A few months ago, I committed to MGMA to try to write a blog weekly, and I’ve done my best to do one, although it has become a task to get it worked into my weeks. Since early on in the writing, I have posted it to the Blog Masters Community and then posted the link to four of my MGMA groups that I frequent – the Political Discussion Group, HR, FMS and Primary Care. I have from time to time asked for people to rate the blogs and comment on them. Overall, the response has been very good and I have really enjoyed writing. However, something happened early on in the writing of the blogs that really irritated me and set me off, but what once irritated me has now turned into a great learning moment.
You see, what was happening, and usually happening within an hour of my blog posting, was that someone was going to the link and ranking me a “One Star” rating! My human nature took over and I did what most would do. I thought, “How dare they just rate me one star.” And then, I did what again I think most would do. I went to the blog and gave myself five stars! How about that! And so it has continued. I post, I notify everyone of the link, they give me the one star and I counteract it with a good old five star rating from the person who knows me best, me.
Wow, what a wiener I’ve been about the whole thing! I have to really laugh at myself and my actions through it all and wanted to share with everyone what I’ve learned through my “One Star Admirer.” I’ll call them OSA for short. Hopefully you can gain some insight into your detractors through my experiences.
No matter how great, mediocre, or poor we perform, we all will have OSA’s. At every attempt of productive work you do or every effort you make in most situations, there will be people there who will often criticize it, tear it down and pick it to pieces. They will see better ways that it could have been done, better ways it could have been said, or see reasons it shouldn’t have been done at all. And through it all, that’s ok. The only way you can escape criticism is by not doing anything. The OSA’s are trying to discourage you and make you feel that you should not be placing your efforts where you do.
Knowing that the OSA’s will always be there, I have had to realize that the importance lies more in how I react to them than on how they behave. Pleading with others to erase their critique, lashing out against them, and even ranking my efforts as high as I can still does nothing to their OSA activities. All of these things just show me that my ego drives me places I should not be. Motives of others cannot be easily detected and as far as I know, the OSA may think that the one star rating is the best as in “He’s #1.” (Always to be desired over your work being called #2!)
I have also learned my biggest lesson about the OSA’s. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want it to go away, once you acknowledge the one star rating, it affects your rating. Once it is “recorded” by you as a negative, you have given it the place it does not have the ability to be unless you let it. I heard a great quote last week: “No one can drive you crazy if you don’t give them the keys.” How fitting is that? (Especially when my road from where I currently reside to “crazy” is a short trip) One more small comment - the whole thing could just be the action of someone just good naturedly "yanking my chain." To that I would tell myself to heed my earlier blog on not taking things too seriously!
So, in all we do, we will most likely run into our OSA’s. Do your best to handle them well and learn from them. Realize that they will always be there, they don’t have to be recognized, and you don’t have to register their opinion.