I Made at Least 4 Mistakes Last Night (Follow Up)

This is a follow up to a post I made last night

In the last 12 hours or so I have received some well deserved criticism for the previous piece. Specifically on calling out Bryan Krahn without reaching out to him first for clarification and as he said “you didn’t misquote me. But you did misunderstand me. And I’m a lot of things, but not a bully.”

That was mistake #1 in the post.

#2 was leaving room for it look like Bryan’s was the subject of the article. I wrote most of that piece on January 16 when I was in NYC. His tweet was on January 29. It was a separate thing that I thought fit into the narrative of the piece so I put it in there. I still think the tweet sucks and it is an example of how careful we need to be in text form (as I learned with the previous post) due to the lack of context and tone.

No doubt that a journalist, I am not.

I have been “in the industry” for 10 years now and I become friends with a lot of great fitness professionals. I have also been exposed to a lot other people who bring a negative tone and attitude to their content. I 100 percent stand by this. This post was more about them. The people that feel like they are saving others by sharing information while also pointing out how dumb other coaches are or even that they are sellouts (yes there are some of those in every field). Judging from some of the feedback I got about the blog post through facebook, messages, and twitter, I was far from alone in how I felt about this.

Bryan shared the post on his Facebook feed and got some great feedback from his following. I think Scott may be right when he said “Wait a second. Isn’t him calling you out like that in the article and calling what you said ‘bull shit’, going against the point he was trying to make in his article?”

Was my tone negative? Was I angry? Maybe the text sounded that way. Was I venting? For sure. I think that was mistake #3. I should have been a bit more proactive and positive.

Also the follow up after I mentioned the tweet was again, not about Bryan, but that is my fault for not making that clear even with the prefix that I was not talking about him specifically (mistake #4). When I said “What if we looked at it this way? Can a mesomorphic male (and keep in mind I am not talking about Bryan, just using the tweet for the discussion) who has always been 10% bodyfat, never had problems putting on muscle of having to deal with excess body-fat relate to someone that has battled with dieting since they were a kid?” I was talking in generalities.

I am going to do what I should have done in the first place and talk with Bryan (something I have been planning to do for the past few months for the podcast).

Bryan, I am sorry for calling you out specifically in the post and I look forward to doing the same on the phone.

In conclusion, we are so fortunate to have outlets like our websites, Facebook, Twitter, etc to spread great information and to help so many without the expectation of anything in return. My hope with the post was to draw attention to where we can do better as fitness professionals, in doing so I learned an incredibly valuable lesson myself.

Thanks to all that read the post and thought about it. And I promise to do a better job delivering my messages and thoughts going forward.

-Kevin