You Deserve To Feel Seen and Heard

Storytime with Kate

Hey there, I have a proposal:
LET FRIENDSHIPS BE FRIENDSHIPS AGAIN ✨

Do you sometimes leave your interactions with your friends feelings kinda... Unfulfilled? Misunderstood? Unseen? Unheard?

Here's a big question for ya: What do you expect your friends to DO for you?

In other words, why friends?

In the rise of "pop-therapy" on social media, it's so great that more and more people are discovering themselves, figuring out their place in the world of things, re-organizing their lives to better suit who they ARE and how they envision their life unfolding instead of just doing it the way it's always been done and performing a role in society that got prescribed to you before you even came out of the womb.

Learning language that helps you understand yourself and others is SO EXCELLENT. There's a big TAKING BACK MY LIFE movement and I, for one, am apart of it and am obsessed.

HOWEVER, I also hear people throwing around mental-health diagnoses like skittles. And yall, that's not helpful...

or fun...

or life-giving...

or intimate...

or expansive.

Expecting your friends to actually be your coach or therapist isn't ok. Because in a friendship, both people's stuff is important. On a friend-date, no one should be asked to put aside themselves so that the other person can have all the space in the world to vent (unless that's truly ok for everyone involved). It can cause resentment in the friendship. Also, expecting all of your friends to be awesome judgment-free listeners is, well, setting yourself up for failure.

Would it be super awesome if we taught constructive and active listening in schools so that more of us had this as an actual skill?! Yes! Relationships across the board would be BETTER.

But alas, that's not how it IS.

Acceptance, the second theme of the My Self Study Practice, helps us come back to a place of what IS instead of operating from of place of what we think SHOULD be true which causes a lot of heartbreak, resentment, disappointment, and anger.

A HUGE part of what coaches and therapists (hopefully) are taught is how to hold space for you, the client. How to reflect back what we're hearing so that together, we might go a little bit deeper on understanding what's going on and find a new way forward.

If you are always expecting your friends to hold space for you, and fully understand you, and completely see you all the time, stop. That'll run a lot of friends off. They'll never be enough. You'll feel unheard, misunderstood, and unseen.

If you expect yourSELF to always hold space for others, to fully understand them, to completely see them, stop. You'll never be enough. You'll always feel like you're falling short in the am-I-good-enough-as-a-friend category.

It's ok to ask a friend if they can really help you work through something - they can say yes or no. Sometimes people want to do that, sometimes people don't. There's nothing wrong with needing help working through something, and there's also nothing wrong with not wanting to help someone work through that thing.

If you're in coaching, you don't need to ask your coach how they are all the time and hold space for them. That's not your job. It's their job to do that for you. That's what you're paying them for.

I recently had someone sign up for a Market Research and Free Coaching call with me and the first thing he did was ask me how I am. I said, "I'm good. Also, this time is for you. I truly appreciate you asking but I'd love for you to just dive in with what brought you here today so that you can get the most out of our time together. No need to hold space for me." He sighed with relief and said, "I always feel pressure to hold space for other people so that was really helpful to hear. Thank you."

So since you already have me and Ruby as your Self Study Coaches, what could become possible with your friendships?! *remember, every friendship is different and what's right for one friendship might not be right for another.

Here are some things I like doing with my different friends:

• Gym dates while sharing ideas and info and literal physical support when I cannot POSSIBLY squat that weight.
• House projects followed by pool hangs.
• Body Doubling my life-admin days (like, getting on facetime while we both fold our laundry).
• Researching the upcoming election info and making a whole voting and engagement plan.
• Running a business together.
• Meme sharing until we're actually able to get together.
• Jumping fences to pick flowers.
• Sharing their new businesses on socials and pretending like you're just a random obsessed customer.

Depends on the friend, depends on the day, and mostly it depends on a lot of life circumstances that make friendships in adulthood very very hard.

You're doing great and your friends love you,

xoxo,

kate

*not everybody can afford to have a coach. And I'm not saying that your friends can't help you process shit and move forward and understand yourself. In fact, what I'm suggesting is that friendships can innately do that without it having to feel like a clinical conversation where you take turns trauma dumping (generally, this pattern leads to burnout/dissatisfaction within that relationship - especially when one person becomes ready to change that pattern). BEING together, just as you are, can be JUST as beneficial and powerful as having a coach.