Category: Friendship

Posted on

The #1 Regret of the Dying

I recently read something that I cannot get out of my mind. Bronnie Ware worked as a nurse, caring for patients at the end of their lives. In her book, she spells out the top 5 regrets people had on their deathbed. The one that hit me like a sucker punch to the gut was the #1 regret:

#1: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This is the trap I see crippling so many people. 

The expectations come from all around us. They come from society and cultural norms, our families, our friends, our school systems, our coworkers, our partners and most especially ourselves. 

Sometimes, we alter our lives to meet expectations no one has clearly communicated; we have just assumed. When we sit down and talk with our partners, family, friends or work colleagues, we find out all they genuinely care about is us being happy. The same freedom we crave is what they crave for us. 

Other times, the fear is real. We have been handed roles we are blatantly expected to conform to, and they are suffocating. The consequences of choosing a different path are significant. I have more than one client right now navigating divorce. As painful as it is to walk through, the pain of staying was worse.

Breaking social norms is uncomfortable because of commentary we may have to face from people in our lives, strangers, or the awkwardness of feeling different from everyone else in a room. Being a mother who climbs the corporate ladder to CEO, or a father who decides to walk away from a high paying job to be a full time parent, are such examples.

My own transformation really began the night my husband and I had one of our biggest fights of our marriage. When I was honest with him and told him how much I was holding back what was inside because of how a handful of other people would react, I had no idea I was going to light a fire under my calm, mellow husband. He aptly pointed out I was being a hypocrite. He told me I needed to pick a new career if I wanted to teach people to follow their dreams, but wouldn’t play mine out in full force because I feared a few people’s responses. 

You don’t have to die with this regret. 

Living the life you crave is absolutely within your reach. 

I know this for a fact because not only have I totally transformed my own life, but I have helped so many others do this work. 

My program Release Your Favorite Self is centered on this very idea. Only YOU can define what your favorite life looks like. And only YOU can do the work to release it into the world. 

It took me ten years, but it doesn’t need to take you that long. I can help you shave YEARS off the process with the tools in my toolbox. 

If there is a gap between the life you are living today and the life you are craving, let’s chat. 

Posted on

The Courage to be Disliked

Recently, I read something in a book that has rocked my world. 

Out of ten people, two will love you, one will dislike you, and seven won’t pay attention to you. Focus on the two that love you, not the ones that dislike you or the seven who don’t care. (Paraphrased idea from a book I read, The Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi.)

This may surprise some of you, but despite my strong and assertive personality, I have always struggled with being liked. 

For example, people unfriending me on Facebook or unsubscribing from my blog or saying negative things about me when I am not around are often given way too much real estate in my mind. 

No one enjoys hearing they are disliked because it feels like a form of rejection. At the heart of being human is a deep desire to feel loved. It takes a concerted effort to become comfortable with hearing over and over again that people don’t like you. Being a bold, outspoken female, I’ve heard it regularly since elementary school.  

Remembering that no matter who I am or what I do, 10% of people will not like me, and seven are never going to care, makes it significantly easier for those comments to roll off my back. 

When my insecurities sneak up on me, I redirect my attention to the twenty percent. 

If I approach every room I walk into, or every post I make on social media, or every email I send out as an attempt to just reach the 2 in 10, life becomes so much easier. 

The other beautiful side of this mindset is that it helps to remove the temptation of focusing on myself. When I have insecure thoughts or take actions (or inactions) out of my fear of what others will think, I am completely and exclusively focused on myself.

However, when I constantly remind myself that my only desire is to serve those 2 in 10, then I can give all my energy and attention to the people I am trying to help. 

May we all learn to release the 10% of people who will never like us no matter what, and to release the 7 in 10 who just see us as another warm body in the room. Instead, may we all double down on serving that 20% who is asking for more of what we offer in the world. 

Posted on

2 Ways to Make Others Feel Safe

As a coach, I am trained in how to make other people feel safe and comfortable to share openly with me. I cannot help them achieve their goals if they don’t feel safe enough with me to tell me their innermost desires. I cannot help someone break through the mindsets holding them back if they don’t feel comfortable truly telling me what’s on their mind.

However, for most of us, we are interacting with people daily who do not make us feel safe. By safe, I mean comfortable enough to let all of our guards down.

Today, let’s chat about two ways we can make others around us feel more comfortable. The better we are at creating safe spaces for others, the deeper relationships we can develop with one another.

1. Replace Judgement with Curiosity

If before entering the conversation you already believe firmly in a proper outcome to a situation (the choice they should make, what they should believe, how they should respond, etc) you have already placed the barrier.

This will require you to do the inner work of arriving at a place where not everyone needs to make the same decisions as you, or respond to situations the way you would respond. We only judge others for what we judge ourselves for. Therefore, if you have not done the work to release your inner critic against yourself, you will be limited in your capacity to hold back your judgement toward others. Even if you don’t outright criticize them, your body language, your eyes, your tone will say it all.

Focus on developing an insatiable curiosity. Instead of approaching a conversation with trying to influence someone else’s actions or thinking, focus on what you can learn from them. Learn how to ask questions that open up doors and windows to how they arrived at that moment, behavior, or perspective.

2. Listen to Understand

Most people approach conversations by “listening to respond.” The whole time the person is speaking, they are spinning their wheels thinking about what they will say or ask next, instead of being able to fully hear the other person.

A seek to understand mindset approaches a conversation without an agenda. In alignment with curiosity, listening to understand allows us to ask better questions, truly hear what someone is saying, and catch what they are inferring between the lines.

Oftentimes in these conversations, I will respond with “If I am hearing you correctly, you think that X, Y then Z.” I cannot tell you how many times the other person will say “not really” and clarify their statements for me. Despite the fact that I was listening, the message they meant to portray and the one I interpreted were not the same. Repeating back what I heard allows me to truly understand the other person because I am less likely to walk away with a misunderstanding or casting attention on the wrong point. So often, the layer where they get to the heart of their message comes in the clarifications.

Brené Brown, author and research professor of social work at the University of Houston, said it best: “I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”

May we all be intentional at making those around us feel safe enough to be their most authentic selves.

Posted on

We Only Judge Other for What We Judge Ourselves

We only judge others for what we judge ourselves.

I was first told these words in college. A professor quoted it like it was common knowledge, and yet it hit me like a ton of bricks. I tossed that quote around in my brain to see if it was actually applicable.

At that particular moment in my life, there were two people getting under my skin. One was in a different class of mine and the other attended my church. Just being in their presence would make my skin crawl. They were like nails on a chalkboard.

I paused and thought of these two people, one male and one female. They actually had a lot in common. They had similar physical builds and their personalities were not too different. What did this tell me about myself?

First of all, they were both loud, boisterous and sought attention.

Ouch. Way to look at myself in the mirror. I had spent many years being told I was too much, too loud, too passionate, too excited, too blunt. Too too too too too all the things. I was regularly being told I should “tone it down” in some area of my life or another. And here were these two people, loud and proud for the whole world to see.

Secondly, they were both overweight. This sentence right here is the sole reason I have yet to write this blog post. I feared people judging me for judging them. I feared potential back lash from my honesty. But when I try to rewrite this and find some other way to describe the second trait, it just sounds like words stumbling all over each other.

The reality of the situation was that I had been deeply insecure about my weight since elementary school. I was the largest kid in my class from third through sixth grade. I had insults thrown at me in middle school centered around my weight. And lucky for me, puberty took care of a lot of the weight loss. But it still left me a size 10/12 through high school when all my friends toggled between 0 and 00.

I felt so insecure about my body that I literally told myself the most ridiculous stories in my head about why everything I wanted that I couldn’t have was because of my weight. I blamed the lack of a boyfriend, a D on a biology test, certain people not liking me and so much more on my physical appearance. In retrospect, obviously none if it had absolutely anything to do with the size jeans I owned, but my adolescent brain wasn’t mature enough to see that truth.

So sitting there at 20 years old, judging this girl who sat across the room from me in my communications class, I realized my frustration had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with me. She was mirroring back at me my deepest insecurities.

It was a heavy dose of humble pie.

To this day I am so grateful for those lessons. I wish I could say I have never judged another human since, but we both know that would be straight up lying. At least now I run it through a filter of compassion. I ask myself “what does it say about me that I would look down on him/her?”

In reality, this is probably why in my writing, you will find a trend of the word grace appearing over and over and over again. The more grace we give ourselves, the more compassion we can share with others. The more we acknowledge our own insecurities and find a way to love ourselves through them, or even because of them, the easier it becomes to love others’ imperfections.

After all, we only judge others for what we judge ourselves.

Grace and peace my friends,

Sophia Hyde


.

Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:

Looking to get from where you are now to where you want to be? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, “Coach Yourself in 10 Minutes.” Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.

If you happen to be a working mom, join our community on Facebook

Posted on

How I Avoid Disappointment

We all know what it feels like to have the wind sucked out of us when disappointment takes over. It’s an awful feeling. I used to experience it much more often, until I learned a valuable lesson:

Setting expectations only leads to unnecessary disappointment.

In 2009, tears streamed down my cheeks the whole way home on a flight from Los Angeles to Tampa. While there, I had been offered the ideally perfect job for me, with the minimum salary we needed to survive, and I felt like everything I had worked 5 years toward creating was coming true. We filled out the paperwork for an apartment in Glendale and starting planning our new lives.

Then, I got the strangest phone call the night before I left. It all came crashing down. I would have to leave L.A. with no prospects, my tail between my legs and the reality that we would probably be staying exactly where we were…in the 470 sq ft studio in the same zip code where I grew up.

I was devastated. We both were.

My husband finished his L.A. internship and came back to our tiny studio. We didn’t know what else to do since it was the peak of the recession, so we started our own business. Fresh out of college. That business ended up providing an income that supported both of us and opened up doors to relationships that have changed the course of our lives.

We still ended up making all the things we wanted happen…just here. In my hometown. Not 2500 miles away. Now we both have careers we love, two kids, a home, and my family lives in the same neighborhood as us.

When I think back to how disappointed I was when the opportunity I thought I wanted didn’t work out, I realize that it was a gift.

Plan B became Plan A, and I am better off for it. How can we even see what gifts may be resting in Plan B if we are too busy being overwhelmed in grief from Plan A (that by the way…never happened, was never going to happen, and literally only existed as a figment in our imagination)?

Mindfulness teaches us to keep our thoughts and energy in the current moment. This is particularly challenging for me, but I’ve learned it’s the best path to my inner peace. When I feel the emotion of disappointment coming on, I pause. I ask myself if I am only feeling this because of an expectation I set in my own imagination, and if I am missing a gift that is right in front of me.

As we prepare for 2021, my encouragement for you is to hold the plans loosely. I believe setting goals and intentions are important. They give us something to strive toward. They help us rise into growth and self-improvement. However, we must be prepared for the curveballs that are inevitably coming.

And before I go, I know many of you probably feel disappointment the most from other people. I feel you. But it’s really not much different than what you expect from your future plans. We cannot control either people, nor plans. I try really hard to release people of crazy high expectations, especially the expectations to which I hold myself. I choose to observe people. I let their actions show me their personalities, their priorities, their insecurities, their fears, their past hurt, their strengths, their gifts, etc. When someone disappoints me, I just watch it and observe it. I allow the experience to teach me something I need to learn about myself.

In simple terms…I hold my expectations of people much like I do my plans…loosely and with gratitude.

Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:

Looking to create more peace in your life? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, Create Peace. Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.

If you happen to be a working mom, join our community on Facebook

Posted on

When Friendship Hurts

 

In private conversations with mothers, I’ve heard the exact same story over and over again. A new mother wondering what happened with her closest friendships. It’s a painful story I resonate with in deep parts of my soul, but also one I’ve finally come to a peaceful place with and feel healed enough to talk about.

As most of us experience, a majority of friendships are for a season. The season that the two of you share the bond that brought you together. It could have been classmates, coworkers, a church community, a project you were both working on, a neighbor, or a plethora of other commonalities. I came to accept that it was normal to grow apart from some amazing people I shared life with because our seasons no longer aligned. I have a fiercely loyal personality, so this was a hard pill for me to swallow in my twenties.

But none of that could prepare me for the changes that motherhood brought on.

Overtime we develop certain friendships that we believe are our ride-or-dies. Relationships that can withstand any hurdle and are just as intimate as family. The friendship is bigger than our geographic location, career changes, and personal life changes. But as I have experienced, and so many women I have I spoken with, sometimes those are seasons too. When those shift, they catch you by the most surprise and leave you feeling wounded.

Becoming a mother shifts your entire world in a moment. Once that child enters the world, it’s like an earthquake. Everything centers around keeping this human alive. If you are a mother that also chooses to (or needs to) go back to work, that becomes your max capacity. Keeping you and that child alive, fed and bathed while maintaining a career becomes all you have the width and breadth to manage. Your little spare time will most likely go to self-care or a rare date night with your significant other.

When I had my first daughter, on top of the usual adjustments, we also were in the middle of a personal life crisis. We lost our home, moved in with my parents and then moved when she was two weeks old and tried to set up a new home with both of us working from home and taking care of a newborn. It was overwhelming.

When she was about six months old, I picked my head up and realized that during that very challenging season there were some friends that showed up more than I could have expected. They helped us move, brought over a meal, just came and sat with me to be company, even mowed our lawn when my husband left for a month for work when she was five months old. And then I realized there were some people who I thought were my inner circle that had not even come to meet her.

I’m not a woman that keeps a scorecard. I always give the benefit of the doubt, but something this time felt different. My husband, being the peacemaker he is, kept reassuring me that I was overthinking things and these people still loved me and cared about me, they were just busy. So I tried to reach out and make plans but I was given excuse after excuse.

By the time my daughter was a year old, I was finally able to accept that these were seasonal friendships. By “able to accept” I mean I wept many tears and grieved the losses. (At the time they felt like losses, as I healed I realized they were just normal seasonal shifts that I didn’t adjust to very well.)

A similar pruning happened after I had my son. For most of the pregnancy I was in a ton of pain, barely functional, and solo-parenting. After he arrived I had about a month I was home with him before I was back to work. And when he was two months old he landed in the Pediatric ICU for two weeks, five days of which he was on life support. I tear up just thinking of how close we came to losing him and the compassion of the nurses and doctors that carried us through that time.

Again, through that six month period there were people who checked on us regularly and showed up for us. Even my friend who was living in the Middle East sent a baby shower gift, a care package for his arrival and managed to be a support system to us while I was living at the hospital with him. Between our friends and our family, I felt overwhelmed in love. We had been so blessed.

Months later, after the stress and trauma had settled down and I was no longer in survival mode, I reflected back. There were certain people who I had in my inner circle who managed to go missing during that time. A reason for why they couldn’t make the baby shower, too busy to come sit with me when I was home with him, absent during the hospital stay. And these were people that in my mind I would have paused the entire world and inconvenienced my family to show up for them.

If you are a working mom then you know, our time to pour into our friendships is so limited, and it has to be very intentional. Every invitation we say yes to leaves something else in our life neglected. Moments at home with our family to just rest (not clean, or meal prep or grocery shop) are far and few between. To maintain our health and our family’s health, we have to set clear priorities.

Most of the time, I am managing how I spend my time, energy and resources by what or whom can most afford to be neglected, not what I most want or desire to do.

Fast forward a couple years and I am so blessed with amazing people in my life. When I say that, I am including the ones I was referencing in this post that I felt caused pain. (Minus one who I realized was a narcissistic abuser and I had to get help to heal from that one, but that’s a different post for a different day, HAHA! I have absolutely 0 contact with her in any form now)

The arrival of both children taught me so much. Here is what I have learned:

  • I choose to tell myself a story that the actions (or typically lack thereof) that hurt me the most were never, ever them realizing they were hurting me. They were in their own state of survival and they were doing the best they could to get themselves and their families through each day.
  • When I am going to pause the needs of myself and my family to invest in my friendships, I am going to pour into the people that pour into me. I will be a mirror to those I love so that I do not accidentally hurt anyone I care the most about. There is a well-known concept I took to heart, “you are a reflection of the five people you spend the most time with.” After the experience with my second child left me feeling disappointed when some of the people I invested the most time in were not the ones that showed up for me on my darkest of days, I literally got out a sheet of paper. I knew that with two kids, a marriage, a full-time job and a side hustle I would be investing very little time into friendships. I wrote down five names that I wanted to love on the hardest and make sure I always showed up for in the ways they needed me and everything else was bonus.  
  • I have gotten very good at saying no to invitations. It’s never, ever, ever because I don’t WANT to go to something. I am an Enneagram 7. I absolutely LOVE socializing, spontaneous fun and making new memories. Literally…the driving fear of a 7 is FOMO, the fear of missing out. I want to be at all the things, party with all the people and maximize the amount of laughs I can have on this planet.

But I have come to realize that I cannot do all the things. My children literally cry when someone other than mommy tucks them in bed. My job supports our family. My husband craves time with me. I’m blessed with parents and siblings (plus nieces and nephews) that live nearby and I treasure the time we can be together like they are gifts sent directly from God himself. These things will fill up a calendar quickly.

All that to say, when the invitations start coming in for birthday parties, Christmas parties, backyard barbecues or whatever the festivity may be, I pause. I didn’t used to pause. I used to look at the calendar and see if there was a conflict and if not I always went. Now I realize “dinner with my family and putting my kids to bed myself” is an event.

Now I say yes if it’s a mutual friendship (meaning someone that also shows up for me). Or I will say yes if the invitation in an investment in my self-care.

  • I’ve found other ways to love on friends. My love language is quality time and that’s how I WANT to show up for EVERYONE. I just simply can’t. So now I try to show up with words of affirmation a lot because it’s really all I can manage. Maybe it’s a social media comment or DM, maybe it’s a text to check in, or maybe it’s some other form of communication (I don’t make phone calls…don’t be offended, lol). But this is a way I can manage to make someone feel loved without taking away from my family or career.
  • I focus on the gratitude for the people who are in this season. Whether it’s because of a commonality with our children, our careers, living in the same vicinity or whatever we share, I enjoy them to fullest with no expectations. I appreciate the friendships around me for what they are right now, and I don’t expect anyone to still be here when I’m 80. I laugh with them, I cry with them, and I (on rare occasions) make plans with them. Because I’ve been hurt, I don’t hold anyone to the expectation anymore that they can weather all my seasons. It’s not fair. Neither of us know what life can bring. Some of my most favorite friendships I have right now are with people I have only known for the last 2-3 years and that’s okay. They bring so much joy into my life and have been a gift on a silver platter. We will enjoy each other’s company, learn from one another, and one day life may separate us, and now I am perfectly at peace with this truth.

Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:

Looking to create more peace in your life? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, Create Peace. Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.

If you enjoy reading these posts, then drop your email into the box at the footer of the website and you will get an email from me each week with a new post.