How Gossip and Negative Critiques Can Wreck Your Creator Career

Allen C. Paul - God And Gigs (00:00)
In a recent Instagram post, our friend Jasmine Crumley, who is a world renowned vocal contractor and background vocalist, shared some thoughts on what happens when musicians and vocalists don't protect the room. When they speak out, talk about things that happen behind closed doors, and it ends up ruining their reputation and their employability. And I thought this was not just a musical problem. This is something that happens in every creator's life.

We all deal with situations, with relationships, with people where we are asked our opinion or we are giving recommendations based on what we saw somebody do or how they performed. And we have to think about this. What should you say? When is it okay to speak up? And when should you stay silent when it comes to other people's behavior, creative ability, or even your referrals?

We're gonna get into that in this episode of The God and Gigs Show. So make sure to listen to the entire thing, because we hit on some real key spiritual and practical applications that could make a difference in your creative life. My name is Allen C. Paul, and if you're new to our show, this is The God and Gigs Show, where we help you to become the creator that you were created to be.

Allen C. Paul - God And Gigs (01:21)
it has been so, so important over the course of my entire creative life to be someone that people trust. It's not the easiest thing by the way to keep yourself out of all of the back and forth of the relationships of people who don't like each other, creators who are kind of mad at each other at times where

people fall out and they don't want to like connect. And then, well, if you're a friend of this person, then you're not a friend of this person and clicks. I gotta tell you, like all of that is a hundred percent true. It's a difficult thing to keep all of that together as a creative, to not get caught up in all of the issues when it comes to communities, when it comes to egos, all of that.

can get super, super, super complicated. And it can feel like if you, especially as a follower of Jesus, as a faith-focused creator, when you get into these moments of, what should I say? Who's saying this? Is somebody bad mouthing this person? ⁓ Is this particular gig, event or performance or interaction or collaboration going south? How do you handle it?

Now, know, Valentine's day just passed. So a lot of this might sound like relationship advice, right? But it's not just relationship advice for romantic. It's relationship advice for relationships period for all creators. All of us, unless you are basically painting in a ⁓ room where you never talk to anyone, you have to interact with other creators. You have to interact with your clients. You have to interact with those.

that you're serving with audiences. There's always this interpersonal relationship building happening almost all the time as a creator. And one thing we don't seem to talk about enough is how do you handle negative issues, negative feedback, negative problems that happen in your relationships? And then when you're asked by somebody, maybe someone that you're

you know, very good friends with. What do you think of so and so? Give me a referral. Talk to me about this person. What do you think? These issues are not easy to deal with. I am so impressed and so ⁓ absolutely like.

in all of everything that this young lady, Jasmine Crumley has done. And when she talked about this on a recent Instagram post, it like rang in my spirit. said, okay, if she's dealing with this. And then I saw all of the comments that came along with that post. I was like, all right, it's not just me that feels this way. Clearly this is something that struck a nerve. And if it struck a nerve with her and her followers, then it probably will strike a nerve with our community and our followers. Because.

It is so clear that when things go south in relationships, it doesn't just affect you. It affects your entire community. It affects your career and the way you handle it could affect whether or not you get to be in certain rooms and have certain opportunities. And probably just as importantly, whether certain relationships continue or whether they dissolve and for the wrong reasons. So.

I'm going to try to pull this up and we're going to listen to Jasmine share something that she shared with her community and her Instagram.

we go.

⁓ okay. Ooh, let's get into this. My friend, Jasmine, you literally hit the nail on the head. And here's what I really, really, really, really, really, really want to make sure that you hear in her words.

So I'm going to go back to a blog post I wrote, and I shared this in my newsletter as well, the Creator Checkup Newsletter, that I wrote about what to say to people when they ask you for referrals or recommendations and you don't have anything good to say or something went wrong. And here's the first problem with

that whole question of, well, tell me about such and such. People count on your honesty as a creator, true? Your honesty as a creator, your value, your character, that comes first. So to be a person of character first implies that someone's asking you, they know you're going to be honest. If someone wants to know, hey, how does somebody perform?

How did somebody think, what did you think of their performance? They want you to be honest and they're asking you cause you want to be, they want you to be honest. But here's the other side of that. The other side of that is if you are simply trying to tell people, here are the facts. Here's what really happened. Here's what she or he did as a creator. And you are not giving them the full context.

and they take your word as gospel. And then later on that person finds out, hey, you know, this person said that you were blank, blank, blank. You didn't do this or you didn't do that. How is the other person going to feel that they didn't have a chance to give the context? Okay. How do you make sure that you not only protect your image and your character, but you protect other people from what might be a assumption of something that they

maybe didn't have anything to do with. Maybe the day that you saw them perform, they were really sick. Maybe the day that you caught them in a kind of like not doing the greatest job that they were having a bad day. And that was the one time that you saw them and you give your honest opinion, but your honest opinion was based on limited information. This is why the Bible is so clear about why we are careful, why we are slow to speak.

that we're slow to anger, that we're slow. The only time the Bible says it's okay to be slow is in this kind of situation. When we are in places where there's information that goes out, and Jasmine just said it, there's so many people who have lost positions because they were not slow to speak or just refused to speak.

The thing I love about this platform is because when Jasmine is a believer and she can say all this scripture just like I can, she didn't choose to do it in this format because this was her public page. I am on God in gig so I can quote the scriptures that I know that Jasmine would have quoted as well because she is 100 % a believer and 100%, I know she would be agreeing with this is why I wanted to like amplify it. You go check out, I'll make sure to put a link to her Instagram post in this particular live stream.

But when the Bible says in Ecclesiastes, there's a time to speak and a time to refrain from speaking. There's a time to refrain. Even if you're right, even if you have a legitimate concern about the way somebody did something. And what I feel in my local area, the reason why I have been able to work and not for the most part, I feel like have people on, you know,

my, their bad side or be on people's bad side is because I try ultra hard in every single performance and interaction I have to leave the other person with no reason to doubt, no reason to question my loyalty, no reason to think that I was out to get them or that I was spying out for somebody else or trying to undermine them. I want to leave what the Bible says, no appearance of evil.

I want to shun even the appearance that I would be two-faced, that I would be, hey, talking about behind this person's back about the way they play, about the way they sing, about the way they perform, about the way they write. And what Stephen Covey says in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he calls this being loyal to those absent. I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I think when I was 17, 18, maybe 19. And that phrase has stuck with me all of my life. Be loyal to those absent. And those who are absent are the people who cannot speak for themselves, even if you are in a situation where someone wants to know, what really happened? What, know, and here's what's, I will be very honest with you guys right here. And I hope if you're watching live, feel free to comment if this has ever happened to you.

When creators, musicians, artists get together, we talk. We do tell stories. Let me just be honest about that and make sure nobody thinks that I am acting like I am this angelic person that has never said something that happened to somebody else in public. I have, I am guilty of telling a story, trying to eliminate names, trying not to explain who did what. And then probably I still ended up talking about somebody.

And I apologize from the bottom of my heart for that. Cause even in a joking manner, even a humorous manner, I could still be guilty of bringing somebody down or making somebody look less than in someone's eyes because of the way I talked about their performance or their behavior. Now I will say this, of course, publicly, if it's on video and people see it, I'm not the only person that's speaking about it. You've made it public. And so now it's kind of like open to critique, but I'm talking about private events or private conversations.

I don't try to make those the subject of the story because of this very same issue. Who am I going to be loyal to at that moment? Am I going to be loyal to the people I'm talking to? Am I going to be loyal to the people who were in that room who are no longer able to defend themselves or talk about what happened? So in my blog post, I said it like this. If somebody asks you what really happened, who said this? How did this person perform?

I would use phrases like this. I'm not sure. I have my own opinion, but I would rather you hear it for yourself. Give them a call. See what happens. I'm not yes or knowing anything about their performance or their behavior. I'm simply telling you, here's my experience, what I did and what I saw. Period. Okay. I'm not giving value judgments.

I'm not telling you not to hire or to hire. I am not saying anything about that specific person's attitude at all, unless that person again, has public information that cannot be disputed. That's different. If someone has a public blowout and everybody saw the blowout and then I say, yes, I saw the blowout too. Well then that's different because I am simply corroborating information.

That is not just me, but if it's a private conversation, if it's a private event or private moment that happened, it's not my place to give that and divulge that to somebody else. And again, being loyal to those absent means I will go around and say, hey, if you want to see how they do, why don't you bring them in? Why don't you talk to them and I'll be there and we can talk and I can share our experience and that person can be there in the room. So anything that I cannot say directly to the person,

Directly to them if somebody I'll give a good example if someone has trouble like with music reading and Someone says is this person read music? Might be a simple answer. Well, no, they can't reason me. I don't know that for sure though Maybe they just had a struggle reading that day So I would say to them. Hey, I didn't see them reading music at that specific time why don't you call them and Find out if they can read music Let them answer for themselves

Don't put it on me to be the person that determines the veracity of this person's ability or performance. Cause I'm not, I can only give you the information from a limited perspective. And I will make that super clear if I even start to talk about what somebody else did. And I will never do so if it was a private event or a conversation that did not deserve to be out there. I hope that this made sense.

Jasmine said it so well that I don't know if I even needed to add anything to it. The last comment I have about this is in my book, I talked about two types of trust in my section that's called respect the business. So it's S-E-R-V-I-C-E, that are the seven steps.

of being a highly effective musician, a highly effective faith-focused creator. now the R stands for respect the business. So respect the business includes two types of trust. There is relational emotional trust and performance trust. The relational and the emotional trust comes after the performance, after the collaboration, during the planning, during...

Like everything that doesn't involve the actual performance itself is relational and emotional trust. That has to be built before there will be professional or performance trust in terms of how you'll interact with me while we're doing the thing. If we're doing a podcast together, we're performing together. If we're doing interaction in terms of writing together, we're editing together, we're writing a script together. All of that is the professional trust, but the professional trust is only built

When there's relational and emotional trust, kind of, see, I don't know if you guys can hear, if I'm doing this for audio, you can't see my hands, but I'm kind of making circles where the inner circle is the relational trust and outside of it is the performance or the professional trust. And you got to have the inner circle of the relational trust strong enough to support the outer circle of the performance trust.

So if you trust me as a person, you will trust me more on stage or as a collaborator. But if you don't trust me as a person, you're not going to trust me in any professional environment, whether or not I'm really good at that. So this is what I think I can at least add on to the conversation that Jasmine started, is that you have to build emotional and relational trust and equity and integrity.

into the relationship before you were trusted with the professional, the ability to interact and to connect and to be a good collaborative creative partner. So I hope that all made sense. I hope that you now kind of see the reason why trust and discretion are so important in terms of how you interact with fellow creators, why it's okay to have your opinion about things, but not to share it in a way

that gives other creators no chance to answer for themselves if in fact you have limited information on how they performed or how they interact and always give the benefit of the doubt. And the Bible is so clear about judging. Judge not that you not be judged. It doesn't mean you can't have a judgment. It means that if you decide to make a judgment call, you are opening yourself up to the same kind of judgment. So I highly, highly recommend that you check out

The

seven habits of highly effective people. If you want to read that chapter on being loyal to those absent and my book, of course, God in gigs, that chapter on respect to business. And I'll also make sure I link to any of our other blogs on that particular issue in the descriptions.

God bless you. And until next time, continue to become the creator that you were created to be.