Friend So Hard – Maintaining Friendships While Hustling from Home
Episode 224: Show Notes
We’ve been getting a lot of questions from our community recently about how the heck we stay friends, even though we’re business partners. So, what does our relationship look like and how do we maintain friends outside of our business circle at TCC? Well girl, “It’s complicated,” and this is why we’ll be tackling questions around our own friendship and our friendships with others in this episode. As any business owners knows, it can be a challenge to maintain friendships with people who don’t really understand what you do. People drift apart, lives change and these days, we just move in so many different directions!
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So how do you make new friends (without being awkward about it) and how do you know when a friendship is just not working anymore? We’ll just be chatting this topic out and sharing how these dynamics ebb and flow in our own lives. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a few tips that you can use to help maintain (or sever) your own relationships. Because the truth is, we all get by with a little help from our friends, but you have to get out of your comfort zone to make them and sustain them.
We’re Not Best Friends. We’re Not Married. We’re Somewhere In Between
When we became business partners we didn’t have a previous relationship. When we chatted it was always about business and that giant foundation has helped us to build and maintain a successful business partnership and friendship. A lot of the time it can be a rocky road for friends who decide to go into business together. Of course this can be done well but it is trickier. So those background issues and history other people might have as friends / business partners, we just don’t have because we started on the business front, first, and then happened to like each other! We grew into being good friends, best friends. Such good friends in fact that our relationship can now pretty much be equated to a marriage. But perhaps there needs to be a new term for what it is that we have because we’re not best friends, we’re not married, we’re somewhere in between. This is where we fall and it’s an interesting balance of personal life and business life. Sometimes we have to just ask what person we need each other to be. For example, Abbie needs to say when she needs business partner Emylee or bestie Emylee. And this switch happens quite naturally for us now. We encourage you to just say what you need from the other person and be respectful of that as much you can.
Maintaining Relationships With People From Our Past As We Have Grown
There are those friends that we have so much history with. We all have those friends, right? And for Abbie, she still wants to get together with them and chat about life. But they are at a place where their lives are not the same anymore and so the commonalities are just not there. So chatting on a regular basis has fallen to the wayside, but to get together every now and then to reminisce and catch up is still really nice because of course you still care about each other. This has happened more with school and childhood friends. But Abbie does have a group of friends from college and although they have pretty much nothing in common, there is still enough interest in the world and the same type of thinking that lights them up and keeps them getting together more regularly.
For Emylee, she and her husband have had the same group of friends since elementary and pre-school. These friends are still their friends now! They really locked down their core group of friends pretty quickly and kind of just stuck with them. They worked really hard to maintain those friendships throughout their lives. So Emylee’s best friend from her childhood is still her best friend today. This might be a unique situation because the truth is, nowadays people move around. People head off in all different directions and so getting together becomes a lot more difficult as we get older. For example, this happened to Abbie when she moved to Kansas City, she started looking for new friends. Her friends here have come from the creative industry and the other close friends have come from the junior league. They keep up with each other via texting and group chats mostly and then will make an effort to meet up at least once a month.
Do You Feel Like You Have Lost Any Friends? Adapting To Change
Abbie feels like she has definitely lost work friends since moving away from the corporate world. She also feels like she has lost friends since she is not a mom. Then there have also been a few “friends” that started paying a little bit too much attention to the business or how much money she was making and let’s just say it got awkward. That’s some shady shit, so that was a bye bye to them. For Emylee there have been a few friendships that have kind of stalled. There is often a misconception that because you own your own business you can do what you want all day, every day. So sure, you do have the power to say “I’m just not going to work today,” but you’re going to have to make that time up somewhere else! This means that you can’t just go grab coffee with a friend every five minutes. Often times this is not understood by friends and can upset them when you decline invitations to hang out. “I work from home, I am not retired!” That’s Emylee’s dad’s favorite response in these situations and Emylee can’t wait to use this line too. There is flexibility but only within boundaries in this biz. On the flip side of losing friends, Emylee has been able to rekindle an old high school friendship because this person also works from home too. So you lose some, you win some, right?
The Process Of Cultivating New Friendships and Our Monthly Dinner Club
The other day we had some free time and went down to one of our favorite pizza places. It was here that we realized that we have so many new friends here that we hadn’t made much of an effort with. So we decided to start a monthly dinner club, figured out who to invite and decided to cross some friend circles. We decided to call the dinner club, “Monthly Friend So Hard Dinners.” We set a time, picked the restaurant, and started a Facebook group. We have such a great mix of people in this group and we’re so pumped about it (we’ll let you know how it goes). Back to the point of making friends – it’s difficult, let’s not forget to mention. Especially as an introvert, like Abbie is. But the biggest thing she has learned when it comes to making friends is that you have to be yourself in front of the people that you want to get to know. You also need to recognize the type of friend that you can be right now, and the type of friend that you need or are missing. Abbie has formed a lot of random friendships too, largely around her Essential Oils side business. When she meets someone she thinks she has a lot in common with, she might just Facebook message them and say “Hey girl, we have a lot in common, I think we could be great friends.” And the truth is, most women are ecstatic about this because most women our age struggle to make friends.
All of this to say that you are not doing a bad job. You are not a bad friend. So quit beating yourself up about it. Likely all the people in your circle are struggling just as much as you are. So if you are sitting there thinking, “I haven’t texted that girl in like two months,” she is probably thinking the same thing! So don’t worry about it, instead do something about it. You need a few friends, not a million, but a good few. So get out of your comfort zone and go and find them.
Quote This
The big thing is being yourself in front of the people you want to get to know.
Highlights
We’re Not Best Friends. We’re Not Married. We’re Somewhere In Between. [0:02:22.1]
Maintaining Relationships With People From Our Past As We Have Grown. [0:09:30.1]
Do You Feel Like You Have Lost Any Friends? Adapting To Change. [0:21:00.1]
The Process Of Cultivating New Friendships and Our Monthly Dinner Club. [0:28:30.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Friends, Making friends, Girl groups, Dinner club, Maintaining friendships, Making new friends, Business relationship, Business partner, Relationships
