Recently I posted something on Craigslist that ended up being flagged and deleted by a user after being out there over a month. When I posted in the Craigslist forums to figure out what I had done wrong, the responses I got were note what I expected.
Out of all the responses I got in the forums, many of them had a negative tone towards my original posting. (For what it’s worth, it wasn’t an item for sale.)
While the base of what many of the people in the forum said may have been correct, the way they worded their responses was rude and discolored the heart of what they were saying. It was almost like they were waiting for the next fish to jump in the piranha tank.
The worse part about it is that it was making me feel like I was the bad person. Why is that? Why am I letting people I don’t even know make me feel like I’m a bad person or did something wrong? Why is the rudeness of others causing me to feel like less of a person and like what I was trying to do was wrong?
It seems like we can be moving along on our journey and things are going well, but we allow others to knock us off the path of success (even if we don’t know them personally). We could have 10 people say something positive to us, but it only takes 1 to tear us back down.
We can harden our hearts so that others cannot penetrate it and cause us pain, while possibly blocking the good things that happen, or we can soften our hearts and allow everything in, the good and the bad.
What do you do? How do you handle negative experiences when they come up?