. You're not being aggressive enough.

If everyone loves you, your job is to polarize everyone you come in contact with, that's how you need to think about your job as a business development professional. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Dave, I'm a CEO of a $75 million company or Dave.

I'm a lawyer or Dave. I'm an accountant. I'm not in business development.

Oh my friend, you are sadly mistaken. If that's what you think, everyone is in the relationship business and everyone is in the persuasion business. You're trying to influence someone.

It doesn't matter if you're a business development professional trying to win over the next big client, or if you're the CEO trying to motivate your chief operating officer to see your side of a decision that she disagrees with you on. Or if you're trying to convince your chief financial officer that this line of funding is better than the one that he suggested, or if you're trying to convince your board that you need to go out and raise money to acquire a company in a complimentary industry, you're in the persuasion business no matter who you are and no matter what you think you do between the hours of nine and five every day. So realizing that you're in the relationship and the persuasion business, you need to understand that everyone you come in contact with, you should be sharing your opinion with them on topics that are important to you and you should be trying to win them over to your way of thinking.

Now, when you do this, when you polarize people, you are going to have people who don't like you and that's how you know you're being effective because for every one person that doesn't like you, if you're doing this right, there's 10 or 15 or 20 that love you. We don't want anybody to ever feel neutral about us. We want them to either love us or hate us and we don't care which is which.

We just want the ratio of people who love us to be greater than the ratio of people who hate us. So what do you do with the haters? So what do you do if you're like I am regularly in front of an audience on a stage giving a speech, 20% of the audience, sometimes more than that, sometimes 33% of the audience will disagree with what I'm saying and they will hate me. And when they hate me, they raise their hand and they go, you're wrong.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. I think you're full of crap. I would never listen to your advice.

What do I do and what am I advising you to do when somebody says that? The first thing I want you to do is I want you to realize why haters hate. I want you to realize why people throw shade at you. I want you to realize why people criticize and they couch it in the word critique.

I want you to realize why this happens. This happens because those people who are doing it are insecure. This happens because those people who are throwing the shade feel bad about themselves.

Nobody, nobody is going to attack you if they're feeling great about themselves. It's just not something people who feel great about themselves do. So I want you to realize that this is about them when they bad mouth you, when they critique you in a way that's unhelpful to you, or when they talk about you behind your back, it's about them.

They are insecure. It's a fundamental insecurity they have that is driving them to hate you, to throw shade at you, to dislike you. So that's number one.

Number two is that it's easier for them to hate you than for them to do the work that you did to earn the success you've earned. It's easy to talk trash about someone. It's hard to do the work that that person did in order to be successful.

The example I'll give you, not related to my business, but related to a volunteer gig that I have. Yes, that's right. People throw shade in the volunteer world too.

So I'm a volunteer group leader for Provisors. Provisors is a national networking organization that strives to take professionals who have 10 years or more of experience and connect them with one another so that they can refer work to one another and help each other by developing relationships, growing those relationships. And I built the biggest group in the organization.

And because I've done that and other people have not, and other people could not, people talk trash about me. They say all kinds of stuff. And you know what? They do that because it's easier to criticize me and it's harder to do the work that I did to build the group that I built.

Any one of them could build a group that I built, but it's hard work and you don't get paid for it. So they don't want to do that. It's easier for them just to talk trash.

So it's easier to hate than to put in the work. And as I said before, point number three, it bears repeating. It's insecurity that's at the heart of this.

So there's something in their psyche that helps them or makes them feel that they are unworthy. So they feel insecure and they try to make up for that insecurity by trashing me so that in their mind that they can bring me down to their level. So if you have a hater, that hater is, is grossly insecure and they are trashing you because by trashing you, they feel like they are going to drag you down to their level of a lack of success off of your level of success.

So that's the first thing to know. Haters hate because there's something about them that they're not happy with. They hate you because they're not happy with themselves.

The second thing I want you to realize about haters and the second thing that's important for you in handling haters is you need to think about the worthiness that you have for the success that you've achieved. What makes you worthy of the success that you've achieved? I'm going to tell you why you're worthy of the success you've achieved. First, you have talent that the haters don't have.

You have an innate ability to do the thing that you do that makes you better than them. That's why they hate you, but it's just a fact. You have a talent that they don't have.

The second reason why you're worthy and they're not is you've developed skills that they don't have. You've developed some techniques, you've developed some specific skills that enhance your talent and make you successful and those skills are something that they have not taken the time to develop. The third thing is knowledge.

You possess specialized knowledge in your area of expertise that the haters don't have. They could acquire that knowledge, but they're not willing to do the investigation that you did. They're not willing to put in the time that you did.

They're not willing to be diligent, persistent and acquire the knowledge that you have. They're not willing to do that. So they don't have the knowledge that you have.

And then the fourth thing is the experience. You've probably been doing the thing that the haters hate about you. You've probably been doing it for a longer period of time than they have.

You've probably seen a lot more than they've seen. You've learned, you've made mistakes, you've corrected the mistakes and you've learned from them. And this has given you more experience.

It's made you wiser and they don't have that. So your talent, your skills, your knowledge, your experience, they make you worthy of your success and the haters hate that because they don't want to put in the work. They don't have the innate ability.

They don't have the talent. They don't want to put in the work to gain the skills. They don't want to look for the knowledge and uncover it and they certainly don't want to have to spend the years and years and years that you've spent gaining that experience.

So you're worthy because you have those four things and they're not. You earned the success you have now and the haters want it just handed to them. In fact, I'm willing to bet that that's one of the things that the haters say about you when they're hating on you.

Oh, that Dave Lorenzo, he got that speaking gig and he was paid $18,000 to speak in front of that audience and he got seven new clients while he was there. He was just handed that gig. No, Dave Lorenzo has been speaking since he first did a reading in church in 1976 and then he became a professional speaker in the 1990s and he honed his craft and he was paid over the years, various small fees, sometimes nothing at all to learn and grow and develop his innate ability, bring it out in him, recognize it, continue developing skills, acquiring knowledge by hanging around with better speakers and learning, getting the experience of speaking to groups of three, five, seven people and then also honing his craft by being paid $200 for a speech when he was coming up or $500 or $1,000.

All of that, the cumulative talent that he has, the skills, the knowledge, the experience have led him to this moment when he was given the opportunity for $18,000 to speak in front of an audience of a thousand people and get a half dozen clients as he walked out of the room. It was 35 years of bringing out his talent, his innate ability, honing his skills, deepening his knowledge and gaining experience, making mistakes and learning from it, 35 years of that, that led to the thing you're saying, he was just handed. So in your mind, when somebody hates on you, realize that you've put in the time, whether you put in five years or whether you put in 35 years and you need to just brush them away because you truly are worthy.

You earned this. The final point I want to make on this topic is probably the most powerful point. Nobody more successful than you is ever going to hate on you because they're just not concerned about you at all.

If they're more successful than you, they certainly don't care what you're doing. Your haters are people who are less successful than you. Why on earth do you care what they think? That's our message for today.

My name is Dave Lorenzo. I'm the godfather of growth. This is your daily dose of Dave on the Inside BS channel.

I'll be back here again tomorrow at 6am with another edition of our show. Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.