Latest / Friendship IRL: Real Talk About Friendship, Community, and What It Actually Takes / Moving Past Inconvenience and Leaning into the JOY of Helping Our Friends

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Moving Past Inconvenience and Leaning into the JOY of Helping Our Friends · Friendship IRL: Real Talk About Friendship, Community, and What It Actually Takes

• 0:02
  Alex Alexander: All right, gang.
• 0:02
  Alex Alexander: Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship.
• 0:58
  Alex Alexander: Yesterday, I was at a baby shower for a friend who has wanted to be a mom for so long that I could literally cry thinking about how excited I am for her. Like truly my eyes, my eyes are watering just thinking about it. It has been such a journey, and I am so excited for her. Now I feel like something else that's important to note is that she is not my oldest friend or my closest friend. She's not somebody I would probably call first in an emergency moment, but I do know that by the time word got to her, she would show up for me in whatever ways, and I want you to know that, because I want you to know that the feelings I'm about to talk about in this episode today — they are not limited to just my absolute like closest people. So I come home from the baby shower and I'm decompressing, so I'm scrolling on my phone when a post appears with a message that I have been seeing everywhere lately, and that message is this idea that the price of community is inconvenience. You know what I'm talking about, those posts where they're like, if you want friends, if you want community, if you want a village, you have to be a villager. You have to give the rides, buy the gifts, show up and drop off the meals.
• 2:25
  Alex Alexander: You have to do the things. And this post appeared at either the wrong time or the right time.
• 2:38
  Alex Alexander: You can decide by the end of this episode, because they're right. Community is inconvenient sometimes, but they are also completely missing the point.
• 2:51
  Alex Alexander: And it took me being in the moment yesterday, after I had just been at this baby shower, to be like, hold up. What are we doing here? Why is this the message we are spreading?
• 3:07
  Alex Alexander: Because we're doing this all wrong. And I know because I just experienced this exact thing where, you know, I just have to do this task, get a gift, go to this brunch? In fact, I wanted to do more. Was dying to do more, because I'm so excited for her. I think the real problem here is that we've lost touch with the joy that comes with being in community. We've lost that natural give and take of community. And I think that's a pretty widely accepted statement, right? People are out here trying to figure out how to be a villager. Receive as a villager. There's so many, and I'm using that term because that is all over social media content right now. So we're trying to figure how to do the thing right, how to add it almost as another task in our to do list, versus really trying to reframe and get to the core of wanting to do it, not just doing it because we want to be a part of the village, but like wanting it. And so the reframe here is, isn't helping your friends actually in some way, shape or form, similar to writing that book, like helping your friends is in some way underneath it all. It's actually for yourself in the long run, and it's also just for the love of your friends, for the love of people, for the positive impact you could have on a stranger. So like in my case, right? I love this friend. I want her so freaking deeply to have the experience she wants as a mother. It has been quite a journey, as I said, and I'm not going to tell her story here, but I want it like deep in my bones, I'm going to meet this baby and cry, okay? I also want to meet the baby. I want to watch them grow. I want to make memories of moments that I have down the line. So on one hand, like it's for her, but on this other level, it's also for me.
• 8:27
  Alex Alexander: And then there's kind of this, you know, I said, the love of her, how grateful I am to love her, to be connected to her, to get to watch her go out there and do the things she wants in life like there's just so many layers here of joy and happiness that have absolutely nothing to do with the cost of community.
• 8:55
  Alex Alexander: There's so much joy that I find in community. Let me give you another example. Another thing I see often is, you know, this idea of like, giving somebody a ride, whether it's a ride to the airport or a ride to the doctor's office, whatever it is that that is like, the inconvenience of that is the cost of community and friendship and whatnot. And to me, I'm like, okay, If I'm stuck in the car with you driving you 30 minutes to the airport, that is 30 minutes of uninterrupted friend hangout time in a world where everybody's saying they're too busy to hang out, I get to help you. You get to be safe in my car. You don't have to be in some strange Uber where we have our location shared with our loved ones so that they can make sure that we're safe in there.
• 9:59
  Alex Alexander: You get to be. Safe in my car.
• 9:59
  Alex Alexander: We get to connect. Maybe we've been saying that we should plan that weekend trip or we should sign up for that dance class together. We can do that in the car. We can figure that out. We have time now. We have each other's attention. So on some level, yes, is it, I suppose, inconvenient that I'm driving you to the airport? In my mind, there are so many positives that outweigh that I'm not even thinking about how it's inconvenient, like I'm excited.
• 10:32
  Alex Alexander: Let me drive you to the airport.
• 10:32
  Alex Alexander: These moments, if we start to reframe our thinking, they enrich our lives too. It's not just a cost. We are getting a net positive. Now, I know some of you are going to be like, Alex, my friends take advantage of me, right? I'm a people pleaser. I can't say no and set boundaries. I get taken advantage of. I'm the only friend. They ask whatever it is, I get that and my book, which is coming out. So pay attention here for the ads with more information on that. The book has a entire section to help you with this. So I'm going to give you the briefest of explanations, because I just don't have time in this podcast episode. So in the book, I have this section, this concept called the Do Less List. I could have also named this the Find Your friendship superpower or find your lane. List doesn't really matter which way you want to think of it, but the idea is that if you spend the time to think about the ways you show up for people in the book, it tells you do this exercise where you make a matrix so you have four you have a square with four boxes in it. The top left box is anything you are good at and enjoy doing. Right? It's a double positive. Then the top box on the right is anything you are good at but don't enjoy doing. The bottom left box is anything you are not good at that does not come easy to you, but you enjoy it. And then the bottom right box is the double negative you are not good at it and you don't enjoy it. And it's to spend some time thinking about the ways you show up for people and where they fit in those boxes. So for me, when you find this lane, it helps you for so many reasons. Number one, people start to think of you for certain things. And so if it's something you're good at and you enjoy, that makes it so much easier to show up because you love doing it anyways and it comes easy to you. Or maybe it's a skill set that you want to get better at. You're not very good at it, but you enjoy it, using that as a way to help people.
• 13:12
  Alex Alexander: Maybe it's something you don't enjoy, but you are good at it.
• 13:16
  Alex Alexander: It doesn't take you very long.
• 13:16
  Alex Alexander: You can do it in a very short period of time. You want to do those sparingly, but in moments where you have the capacity lean into that. And then the double negatives, those are places to tell people like, Hey, I don't think I'm the right person for you. Can we brainstorm who might be the right person for you? So for me, in that double positive, I'm good at and I enjoy it is cooking. I've talked about this before, but the idea that I really enjoy cooking for people, and I enjoy food related questions. So if you need to figure out what to serve for a dinner party you're throwing, if you have a holiday menu and you have questions, if you have a cooking appliance question, what pan to buy, what knife to buy, where to take your knives to get sharpened in Seattle, I have answers to those, and I can answer them very, very quickly.
• 15:18
  Alex Alexander: A category, let's see the don't enjoy, but good at could be wedding and event planning. I'm still pretty burnt out, but I was a professional wedding planner for 10 years, so I don't offer that a ton, but if somebody comes to me with an event question or a question related to their wedding, and it's easy enough, it takes me two minutes to answer their question, to calculate that thing, it might take them two hours. Like here, sure, let me just do that for you really fast. Now I'm not freely just like offering that on repeat the way I am cooking related things, but I will do it. When you come up with your lanes and you start to talk about them, you start to offer them. It becomes really easy for friends to know what to come to you for, what will you find joy in showing up for them.
• 16:14
  Alex Alexander: In it also helps you communicate what you don't want to do, and to feel less bad when somebody asks you saying no, because you can trust that you will show up in all these other ways, and you will find joy in it, and you will happily do it, or you will quickly do it. You'll just be like, yeah, here's the answer to that. Happy I could help moving on, right? That's how I feel when I answer a wedding question for somebody. But if I answer a cooking question, I might be like, Here's the menu ideas. But you know, do we need to talk about like ingredients? Now, right? I want to go further, because I actually love talking about it. Do you see the difference there? Now, sometimes there are truly inconvenient asks. There are the asks that are in that double negative category, and that's where I'm like, Okay, this is kind of the inconvenient, right? That is the price of community. Is those tasks, and in the moments where you really do need to do those.
• 17:19
  Alex Alexander: I haven't talked about this much on the podcast because I've been well, I've been dealing with my own feelings about it, but also to respect my friend. But I think we're at a point where I can kind of mention a little bit of it. A friend of mine lost her husband at the very beginning of summer, and she has two young children. It was very unexpected loss, and I spent a good chunk of my summer with her and her boys. Like living in her house, basically being a second co-parent, right? Driving them to camp, cooking meals, shopping, helping her move very suddenly, very quickly, helping her make phone calls to airlines and financial institutions and things like that. Right? There were certain tasks in that moment that fell in my double negative like, there were moments where definitely I was burnt out because I had been there for an extended period of time, and I kind of really didn't like the ask. Now, sometimes I was able to brainstorm who might be a better person to ask and even ask on her behalf. But there were times where I kind of had to suck it up and do the task, and in the moment, am I like, gosh, I am so tired. I truly despise this task. I do not want to do it. I wish somebody else could do this. Yes, yes, there were those moments. They were few and far between. I really tried to stick to my lanes when those moments arrived. I did have to trudge through them. Okay, there's no if and or but about it, I did not enjoy some of the cleaning tasks I trudged through. But on the other side, I was able to find some joy. And I'm really not trying to push some sort of like toxic positivity here.
• 19:27
  Alex Alexander: That's not the point like two things can exist at once in the moment, I could have really hated that I was doing the cleaning task. Okay, I don't want to go back and do that. I don't want to offer that to more people. That can be true. But the other truth is that this was truly one of the lowest, hardest times of her life. And I am again. I could cry, could cry through this whole episode. I am beyond honored that she trusted me, to let me in, to help her, to push her forward on days where she didn't want to, but we kind of had to, for like, move deadline, like certain things had to move forward, and that she would trust me to help her with that, that she trusted me to have really vulnerable, honest conversations with my nephews about losing a parent.
• 20:19
  Alex Alexander: Because that's something I understand. Like those moments, and they don't have to be that loss moment. It could be any other hard thing. It could be somebody had a, you know, a bad$1,000 business investment. It doesn't need to be as significant as what I'm talking about. There is joy in knowing that in those hard moments, I could be there for her that she was not alone. There is joy in knowing she wasn't alone, and I could be there for her that can coexist on a deep level that is making me like kind of shaky and emotional over here, along with the fact that I just. Advised the cleaning portion of Hope either both are true, it doesn't have to be. This cost of community is inconvenient, and that's it, sometimes, sure, but for the most part, I don't even experience that. So what is the deeper work here? I think the deeper work is reprogramming ourselves for finding the joy in community. Again, this is not toxic positivity. You can be like slightly annoyed by the task and still dig deeper. It's like that exercise. I don't know if you've ever heard this. I think it's a marketing exercise, where, when you really want to get to like the root cause of something, you're supposed to ask, why? Five times like this will help people because blank why you have an answer, why you give an answer? This is kind of the same thing when you're reprogramming yourself for joy in community. So in my baby shower example, I would say that buying gifts for people is not normally my lane. I don't know if it falls in the double negative category, but it definitely doesn't fall in the double positive category. I just don't love the work of buying gifts, unless I see it out and about, like, that's great, but buying a gift for an event, right? I have to go to the registry. I have to pick the things. They have to be shipped.
• 22:37
  Alex Alexander: I have to unbox them. I have to re-wrap them. Oh, do I have wrapping paper? I need to buy wrapping paper. I need to get a card. I need to write in the card. There's just a lot of tasks I don't love that, right?
• 22:51
  Alex Alexander: That can be true, but I wouldn't say with this baby shower, I actually didn't even think about it. I just did those tasks kind of neutrally, maybe because the entire time, all I could think about was one how excited I am for my friend to be a mom, and how I want to be there in whatever way to show her how excited I am. Two the other friends that planned this baby shower just planned such a perfect celebration. It was a very chill brunch. My friend loves brunch. There we did like baby coloring pages for a baby's first ABC book. So we all colored a page while we sat at brunch waiting for things. There weren't a bunch of other games.
• 23:38
  Alex Alexander: We brought the presents, but we didn't force her to be uncomfortable and unwrap them in front of all of us like it really was this ideal way to celebrate my friend and this upcoming milestone, and I had so much joy in the fact that we were doing it in a way that felt so right for her that I didn't even really think about the tasks. I just did them, because I was so focused on what an ideal celebration this was for her, and that's where I found the joy. Going back to my example with my friend who lost her husband, I think another way to reprogram and find the joy is really thinking about the vulnerability that it takes.
• 24:26
  Alex Alexander: I've talked about this before in other episodes, but this idea that, in my friend's case, losing her husband, that kind of blasts open your vulnerability, right? You are a raw edge walking through the world everywhere. So not only is that vulnerable, but now you have me, like in her house, talking to her kids or packing her to move.
• 24:49
  Alex Alexander: I'm like, going through all of her drawers. I helped go through her husband's office, and cried my way through that entire experience. Like that is so vulnerable. That's why I talk about so much about this idea of small intimacies. If you don't know what that is, go listen to episode 74 but small intimacies are this idea that you know you can let people in in small ways, like just letting somebody come over and see what's in your fridge and in your pantry, or, I don't know, the fact that your house is messy, or your car is messy when you give someone a ride like these are small ways to let somebody in and start to work that muscle of letting them in, because if something blows up your life, like my friend losing her husband, you're going from zero to 100 if you've never let anybody in, but if you have been working on those small intimacies, you know maybe you're going from 30 to 100 maybe this isn't quite as big of a leap. And whether it's a small intimacy or me coming to live with you for weeks at a time in your most vulnerable moment, I.
• 26:05
  Alex Alexander: Yeah, the truth is, like those inconvenient moments are what create the strongest bonds. The inconvenient tasks, sure, on their surface level, are kind of a burden, but the long term payoff of those for your connection is so worth it. And if we can dig deeper, if we can ask that, why question and get under the surface, that's where the joy is. It's in knowing that I could be one of those people for her, and I love her so much.
• 26:43
  Alex Alexander: And that applies to either of the friends I've talked about.
• 26:50
  Alex Alexander: Now, something else I want to note here is, if you're somebody who's listened to some of my episodes about chosen family, and that's something you want, then these inconvenient moments, again, it doesn't have to be the double negative moments. It could be the ones where you find joy and like doing it and are good at it, like it could be the double positive or the single positive. If you want chosen family, these are the kinds of things you need to do, point blank. End of story. I don't I don't have anything else to tell you. You can tell someone you're their chosen family, over and over and over again with words.
• 27:25
  Alex Alexander: It's the actions that matter.
• 27:30
  Alex Alexander: And so then the joy here is the fact that you've done the work to build the chosen family you want. That's the joy. So even if it is inconvenient, is that really the overarching feeling?
• 27:45
  Alex Alexander: I don't think so, because for me, again, I feel so much joy and grateful. I'm so grateful to myself for what I have done to build the chosen family I have that I don't even think about how it's inconvenient, because the end result takes up so much more my brain space. I guess.
• 28:02
  Alex Alexander: Now there's this concept in the book, again, I'm not going to go too deep into it, but this idea of nourishment versus reciprocity, the most basic way I can put this is I don't love the idea of reciprocity. I just don't, because in my mind, reciprocity is kind of this. I did this for you so I will get something equal back. And I don't think of it that way. I think of it as I want to nourish you, and that means I want to, if I have nutrients to give you, right, the ways I can show up, the ways I like to show up, the ways I'm good at showing up. If I have those nutrients, I will give them to you because I can, and in return, that friend may not even nurture me. They may have nutrients for someone else, and then someone else, and then another friend and another community member. And when I need nutrients, and maybe I have to ask for them, I trust that I have built myself a broad enough web that I will get them back. I will get what I need when I need it, and that it doesn't have to be one to one. That's the most basic of explanations of that.
• 29:13
  Alex Alexander: There's a whole section in the book. Okay, how do we sum up this episode? The next time that a friend asks you for something, or maybe they don't even ask.
• 29:29
  Alex Alexander: Maybe you kind of hear that they need some help with something, and you're thinking yourself like, Oh, I could do that. Like it's kind of inconvenient. It's gonna take me away from my routine or my norm, or it's gonna take an hour out of my day, or 30 minutes. I want you to pause and one just recognize the feeling like, that's the first piece, is recognizing that our gut instinct is kind of this like, and then start digging deeper, start trying to get underneath that. Like, how might this actually enrich your life, right? Or, how can I find joy in showing up for someone that I love, or just for another human right? How can I dig down to that like I love them so much I am so happy to be one of the people they call to give them a safe space, to celebrate them, to watch them take this next step, these moments, this mindset shift. I don't know how I've never recorded this episode before. I don't know how I've missed this piece, but I really do think that this is kind of the underlying layer that so many of us are missing, is doing the reflection and self exploration on our feelings about showing up for other people, and trying to rewrite and reprogram those because if you don't, you're forever going to feel like showing up for your people is just another task, another burden, is another thing you gotta do, and well, sometimes it might be inconvenient, and that feeling might exist. It doesn't have to be the only feeling you can have. Multiple feelings. Can you find some positive in there? And if you can't, don't force it if you truly dig down and you cannot find the positive. If this friend is asking you to show up for them, and you dig down and you realize, like, Oh man, I really just don't I don't love them that way. I don't think that they've showed up kindly for me. If you get there, that is like a sign, guys, that is a sign that you need to go and reevaluate that relationship as a whole. So I'm not saying force it. I'm saying push a little harder, do a little more exploration. I'm gonna think deeper about this. Maybe expect some more content on this. Thank you for coming to my ramblings today, my not fully formed thoughts. We'll see where these go. And I want to hear your thoughts, so let me know what you think, and if you're trying to reprogram these, I would love to hear about that experience too, because I think I'm pretty deep. I'm pretty deep in this at the moment, so it'd be interesting to hear, kind of like, what pushback you get if you're trying to do this with that. I'll see you next week.
• 32:32
  Alex Alexander: Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you. But don't let the chat die here.
• 32:43
  Alex Alexander: Send me a voice message. I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram. My handle, @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting. And use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye. I'll be back with a new episode next week.