I Will Never Trash Your Studio. Not Even Now.

A few days ago I published a post with the word hell in the title.

This week I went back and changed it to heck.

That’s about the best measure I can give you of where my head is at right now. I’m feeling a little more zen than I was at one in the morning last weekend, and I’m back to giving pretty close to zero cares about whatever is being said about me at other studios.

Pretty close.

So this time I want to talk about the other side of it. Why I don’t badmouth other studios. Why I don’t trash their owners. And why I think quiet confidence is the better play for any business owner, even on the weeks when staying quiet is the last thing I feel like doing.

(Yes, I see the irony of saying that on the same blog where I just spent eight minutes on the rumors. I’ll get to that.)

But here’s where I’ve landed.

If other studios want to scoop up the people I kick out of here and gobble up every bad thing those people have to say about me, so be it.

If they want to believe every perspective, every lie, every attempt to hurt me, so be it.

If they want to live in that negativity and turn it into stories of their own, so be it.

I can’t control anybody or anything except what happens inside The Clay Hole.

And every time they do it, they’re only helping me.

Let me explain.

Which is exactly why I don’t sit around griping to my members about the other studios.

And believe me, the material is there. The gossip, the rumors and the vitriol are all rampant about The Clay Hole right now, and some weeks it would be the easiest thing in the world to vent about.

But if I spent my nights moaning about all of that to the people at my tables, I know exactly what would happen. It’s not that I’d lose my people.

It’s that I’d replace them.

One complaint at a time, I’d trade them in for the kind of people I don’t want to sit with every single night: the negative ones, the ones who love the drama, and the ones who are always somebody’s victim. Because a room full of griping is exactly what those people go looking for.

Why on earth would I do that?

Psychologists actually have a name for the other half of this. It’s called spontaneous trait transference, and in a well-known set of studies, people who described somebody else’s traits ended up with those exact traits pinned on themselves by whoever was listening. Call another owner petty, and the person you’re talking to quietly files you under petty.

I would like to not be the petty one.

It works the same way in business. One study in the Journal of Marketing Research found that ads putting down a competitor were seen as less believable, and people ended up liking the company behind them less, mostly because they thought less of whoever did the putting down.

Just this week, I had to call the police and report one of my own former employees. I had to turn down advances from somebody I’m not interested in dating. I had to shut down a possible connection because it just wasn’t right.

My most dedicated member got frustrated with me over something I had no actual part in (except that I did, because it’s my studio). Two of my favorite members told me they’d have to quit, because one of them had just been laid off. I had to handle an HR situation between employees that I never in a million years thought I’d have to handle.

My parking lot flooded. My number one employee turned in her notice. She loves it here, though, so we found a better fit for her, and she’s sticking around. I had to give an ultimatum to a member who rarely cleans up. And I got hit with $2,800 in expenses I didn’t see coming.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

It’s only Friday.

Every studio owner reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about. Your list looks different than mine. But you have one. And next week, every one of us will have a brand new one.

So maybe, instead of staring at how we’re different, we could look a little more at how we’re the same. Maybe we could appreciate the battles every one of us is fighting, every single week.

I don’t know how other studio owners handle it. But at The Clay Hole, I never stop fighting to get rid of the wrong people.

The hurtful ones. The ones who won’t take no for an answer, the ones who are here for the wrong reasons, and the ones who don’t keep my members or my staff feeling safe. The ones who bring bad energy into a room that a whole lot of people worked really hard to make good.

I could go on.

And guess what. When you get rid of people like that, they almost always go on a war path.

They don’t rest until they find the people who want to believe them. They tell half-truths and leave out all sorts of things, and they fine-tune the story every single time they tell it, getting better and better at telling it as they go.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Researchers have shown that hearing a claim over and over makes it feel more true, and one study found that held even when people already knew the right answer. A story told fifty times starts to sound like the truth, mostly because it’s been told fifty times.

And what an easy story it is to tell. You got kicked out by the owner of The Clay Hole, and he isn’t there to give his side.

He’s toxic. He’s incompetent. He hates artists. He uses AI, so he must be evil. He only hires young girls, and he tries to date everybody who walks through his front door. He’s mentally unstable. He’s a tyrant. He’s a narcissist. He’s a terrible human.

Fill in the blank.

They’ve said all of it. They’ve spread all of it.