Latest / Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship / #185 - When Career Success Strains Your Friendships (Dr. Kimberly Horn)

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#185 - When Career Success Strains Your Friendships (Dr. Kimberly Horn) · Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship

• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Gier Nina Conversations about Friendship.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Nina Boutsin.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've been writing about Friendship for over a decade.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Podcasting about it for well over four years now.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about four and a half.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I enjoy today by Dr. Kimberly Horn, who is equally as into this topic.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's an internationally recognized research.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: psychologist, professor, and public health scientists.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her new book is Friends Matter for Life.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The subtitle is harnessing the eight tenants of dynamic friendship.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: What we're talking about here today is the specific issues that very high achieving ambitious women have with their friendships.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: How friendships often come last?
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: How friendship needs to be a
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: health habit, it really is something you have to make time for obviously, but we talk about the things that get in the way, Dr. Ron has practical ideas for how this specific population, the high achieving women who have worked hard to get into a certain place in their career.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then socially, there can be an issue.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: She has an expression I really liked, ambitious women can often appear to be socially rich on the outside, but feel disconnected on the inside.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we get into
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Without further ado, welcome to Dr. Kimberly Horn.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me Nina.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been looking forward to this for weeks now.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a long time coming.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've been connected on social media.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love connecting with other as I told you before.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: We started recording other friendship dorks like me who are very deep into this topic.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: People can't believe that I'm still talking about this 10 years later, but I feel like you understand that.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think today in our topic, I come to you both with research and lived experience as a public health scientist.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been looking and studying, health, behavior, and health outcomes for almost three decades now.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so one thing you're seeing in your work, and I see it too, it's anecdotally that as you achieve more in your career, friendships seem to be the last thing on the priority list.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's all kinds of reasons for it and it's but it's not just time, all the time is obvious one.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we'll get to that when we talk about habits, but I want to start with a question I has, when did you first notice maybe in your work or in your life that a success goes up?
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your social life goes down.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: At some point in my career, I realized that people were relating to me more as a dietyl than as a person as a human.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I rose through the ranks in the academy from a mere research assistant all the way to Dean Rolls.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I noticed that my social landscape, especially at work, started to shrink in that people were either pulling away a little bit, maybe because they didn't want to bother me or they were leaning in more.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: for accessibility and invisibility kinds of things.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a little bit of a slippery slope and how you can trust who to interact with and what's real in authentic.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't benign in that as well because I became more aware of my own energy and protecting my energy and time and maybe even myself pulling away a little bit because you are the keeper of information you sometimes not sure who and if you can share.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a concept I've talked about and it's, are you a real friend or a deal friend?
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that this might enter into this part of the conversation, like you're saying, people maybe lean in, I feel like heard you say, because they want something.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are my words now.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: They maybe want something.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They want a recommendation for something, or they want you to add them to a committee or whatever it is an academic life.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: know, they want that inside scoop too.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's interesting.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like is that the keeper of information.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those would be maybe more colleagues in your own fields where it becomes a social murky area, but also the rest of your social life.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: As you get busy in your career, I think it can be, I guess it's just prioritizing friendship.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can understand why it's the last thing people have heard.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's hard enough to have time to work out and to get to the grocery store.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: All these things go now you're telling me to go meet a friend for a walk or coffee.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Come on.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that you're right.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does get a little trickier outside of work, which is why I think it's important for us to start to build those networks and connections within our workplace too because you think about the number of hours that we spend every day in that setting.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: what's been important to me is to recognize how to find those people and those friends and those peers that I contrast and relate to and you and turn them me as well.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not saying that by any means that having leader or high-cheeping women is the only kind of friendship that we should have, but I think it's very important to have those kind of peer connections.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: particularly if you're a high achieving woman.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I like to say, you'll hear me say this a few times probably episode, book evenly instead of looking up or down to try to find those peers that feel more like you and understand where you're coming from.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So do you feel like within your field you're saying?
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that it can be in your field, but I also think that that's to say, okay, I'm in academics.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I also have friends who are female leaders across a variety of corporate sectors even.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: But these are women who understand high stakes and high pressure demands.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't have to be the same profession.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have an expression I like that ambitious women appear socially rich on the outside,
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of times people look too high she being women as having it all put together.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're well networked, they've got full calendar, what people don't realize sometimes is that those are more context than they are connection.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I know you understand this at sometimes competence becomes like a cloak.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: People think that we're self-sufficient and we appear steady and we are, but that doesn't mean that we don't need help and support and comfort and all of those sorts of things too.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: The burden can become disproportionate, I think.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's an assumption that somebody who has a very busy career is too busy, and so they don't get invited to things.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or if you've said no a couple of times because you're genuinely too busy, you start getting the invite, and it may take an act of saying to friends, I know I've said no a few times, like sometimes just that self-awareness.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I still really would want to be invited.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate the invitation, that the invitation isn't annoying.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a great point, yeah, because they don't want to bother you, or maybe they are a little put off the, yeah, you said no more times than they can count.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've been guilty of both, I will say.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I can think of that too.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can think of some friends in my life who have definitely gotten extremely busy with their careers.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think to reach out to them as much possibly because they complain about how busy they are.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I would say that's a warning, also a piece of advice.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would like to give to people who very busy in their careers but also know that they have to attend to their friendships.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would be careful about complaining about how busy you are.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because you're going to make it hard for people to invite you to things.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's face it.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's busy.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know anyone that's not super busy on some level right now and it doesn't matter what their career looks like or if they're working from home or people are busy and I think we can all find to make excuses not to spend time with our friends and I think sometimes when with women.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: high achieving women in particular that we get into this identity drip that gap between who we are and who people think we are and that's particularly if you've started in a certain place maybe with a group of friends and you've just elevated to a different level of leadership than they have or maybe you've chose different aspects or career trajectories than they have.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe they see you as always the steady one.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're really emotionally spent in drained, or they see you as that person that they knew 10 years ago when you were puddled around the water cooler together and you're not that person anymore because of your demands.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that there's a lot that women have to negotiate to and how they see themselves and how other people see them.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: this is another great example of things that get in the way of a friendship because there's a difference in your life.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this case, the difference being somebody is in a huge leadership role in their job.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're very successful.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most likely, in this scenario, we're talking with spending a lot of time with colleagues, those spending a lot of time on work, things.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They may be the people that they started off with as friends, like you're saying, those people haven't on purpose chosen that path, or maybe they try to and didn't succeed as far as
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think about people, and this was an example for myself.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're early in my career, I rose to the rice in one institution, and I think that when you start at one place, and then you rise to different levels from the peer group or your work colleagues or friends that you started with, that creates a whole different level of tension in friendships, because the people used to hang out and talk about everything with,
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: through your work pals, you can't do that anymore.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that contributes to some lowliness for women too because they've had that built-in group that they could confide in.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: It becomes very different.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's your need to find friends outside of work.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is to me.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The solution.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about these different traps that I know that you have up your sleeve.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I look at two, three different traps that I feel like that we get into.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one is that optimization trap.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think one of the questions you have asked is, why do friendships get rescheduled or not prioritized for women?
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought of a story of a woman that was chair with me.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: She had canceled a 20-minute walk with a friend at work, a work friend, four times in the last six months.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I kind of like feeling like you know.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then she realized that she had never cancelled a standing meeting that she had that just completely drained her.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then she realized that she had stopped prioritizing her relationships over her appointments and decided that she needed to make some intentional shifts.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that we do that because when you get
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: corporate or whatever kind of high achieving position you're in, I think we run on metrics sometimes.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: We think about systems of efficiency and metrics and friendship doesn't have a lot of products that we can see or measure or people perceive that.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can come up with a few that we can measure, but I think that's one of the reasons that we optimize other things over our friendship is because we don't see the metrics for it.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: to really a good point if you're a certain kind of high achieving person, there's a lack of measurement for sure.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you're always starting over in a way, like especially if you're really busy with work, you have a great lunch with a friend, a great walk or something, and then a month, my go by and it's okay.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're once again, we're like, now caught up, you never really unless you speak to someone every day, which most people don't, unless you have that every day person, you're always playing catch up a bit.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think if we find ourselves doing that, and again, I have to catch myself sometimes too, so I don't want everyone to put out points there that I don't try to work on myself.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think when we find ourselves can repeatedly canceling our activities with friends or we feel like that time with friends is expendable.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And those are some of the signs that we're really over prioritizing our task or our measurable outcomes versus our relationships.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what I said, comparison track.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's a hard one.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's a big one and this topic about career.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think it's in life and work.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think we as women are more prone to that than perhaps men are with comparison, particularly how we compare ourselves professionally to other women.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you think about success, we're constantly moving the goal post, right?
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: We just, it's that you wanted to get to the next saying, wanted to get to the next saying.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then sometimes when other women
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: that's when a lot of comparison can kick in and thinking is this person surpassing me or what am I not doing that she's doing or why that did not get picked for that or those sorts of things.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've seen situations too where maybe someone was genuinely happy for a friend's promotion but at the same time wondering why her own trajectory is not moving in that direction and she's laughing me now.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: We started in the same place and I hear these kinds of stories a lot
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I feel jealous.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The same time I'm happy for it.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think a lot of times people don't realize jealousy is the human emotion and we're going to experience it.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the important things is how do we handle it?
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do we do with the R. We jealous and do something vindictive or R. We jealous and invite them to go out and celebrate?
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: and really lift them up.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Two emotions can exit at the same time.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you can name your feeling without shaming yourself for, yeah, fill in a little, fill a little jealous, and I'm also very happy for her, and I really want to celebrate this.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think co-salibration in those sorts of situation is really important.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, so true.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I completely agree that it's absolutely normal to fill jealous and then it's really our job to manually override the very human emotion she got an overriding and I like what you said about co celebrating you have to push yourself I think people sometimes show their jealousy very subtly and it comes through more as withholding with holding congratulations and this is not sound really petty but it comes up a lot.
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: from people who write to me, just like a lack of even acknowledging on social media, which is the lowest hanging fruit, or just a personal text.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, hey, I saw that you did such and such.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think people don't want others to know their online.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's my theory.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have nothing to test that.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're all kind of on there, but we're with a little embarrassed that we're on there.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We should all be doing other things.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: We all know it.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, why we on Instagram, why we on TechDog, we should be doing other things.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, even LinkedIn, all of it, it's all God, like we're, oops, we should be doing our work or we should be doing other things.
• 14:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once you publicly like something or comment, you're letting the world know, you're so on your phone.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're just a loser like the rest of us, all of us, we're like our phone, but it could be your really good friend and still people will withhold.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: There might be some jealousy, and just push and be a little push passive.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think throwing in a little bit of science, but when we really lift our friends up, when we can co-selebrate, it does rewire our brain.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It really creates those feel good hormones that make us better humans.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's real.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you can get yourself, as you said, the manual overwrite.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd love that.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: You get yourself to a place to do that.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're probably going to film much better as a human being for co-selebrating with someone.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and then you build that relationship just gets more positive and they will hopefully do the same for you, although as things don't ever perfectly even, that's just not how friendship or the world goes, but it starts with us.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you demonstrate excitement over your friends success and hopefully we'll come back your way.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes I use people's success who are in comparable, which I call, some of my work twins, professional twins, I like to use that as motivation from myself.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wonder what they did to get there.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: How can I learn from what they did to achieve their success?
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a really nice way of thinking about it.
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the pie grows.
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like someone took a piece of the pie.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: OK, there's a lot of pies out there.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The pie can get bigger.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: That wasn't your piece.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not zero sum.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it really is true.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, if it's let's use the academic world, if there's one person who could be the dean of the department, the guess.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's one person who could be the dean of the department.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's other ways to be successful in that career.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure they might not want to be a dean.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does sound like a lot of administration work, a lot of paper work.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's move on to the over-functioning trap the next one.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of times women become the giver, the over-functioner, and a lot of different arenas.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We do this at work too, and I think a lot of times high achieving women or notoriously, if I can use that word, under-receivers, and sometimes over-givers competence,
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you're a highly competent person that sometimes leaks into caregiving, we do it because we can, and we do it because it feels good until it depletes us and your resentful.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we get into a vicious cycle.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you're that person that people always call in a crisis.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You listen and you give advice and you do all the right things that a friend does when they're trying to help someone through the difficult situation.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: but then no one really calls and checks on you until you disappear for days and days or weeks on it and you realize you've really trained people to see you as a resource and not really as a person who has needs and wants support.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I sort of feel like you're speaking to me directly actually.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: know that really that I feel that sometimes I do.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah and I think that's normal when you're that person who's in that role of tending to things.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: But with women and this especially in heterosexual dynamics of relationship when children are involved and both spouses work and still the research says around 70% of that emotional and visible labor still falls to the woman.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get this at work and then we get that second shift at home.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It can be very draining.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the overgiving concept I'm telling you, it's probably 80% again, not a math number, but who are real one?
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just a gut feel of the letters that come to me.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether it's through the Facebook group, which people can find a journey to the group, or whether it's through my email.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: which you can find at NinaBatson.com.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you just go to my website, you can visit an anonymous form.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's why it's called Dior Nina.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of the things people write to me are about this concept of loss, side-in-ness, and I've done whole episodes on it, but I like to address it with someone like you, too, who's like really deep into this work.
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: because I don't have a perfect answer to it.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have my answers to it.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious what your answer is and what an uneven friendship looks like because I think it's coming from the same stuff that we're talking about here, which is being the giver.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will just tell you, I don't think they're such things as an equal friendship and there's always going to be somebody who gives more at any given time the goal to me would be over time.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's more of a given take, but it's not going to be necessarily, I do this exact thing for you, and then you do this exact thing for me, the exact same way I did it.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking really micro things like texting, even.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I agree with you that relationships aren't perfectly balanced all the time.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: From my book, I talk a lot about reciprocity.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the number one topic here, reciprocity.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, reciprocity changes over time, and if it's, um,
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: balanced, and I'm not saying it's 50-50 all the time, but on par and some, I think that both people should be getting something beneficial from the relationship.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's different for everybody.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I find beneficial in a friendship might be very different than what you find beneficial.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's up to me to define that and how we, you and I may interact together as friends.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if I'm consistently leaving our interactions, feeling depleted, I'm feeling responsible for attending to your emotions or your feelings, really having trouble explaining or setting my boundaries, that to me indicates it's something is a skew, something is lopsided and I need
• 19:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that is so key.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know it seems really obvious, but a lot of people are missing that part.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would always first give the other friend a chance to address the situation.
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't change the dynamics of relationship without communicating what is a problem.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like the word a skew if that's a great word.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's got asked yourself, but then communicate it.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I try to really bring it down to three choices when friendship is feeling us too.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: If it's not enough for us to want to leave that relationship or walk away from and maybe it's just been a temporary thing, we can just put it aside and not really talk about, just go on with the things that fulfill us and our history and the things we enjoy together in those sorts of things.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: that then that continue that moves on to the second part which is we need to have a talk about it and we need to do that in a way that feels fair and comfortable and has some fence post around it that keep everybody emotionally safe in the discussion and then if we decide to do that and it's productive wonderful and if we've done it we've done it again and we've done it again and it's still lapsided if not toxic then it's time to think about leaving the friendship at least temporarily.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hard.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the hard stuff.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I like to use that temporarily, not everything.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't have to be forever, and it doesn't have to be like a grand announcement either.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the way.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes people think that one friendships fade and be a professional relationship or outside of work sometimes.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not a big grand explosion.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no big major conflict.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it just thing just goes out for various life reasons.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that had that happened in the workplace because
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: again because of maybe advancement in career, maybe relocation, maybe taking on a new job, maybe going to a different building even.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those things can cause friendships.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're just tripped.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that doesn't mean that you can't leave the door open for something on the way I've reconnected with a friends I haven't hadn't seen in 10 years professionally.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing wrong.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It just
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's so personal.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It really could be, I love that you used the example of moving buildings.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It really could be that it could just be the lack of proximity that you don't run into each other anymore.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you don't have that quick, easy five minute in the hallway.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: That makes a huge difference in our day-to-day lives.
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you're back to a much more formal ketchup.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now it's a phone call.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now it's having to make a plan.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's much harder.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, you're probably going to drift and I would also add that it doesn't mean that the relationship when it was strong wasn't an important part of your life.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, those people were more grateful for the time that they had with certain friends, instead of bitter about the ending, we would just be happier.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I agree.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: If we could go back and just claim those things as it gets that they were during a given point or season in life and leaving the door open because yeah, you do never know.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, Kimberly, we've talked about a lot of things here and I want to move us to practical what are some of the takeaways.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: for that high-achieving woman who does know that friendship is important, but is caught in any number of traps of the reality of fitting that into your life, making it a habit, and not letting all these issues of over-functioning, of being the giver of comparison, of the worrying that other people are comparing to you, maybe what do we do?
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, I think there's some simple things that we can try.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We won't always succeed, but we can try and it's important to at least put some effort into it, because I think when we struggle with friendship professionally, we have to put extra intention.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And...
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because there's no doubt, when you're a high-cheap in women, it's a dust shrink or circle, being intentional is very important.
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So one of the things I like to try is a weekly 2-2-1 ritual.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: As during the week, I tried to take a couple of friends to send text messages a couple of times a day and usually different people.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I tried to do two voice calls a week.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love phone calls.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we're so overdone on Zoom.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm still someone who loves to talk on the phone.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even it's just 10 to 15 minute chat, catch up, to hear their voice, and to have some additional dimension to it, I find those to be very helpful.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the one is to try to have one in-person touch point.
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's some point during the week with a friend.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that can be meeting someone for a quick coffee at work
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you go for a walk after a meeting just to stretch your legs and connect a little bit.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the two-two-one, I think, is something that's manageable.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's two phone calls, one-in-person.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, two texts, two calls, one-in-person.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it doesn't have to be a long-in-person, especially at work, or when you're working to be able to integrate things into your day and not to think to have one more thing to do.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And maybe you're finishing up a meeting and you meet for a quick walk,
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you at least have that chance to connect on a different level and maybe if it's a peer, you can actually vent about the same meaning that you're in that you can't discuss with anybody else.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The two two one I think is doable.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not successful with it every week, but I try.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think to recalibrate your circle when it makes sense and to release the guilt.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we don't want to let go of friends that no longer serve us because it's nostalgic because we feel guilty.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think it's important to reflect on the friendships that are really nourishing you and serving you at this point in your life.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you have to reconfigure the amount of time that you spend with them.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: that might allow some additional time to bring someone new in your life when I talked about looking sideways, I think it's important to find those people that you can bring into your life if you don't have them, at least one or two.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very important.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The third thing is to safeguard your energy, not everybody earns full access to your time in your calendar, and sometimes it's okay to say no, and sometimes it's okay to really pause and think about when you want to say yes to spending time with someone.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: really hard.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want you know for me, that's the hardest one.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a certain personality that struggles with that.
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm much more of a pleaser.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm very concerned with being perceived as nice.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just know that about myself.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I am nice, but I think I, yeah, and I work on that.
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somebody people reach out to me and they want to get together.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I've had, in the past, where I've reached out to people and they've been uninterested and it's just a hurts year feeling so much.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't want to be the cause of that to anyone else.
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet,
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: then as I'm driving to the thing, I'm like resentful, I'm annoyed, I'm interrupted, whatever I was doing to go beat someone else for coffee because they wanted to, and I'm like, did I really want to?
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure all the nice enough time, but and it's not that you never have to spend time with this person, but you only had so much time in the day and it's very important because friendship and positive friendship, healthy friendship is a health intervention.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very important to make time,
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: for the quality interactions for yourself.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is a part of the last point which I talk about in the book quite a bit is self-rending, and to make sure that we're really building in time for self-compassion and self-care in those sorts of things.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that I used to do, I don't do it as much anymore, but I used to find it very helpful.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: is when I would get to my desk, I would spend five minutes journaling, and I have a professional journal that I keep to, where I can set my intentions and those sorts of things.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: But before I would dig in to my emails and get just, you know, how the world, the rule went, the emails sets off a chain of events.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would just spend a little bit of time at my desk centering myself and writing a little bit before I dove into that.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And to me, that was a part of my self-care.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The set paradox, you talk about that paradox of that likeability, leadership tension is real, because you don't want to be perceived as not likable or not nice, or that we're somehow going to be a burden, we put ourselves last.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's so well said that this is great practical advice.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm excited to have them as full of points and picturing it in the newsletter.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm already like picturing the writing about you and writing about the newsletter and there's a lot of practical advice and Kimberly's book and if you're working on your friendships any part of your life it's I'm sure you agree Kimberly but I always say it's an ageless timeless topic.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can be 18, you can be 80, brilliant ships and getting along with people and the way we get in our own heads.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for coming and talking to me today and to the list of you.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm glad to finally meet in person, not in person, but it's close enough.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's closer to in person than just email, which is what we've done before and social media.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we are now truly connected, which I am grateful for.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Me too, Nina.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for everything that you do.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Listeners, come back next week when our friendships are going well.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are happier all around.
• 28:15
  [UNKNOWN]: Bye.