With everyone developing more of a social consciousness, and with our society making opinions more and more important, there’s a ton of flack going around.
Flack means nothing
I’m not really into taking unsolicited feedback. It’s usually off track. I love getting solicited feedback from people who know what I’m doing.
Flack usually comes from a person’s personal yearning instead of from their desire to help.
With Boobietrap we got a lot of flack for different things because we were available to a lot of people. We also got some flack probably because we were doing things in new ways.
Most of the content of the flack was valid and sensible from the flacker’s perspective. We even got flack for not including enough women or diverse people in some of the shows. Just because they were right didn’t mean we wanted to listen to it.
We didn’t respond
The best way to respond to flack is to listen and let them know that they were heard. Getting defensive, justifying, or any other response is not usually very effective.
I didn’t want to make changes to things because of flack. I wanted to make changes to things because of intention. We did respond to the diversity issue in Boobietrap, but we didn’t respond to the flack. We responded to the issue before we got the flack.
Organizations and individuals who respond to flack are too late.
We all need to work from our intentions. What do we want? Sticking to our intentions, though it takes responsibility, gives us power and gives us a voice. When we got flack for our business model, or our time limit, or our booking style, or our whatever, we knew that people may be responding to why we’re different, but we’re different on purpose. That’s the point.