The Post I Almost Deleted (And Why I'm Glad I Didn't)

Has someone ever disagreed with you online?

Not a gentle "have you considered..." - a full-on, no-holds-barred comment saying your advice was wrong, that you should know better, that they were disappointed in you.

That knot in your stomach. The urge to delete and pretend it never happened. The spiral of thoughts: what if people believe them? What if this damages everything I've worked to build?

If you've felt that, you're not the only one.

And here's the thing - it's not something any of us were ever trained for.

As dietitians and healthcare professionals, we're taught to be evidence-based, careful, responsible. We learn to support our patients, not defend our clinical opinions against strangers on the internet. So when it does happen, it can feel deeply personal - like a direct attack on your expertise, your integrity, your professional identity.

But what if that moment of criticism was actually pointing you towards something important?

That's what happened to me. And what I learned changed how I create content.

Why Online Criticism Hits Differently for Health Professionals

When someone challenges your content, it doesn't just feel like feedback - it can feel like a full-scale assault on your credibility.

You might find yourself thinking:

Should I have posted that? What if other people see this and think I don't know what I'm talking about? Do I need to justify myself? Should I just play it safe next time?

And all of that is completely understandable - especially because most of us still have our NHS hats firmly on when we show up online.

We've spent years being trained to follow guidelines, stay within clear boundaries, and avoid anything that could be questioned or misinterpreted. So when someone questions us publicly, it triggers everything we were ever taught about being careful and responsible.

But here's what I want you to hear: a negative comment doesn't mean you've done something wrong. It doesn't invalidate your clinical opinion. And it definitely doesn't mean everyone else reading is thinking the same thing.

It just means you've said something that someone sees differently - often through a completely different lived experience.

And in the online space, that is going to happen.

The Post That Got Called "Toxic" (And Then Went Viral)

A while ago, I posted something in my children's nutrition business about what to do when kids refuse dinner.

Specifically, I was addressing the question of whether to offer a "rescue meal" - where, if a child refuses what's been served, you make them something else so they don't go to bed hungry. I know it feels like the kindest thing to do. And I've seen it recommended a lot.

But in my clinical experience, it can actually create longer-term feeding difficulties. Children quickly learn that if they hold out, something nicer will eventually come along - which makes them less likely to engage with family mealtimes and more selective over time.

I was clear about my clinical opinion: I don't recommend the rescue meal. Instead, I talked about the division of responsibility principle (parent provides, child decides) and suggested a small, predictable bedtime snack as part of the everyday routine.

Then the comments started coming in.

Most were grateful. Some were genuinely relieved - parents who'd been struggling for months and finally had a different approach to try. But there were a few who disagreed. Strongly.

One comment in particular stood out. It was long, it was pointed, and it used the word "toxic." It said I should know better. That it was never okay to let a child go to bed hungry. That they were disappointed in someone with my background.

I'll be honest with you - that landed.

My immediate reaction was that internal wobble: should I have posted that? And I genuinely considered deleting it.

But I didn't.

And that post went on to become my highest-performing piece of content ever.

Over 80,000 likes. Hundreds of comments. A flood of DMs from parents who were genuinely relieved to have a clear, honest answer from someone who understood what they were going through. It grew my audience, expanded my reach, and - far from damaging my authority - actually strengthened it.

The negative comment was real. The wobble was real. The result was the opposite of everything I feared.

The Mindset Shift Most Dietitians Need to Make

Here's where things start to get interesting.

In the NHS - or any clinical setting - we're trained to:

• Follow guidelines carefully
• Stay within well-defined boundaries
• Minimise anything that could be questioned or challenged

And that makes complete sense in that context. But in your private practice and online business, you're not just a clinician. You're also a communicator. A leader. A voice that people are actively seeking out because they want someone who thinks clearly and speaks plainly.

That means stepping into your clinical judgement - not just repeating what the guidelines say.

Here's something worth sitting with: two dietitians can look at exactly the same body of evidence and interpret it slightly differently based on their experience and the clients they work with. That doesn't make one right and the other wrong. It makes you professionals with perspective.

And your audience? They're not connecting with textbook answers. They're connecting with you - your reasoning, your experience, your real-world application of the evidence.

When you shrink that down to only what nobody could possibly disagree with, you end up saying very little at all.

What Polarising Content Actually Means (And What It Doesn't)

I want to be really clear about this, because I think the word "polarising" can feel a bit alarming.

I'm not talking about being controversial for the sake of it. I'm not talking about stirring things up for engagement, posting hot takes, or saying something provocative just to get a reaction. That's exhausting - and honestly, it's not your style.

What I mean by polarising content is this:

Being genuinely clear in your stance. Sharing your clinical reasoning. Saying what you actually believe works - even if not everyone will agree.

When you do that, something shifts. The right people feel understood. Your message becomes memorable rather than forgettable. You stop blending into the sea of generic advice and start standing for something.

And yes, occasionally someone will disagree. But those people were never going to become your clients anyway.

The people who do align with your thinking? They read your content and think: this makes complete sense. She gets it. She sees what I see. That's what builds trust - faster and more deeply than any amount of careful, inoffensive tip content.

Why Playing It Safe Is Actually Riskier Than You Think

If you're creating content with the goal of making sure nobody could possibly disagree with you, here's what tends to happen:

You soften your message. You water things down. You stay vague rather than specific. And your ideal clients - the ones who are desperately looking for someone who thinks the way you do - scroll straight past because there's nothing there to stop them.

Generic content doesn't build trust. It builds nothing.

Whereas when you take a clear position and share your honest clinical reasoning, you give people something to connect with. Something to think about. Something to share with a friend who's going through the same thing.

That's the content that builds an audience. That's the content that builds a practice.

How to Start (Without Overthinking It)

You don't need to completely overhaul your content strategy. You just need to start bringing more of your actual clinical thinking into what you share.

Here's a simple place to begin:

Ask yourself these questions

• What's a question I get asked all the time - where my answer might surprise people?
• What's a piece of common advice in my niche that I don't fully agree with, based on what I see in practice?
• What do I do differently with my clients, and why?

Then turn that into content

• Share your clinical opinion on a question you get asked often
• Challenge mainstream advice you see in your space
• Try a "this vs that" comparison - mainstream approach versus how you actually work
• Share something you don't do in your practice, and explain your reasoning

No drama. No controversy for the sake of it. Just honesty, clarity, and real clinical experience - which is exactly what the people looking for someone like you need to hear.

And here's what I've found: this kind of content almost always outperforms the safe, generic tip posts. Not because it gets more disagreement, but because it sparks something in the people it's meant to reach. It creates curiosity. It creates connection. It makes people feel like you understand their actual situation.

If the Fear of Criticism Is Holding You Back

I want to leave you with this.

You are an autonomous clinician. You have years of training, clinical experience, and real results with real people. You're allowed to have a professional opinion that doesn't look exactly like everyone else's. You're allowed to interpret evidence in the context of your practice. You're allowed to share that with the people who need to hear it.

Yes, someone might disagree with you. But someone else will read your content and feel a wave of relief - because you've finally said the thing they've been looking for.

And the post you almost didn't share? It might be the one that changes everything.

Ready to Show Up More Confidently in Your Marketing?

If you're at the stage where you're thinking: I know I need to be more visible, but I'm second-guessing everything I post - that's exactly what we work through inside my business coaching.

I offer a 12-month coaching programme for dietitians and health professionals who are building a private practice or online business. We don't just look at your content - we look at the full picture.

Your messaging and positioning. Your offers and pricing. Your systems and strategy. Your confidence as a business owner.

So you're not piecing it all together on your own at 10pm after a long day in clinic.

If that sounds like something you need, drop me a DM on Instagram and I'll share how it works.

Sarah x

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Connect with me:

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Episode transcription:

Have you ever had someone disagree with your professional clinical opinion online? If you haven't, unfortunately, I'm sorry to say you probably will at some point, because if you're running a private practice or online business and you're sharing your advice, your perspective and your experiences, it's almost inevitable that there are going to be people who disagree with you. And when it does happen and you get those negative comments coming through, you're going to want to know what to do.

I feel like this really isn't talked about very much.

about how to grow online, how to create good content, how to attract clients, but we don't really talk about what to do when someone challenges you. And let's be honest, it's not very nice. It can knock your confidence. It can make you second guess yourself. It can make you question whether you should stick to playing it safe with your content. And I've definitely experienced this myself.

Today, I'm gonna open this up properly and talk about the time when I got a lot of negative comments on one of my posts in my nutrition business. It was from a parent who disagreed with something I shared in my children's nutritionist business And a few of them definitely did not hold back in how they expressed it. But in the end, this post actually ended up performing really well for me.

It ended up massively growing my audience. I'm getting a lot more eyes on me, which I'll explain more in detail in this episode. I'm going to share the exact story of what I posted, what the negative comments said and how it affected me in the moment. And actually how I ended up turning this into a positive outcome for my business.

So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through how to handle negative comments without spiralling. And we're going to talk about the benefits of having slightly more polarizing, controversial content, why it's something you should be doing and not avoiding, and how it can actually strengthen your positioning and attract more of the right people. So let's get into it.

This is not something the NHS or our clinical training trained us for, right? We were trained to assess, to diagnose, to support our patients, not to handle strangers on the internet challenging what we say, sometimes very bluntly. And because of that, when it does happen, it can feel really quite uncomfortable because naturally the last thing most of us want is a negative comment or people disagreeing with us.

We've been taught to be evidence-based, to be responsible, to do the right thing for our patients. So when someone questions that, especially in a public space, it can feel actually quite personal. You might think to yourself, what if other people see their comments and think, I don't know what I'm talking about? You might feel the urge to over explain yourself. You might think about just deleting the post altogether. And you might decide that next time,

You play it safer, so you avoid saying anything that could be challenged again. All of these feelings are normal, especially because a lot of the time we tend to have our NHS hats on in these kinds of situations. But a negative comment or someone disagreeing with you doesn't automatically mean you've done something wrong. It doesn't mean that your clinical opinion is invalid. It doesn't mean that you've lost credibility. And it definitely doesn't mean that

other people are suddenly questioning your expertise. It just means you've shared something that someone else sees differently or through a completely different lived experience. And in the online space, that is going to happen. So instead of jumping straight into, my goodness, I need to fix this or, I shouldn't have posted that. The goal is just to pause and recognise that this is actually a normal part of having visibility online.

And actually, once you recognise this, the less power these moments hold over you and the easier it becomes to keep showing up confidently with your personal clinical voice.

Okay, now I'm going to share with you the story about that post that got lots of negative comments in my children's nutritionist business. So in this business, I help parents with fussy eaters and give parenting advice to help make mealtimes less stressful. So typically my content wouldn't get too much criticism or negative comments until that post. I posted a piece of content around kids refusing dinner.

And specifically around the question, if my child chooses not to eat at dinner time, should we send them to bed without eating? Now, this is something that a lot of parents struggle with. And what often happens is they'll offer what's called a rescue meal. So if the child refuses the dinner that's been served, they'll then make something else so that the child doesn't go to bed hungry.

And whilst this feels like the kindest thing to do for your child, the problem is that over time it can actually create more issues because children learn that if they hold out, something nicer will eventually come along, which can make them less likely to engage with family meals and become more selective with their eating in the longterm. And I was very clear that I don't recommend offering a rescue meal if they don't eat their dinner.

I talked about the principle of parent provides child decides the division of responsibility and suggested having a small healthy bedtime snack as part of the everyday routine. Now the comment section got very lively to say the least. Lots of parents were really grateful for the advice, but there were also a few parents in the comments to disagreeing quite strongly. And one comment in particular stood out.

It was a really long comment saying the advice was toxic and that it was never okay to let a child go to bed hungry and that they were disappointed in the post and expected better from someone with my background. And I'll be honest with you, at first that did affect me. It's hard to receive that kind of criticism when you've put something out there that you genuinely believe is helpful and evidence-based. My immediate reaction was that little internal wobble of

gosh, should I have posted that? And I nearly decided to delete the post, but I didn't. And then something really interesting happened. The post didn't flop. In fact, it absolutely blew up. It ended up being my highest ever performing post with over 80,000 likes and 169 comments and so many DMs from parents.

And yes, there were negative comments in there, but there were far more positive ones, people who were genuinely relieved to finally understand what to do differently. So this post ended up having a really big positive impact on my visibility, which was amazing. In fact, I even put some ads behind that post afterwards. So even more people would be able to see it because it was performing so, so well.

And what felt uncomfortable at first really quite quickly turned into something that actually expanded my reach, my impact and my authority in that space. It was a really clear reminder that negative comments don't automatically equal damage, like we all might assume at first. In many cases, it just means it's strong enough to get a reaction in the first place.

Now I want to go a bit deeper into the lessons we can learn from this story. Firstly, when it comes to your mindset around getting negative comments and criticisms online. And secondly, what it teaches us about the benefits of polarizing content and how you can bring more of that into your content too, to help you stand out, to stop blending into generic advice and to strengthen your positioning as the go-to expert in your field.

The first thing this story really shows is the difference between how we're trained to think in the NHS versus how we need to show up online in our private practices. So in the NHS, we're taught to stick to guidelines, we're taught to follow protocols and be really quite careful about what we say. But in private practice, we have a lot more freedom to share our personal clinical opinions, our experiences and the way that we interpret and

apply the evidence in real life. And if we want to stand out and build authority, we need to be willing to use that freedom to confidently express those personal clinical opinions, even if that means not everyone agrees with us. Now, in my case, it was a parent who disagreed with my post, but often in the health and particularly the nutrition space, a lot of the pushback actually comes from other healthcare professionals.

This is when it's really important to remember that guidelines are exactly that. Guidelines. They're not always black and white rules and people also interpret things differently. So two dietitians can look at exactly the same research, the same evidence base and come to slightly different conclusions based on their experience and interpretation. There isn't always one single

correct way to say something. So never be afraid to have your own clinical opinion. It's called clinical judgment for a reason. Because if you try and create content that nobody could possibly ever disagree with, you're going to end up bland. You're going to end up shrinking yourself, watering down your message and saying, well, actually very little at all.

So this brings us nicely on to lesson number two, the benefit of polarizing content. Now, when I say polarizing, I don't really mean being controversial for the sake of it or posting things just to provoke a reaction. What I mean is being really clear in your stance, taking a position, saying something in a way that actually reflects your clinical reasoning and how you work with clients, even if not everyone would agree.

Polarizing content can be really powerful for your business. It helps get more eyes on you. It builds trust faster with the people who do align with your approach. And it positions you as someone who actually stands for something rather than just blending into generic advice online. So right now you might be posting great educational content and giving loads of useful, handy tips, but chances are you're not actually taking a position.

And the problem with that is it makes it really hard for the right clients to know if you're their person. Whereas when you start to express your clinical reasoning more openly, your preferences, your approach, what you do and don't believe works, people start to self-select. The right people think, well, this makes so much sense to me. And the wrong people, well, they just simply move on.

So what does polarizing content actually look like in practice for you as a health professional? And what are some examples that you can use this week if you want to? Well, there's tons of different angles you can take for this. The first option is to do something similar to my example, where you share a clinical opinion or experience that you know not everyone's going to agree with.

but it's backed by your own clinical experience and the results that you see consistently in your practice. So like my post example, you could answer a question that you get asked a lot, especially one where your answer might go slightly against what people might expect. Another idea is to challenge common advice in your space. So think about things you often see recommended and challenge them.

Explain what you see in practice that makes you take a different view. You could also do a this versus that style post where you compare mainstream advice with your own approach. Or you could share something that you don't do in your practice and explain your reasoning behind it.

And what I will say is whenever I create this kind of content myself, it almost always outperforms those really generic tip style posts. And I think a big reason for that is because it naturally builds curiosity. And remember polarizing content is something that will come a lot more naturally to you the more you start doing it. So why not give it a start this week? So here's a little action step for you to take after this episode.

Just take a few minutes and brain dump a few things. Think of one question that you get asked a lot from people where your answer may divide opinion. Also have a think of three to five pieces of common advice that you see in your niche that you don't fully align with based on your clinical experience. And then from that list, just pick one and turn it into a post this week using one of those angles that we spoke about. And I'd love to hear how you get on.

So I really hope that this episode has given you some food for thought. So a few final reminders I just want to leave you with.

Firstly, you are an autonomous clinician with the freedom to interpret evidence and apply it in a way that reflects your own clinical reasoning. So why wouldn't you share that openly with the people who need to hear it? Secondly, you're not here to be universally agreed with. People will always bring their own experiences, their beliefs and their interpretations into your content.

And let's face it, there'll always be someone who disagrees with you, no matter what you say. And then thirdly, even when someone disagrees with your stance, they're still reading, they're still interacting, and that's still giving your content reach. And for the right people watching, it builds curiosity, authority, and trust. So this is your sign to start creating more polarizing content.

And if listening to this has made you think, I should probably get some help getting more confident with marketing myself and actually showing up in a stronger way to attract clients, then this is exactly the kind of work we do inside Accelerate. Accelerate is my business coaching program specifically for health professionals who want to build a profitable private practice without constantly guessing what to do to get clients. And yes, creating stronger content, including things like polarizing content,

is one part of it, but it's really just a very small piece of the bigger picture. Inside the programme, we cover everything you actually need to grow a profitable health business from A to Z. So things like your marketing and your messaging and your pricing and your positioning, sales and discovery calls, the tech, the systems behind your business and how to move beyond just relying on one-to-one sessions so your income feels more stable and actually more scalable.

It's really about helping you build something solid that's going to support you financially without trying to piece everything together on your own. So if that even sounds a little bit interesting to you, then DM me with the word accelerate on Instagram to learn more and see if you would be a good fit. You can find my Instagram handle in the show notes. Bye for now.