Ep 103. True Friendship

I’m Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 103, True Friendship.

Welcome to the Reinvented After 40 podcast. I am your host, Kym Showers, and I’m a certified life coach for women in the second half of life. Each week I’ll bring you direct advice and inspiring, practical wisdom to help you live your very best life and create a future you’re absolutely obsessed with. It’s going to be fun, let’s get started.

Hey, everyone, welcome back to my podcast. Happy August 31st. This is the last day of August when this episode comes out. I hope your August was as fabulous as mine was. Oh my gosh, it was such a full, beautiful, fun month. I had so much going on, I started a bunch of stuff and I finished a bunch of stuff. And we had so much fun with our family on vacation. And I’m going to tell you a little story today about when we got back from vacation, something wonky happened to us, Jeff and I, in our house.

I haven’t told you yet because I didn’t really want to talk about it, but I’m going to try and use it as a little bit of a metaphor today, but I want to talk to you about true friendship, but before I get to that. Well, first of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to everybody who follow, rated and reviewed my podcast, who entered my 100th episode podcast contest to win a pair of AirPods Pro.

I will announce the winners next week because when I’m recording this you guys still have a few days to enter. So I’m not closing it up yet, so I don’t have any winners yet. But by the time I record next week, I will have all three of you who won. It will be completely random, so just know that. And all the reviews are beautiful. I’m going to read a couple of them to you right now for a couple of different reasons. They’re all so amazing. I love every single review.

This one is from Erica Tingey and I happen to know her. And this has a lot to do with what I’m going to be talking to you today about true friendship. So I want to read this one. And I’m going to read you another one that was written by one of my clients right now because I want you guys to know how life changing it is.

If you are a regular listener of this podcast and this podcast has changed your life for the positive. I just want you to know if you times that by a billion, that’s what will happen when you come and work with me and meet with me every week. And then come to my in-person retreat and spend three days with me. Your whole life will change. So I have a review from one of my darling amazing clients that will just very much influence you to join one of my next groups.

So as a reminder, my next group starts in two weeks after you listen to this or the day you’re listening to this. It starts September 13th and it is an alumni only. So if you have ever worked with me in the past, if you have paid me money and have worked with me, this group is for you. We just deep dive off the bat. It’s very much like a little mastermind. So my dream is to funnel all my clients who have worked with me for at least six months or have worked with me in the past before I even offered groups.

I want to funnel all of you beautiful women into this group and just create an ongoing mastermind with this group because that’s what I see it evolving into, which will be so useful for you. If you really are serious about up-leveling your life and your business and your relationships and the way that you think and feel about yourself, and you want to change everything and you have an idea and you know that once you get to one level, you know there is another level. This is the group that you want to be in.

It’s very supportive in optimizing our growth. So there’s an optimal place that we’d like to get to, though the truth is, as long as we’re here on planet Earth, there is always going to be another level to get to a different way of seeing things, a different way of feeling about ourselves and about our life. More energy to create what we want to create for the next season. So I highly recommend this alumni group that starts September 13th if you have worked with me in the past. Just go to my website and just click the button, pay the money, come work with me, you’ll be in.

And then if you are someone who has been on the fence and has been listening to this podcast and haven’t worked with me, have never just said yes to yourself as far as coaching goes. I want you to join my October group for new clients. And there will be a few clients in there that have worked with me actually for a long time. So they will be very useful and helpful for you in that group. That group is already filling up but I highly encourage you if you’re new to get into my October 4th group.

You’ll just be getting in under the wire as far as being able to come to my retreat. That will be your last opportunity to come to my retreat is squeezing into that October 4th group, which you will absolutely love. Everybody gets lots of coaching, especially if you’re new you get a one-on-one with me every month if you’re brand new. So you get all the coaching that you need, I promise you.

So let me read you, this first one is from a client. Her title on the review, everyone has to have a title on the review. So on the review, her title is Absolutely Life Changing. She says, “I have been working with Kym for a few years now. I started following her on Instagram, reading her posts, listening to her positive advice. I quietly scrolled and watched for a few years. I finally reached out to her for private coaching.” So this is back when I was coaching one-on-one.

“What an absolutely life changing moment. After speaking with her, I knew that I would not be the same person when we were finished. I’m not. During our six month one-on-one coaching, Kym started her Reinvented After 40 podcast. Not only did I get all of her private coaching, I was now able to listen to her podcast every Thursday. She gives advice and clarity on so many topics, things that I didn’t even realize was happening in my own life. I frequently replay episodes when I need a little extra encouragement. I recently finished a six month alumni group coaching with Kym and four other women. At first I wasn’t sure how I would feel being in a group of people, telling strangers my fears and shortcomings. But after meeting, listening, and realizing that I wasn’t the only one struggling, it was a very eye opening experience. We all struggled with the same issues. I love these women. It was amazing to watch Kym coach each person with their different struggles. It’s like getting double the coaching. The best part was that we all got to meet at her retreat. We felt like we all knew each other and we’re old friends. It made the group so much more exciting.” Did I mention the absolutely amazing time that we had? We did have the best time you guys, retreat is everything. She said, “Kym is so sweet, hospitable and just a wonderful person. She knows how to throw a party.” And that I do, you guys.

And she goes on, “Next month, I will be joining my third session with Kym. I will be in another six month alumni group. I have my list of goals and I will reach every one of them because I trust Kym and I trust myself so much. I’m not the same person that I was a few years ago, I’m better and I’m not done yet.” So that was from one of my clients who I love dearly.

And so with that I just want you to be assured and inspired that group coaching is for you and absolutely change your life. You’ll love it. It’s so different than what your brain wants you to believe it is. It will absolutely change your life for the better. Every single week you’ll just have huge aha moments. So thank you, my sweet April for that beautiful, inspiring, encouraging, motivating review.

And now I’m going to read you the second one and then we’ll get to true friendship. So the second one is from my friend and cohort coach. So first of all, she found me because we were in the same mastermind. I didn’t know her yet, but she reached out to me on Instagram and just started to ask me questions. And so she came on my radar and I was like, “Oh my gosh, well, you’re adorable.” And so once we found out that we were both going to the same mastermind event in Nashville, we got to meet for the first time. And I just fell so in love with her. She is incredible.

She’s in her 40s. Her name is Erica Tingey and she is, I want to call it compared to me, an extreme athlete, but she’s a professional athlete. And she’s also a coach for women who want to get really good at mountain biking because she is an excellent mountain biker, she’s so badass. She lives in Park City, Utah and is so athletic and is, I want to say, a world class snow skier as well. So water skier, snow skier, runner, mountain biker, every kind of sport I’m sure she excels at.

And not only that, you guys, she could be totally a model. I don’t know if she’s ever been a model, but I think she’s 6 feet tall, she’s absolutely stunningly beautiful. She’s very fit, extremely fit and muscular. Has a great sense of style. She has amazing energy. So she is just someone that will be inspiring to me as well for the rest of my life. But this is what she wrote on my podcast review.

She says, “Kym’s podcast is the best part of my week. I have many mentors in my life that inspire and teach me. However, Kym is the shining star that rises above the rest of them. She is showing me what’s possible in my 60s and beyond. I’ve generated a whole new self-concept after finding her work and thoughts. I found out that I can drop the worry about anything. I discovered that I don’t ever have to feel left out again or feel FOMO again. I realized that I create the fun and I am 100% happy to be me, hanging out with me. These are ideas I’ve heard before, but somehow they’ve landed differently for me hearing them from Kym. Take a listen to this podcast, be inspired, and use the concepts in your life, it will change, I promise. I’m a fan of Kym for the rest of my life .” And Erica, I’m a fan of you for the rest of my life.

So thanks for listening and indulging me with these reviews. I think they’re important. They’ve been so amazing to read every day. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time and energy to review. It’s so important for a podcast to get rated and reviewed, because then how the analytics work, it just pushes it out to more like-minded women. So thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ll be reading more in the future. And let’s talk about true friendship today.

I’ve been coaching a lot on this topic, and so I thought let’s talk about it. I’m just going to give you a few of my thoughts and how far I’ve come as far as what I think it means to be a true friend. And how different I think about friendship now than I did even five years ago, 10 years ago. So I think at 62, the way I think about friendship is that the better friend I become to myself, the truer I am with me, the better friend I will be to everybody else and the truer friend I will be to them.

So I do think about The Four Agreements, if you haven’t read The Four Agreements, the little book by Don Miguel Ruiz, it’s just one of my staple books. I know I’ve told you about it several times but these are agreements that I think about often. And these are agreements that I’ve made with myself. And these are agreements that have affected the way that I think about friendship with girlfriends now.

So in a nutshell, the first 50 years of my life, I will say, at least, I got my validation, how I thought about myself, how I felt about myself mostly from my girlfriends. That was a good thing and a bad thing. It worked for me until it stopped working. I thought I was really good at friendship. I mean I really was good at friendship. I had a lot of friends. And that work, that served me well for a very, very, very long time.

Also the flipside of that coin is I over-functioned to keep these friendships, to maintain these friendships. It took a lot of my energy and a lot of times I would betray myself because I was afraid that someone wouldn’t like me or wouldn’t invite me. Those were the two biggest fears of my life, honestly, is that someone wouldn’t like me and say bad things about me to someone else, gossip about me. And I wouldn’t be included in the parties, in the vacations, in the gatherings, in the groups for lunch. I wouldn’t be invited.

Those were my two biggest fears that drove me and kept me over-functioning in all of my girlfriend relationships. And I have no regrets about that. And if you’re in that place right now, I just am telling you this story because I want you to see it. I want you to realize this is what’s happening. If you are betraying yourself, if you are hanging out with women, you leave feeling betrayed, you leave feeling like you weren’t your best self, you leave feeling hurt, with hurt feelings.

I want you to look at that. I want you to notice that and I want you to know that that’s not true friendship. That isn’t true friendship. So going from that to where I am now was difficult. I had to be willing to let it all go. Let’s say I had 100 friends, which I probably did. I had to be willing, I had to risk all of the friendships to figure out who I wanted to be in the second half of life. Who my highest self was, who I wanted to become, why I was betraying myself, why I was over-functioning in so many relationships. And why I was so driven by the fear of being left out or being talked about.

I was driven by those two fears, which I know a lot of you are and I 100% understand that. But I want to tell you there is a way that you don’t have to do that ever again to yourself. You do not have to betray yourself or compromise your values or your self-respect and your regard, your unconditional love for yourself. So this is what I want you to know for sure. Be willing to risk those friendships and then the true friendships eventually will rise to the top.

So part of my story is I went from 100 friends to now outside of my family, because I consider me my best friend and my family my best friends. But as far as girlfriends go, out of 100 friends that I over-functioned in so that I wouldn’t be left out, so I would feel validated and loved and included. I hoped that no one would say bad things about me. Three friends, you guys, since 2020. So I would say in the last four years, three friends have kept rising to the top and I have so appreciated this process, oh my gosh, this feels right.

This feels like a true friend, a true friendship involves two people. A true friend, maybe it only involves one person. So here are my thoughts about this. I had to become and I know I say this a billion times and I say it over and over and I know it feels complicated. But I had to learn how to become my own best friend first, how to tell myself the truth, how to be honest with myself, how to just be super clear and clean with myself first. How to not betray myself anymore.

And this is where the four agreements come in, how to be impeccable with my word to me and to everyone else. So that’s my agreement number one and I am literally going to read the little synopsis from the book, The Four Agreements, because this is what I’m just going to encourage you with. These are the four steps to true friendship.

And the first step is, these four agreements with yourself is step number one, is making agreements with yourself, to be your highest self for yourself with yourself. So the first agreement that I made with myself is to be honest with myself, which we call it in the book, be impeccable with your word, speak with integrity, say only what you mean, avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Oh my gosh, you guys that chokes me up reading that. That has changed my life more than anything else and it has changed all of my friendships because I trust my word. I trust what I say to myself and I trust what I say to everybody else. I do not agree. If I don’t agree, I don’t say yes. If I mean no, I say no. I’m just honoring my word. I’m honoring me and that brings a level of friendship to me that I trust and that I love and that I respect. I highly respect, I highly regard. I 100% trust myself, and it all starts with being impeccable with my word.

The second one, the second agreement, in the four agreements that I made to myself, I agreed and I wrote it down every day until I had a new neural pathway. Don’t take anything personally. You guys, this is a game changer. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a practice for the rest of our lives. Along with being truthful and honest and impeccable with my word, I started seeing when I was taking things personally, when I was getting my feelings hurt.

And then instead of being mad at myself, instead of being mad at them, instead of being critical and judgmental, instead of talking about it to someone else other than my coach. I just started getting curious about it. Why were my feelings hurt by this friendship over and over and over again, what was actually happening here and why was I doing this to myself? So this is what the book says in a synopsis, don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. Your friends aren’t doing or not doing anything because of you. They’re doing it because of the way they’re thinking and feeling about themselves.

It’s the relationship they have with them, that’s why they’re being who they’re being in the friendship with you. So nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. Listen to that again. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. Just wow, wow, wow, that alone will change your life. That is a work, that is a process.

That is a daily habit to retrain your brain to think about yourself differently and to not use the words and actions of other women, other friends against yourself. Don’t take things personally. I had to unfollow mostly all of my friends on Instagram because I knew that I would take things personally when I saw them having parties without me, having lunches out without me, groups of friends, just all the things and me not being a part of it. I knew I would be using all of that against myself until I got healthier.

So I just want you to know that there’s things that you probably need to take action on that will be so helpful for you so that you can start retraining your brain to not take things personally.

And then the third agreement is don’t make assumptions. We assume things and we use that against us. We assume they don’t like us. We assume they’re talking about us. We assume that we’re not good enough. We assume that we don’t fit in. And none of that is useful for us. So the agreement we learn to make with ourselves is don’t make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want first of all with yourself, get curious with yourself. Ask questions and answer them between you and you.

And then express what you really want. Decide what you want, what do you really want? It might not have anything to do with other girlfriends. It might have to do with maybe you need to start doing things by yourself and get braver. But you have to learn how to communicate with yourself first. And then communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstanding, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

And I’ll say that about all four of these agreements, you will completely transform your life. I could go on and on about the assumptions one.

And then always do your best is the fourth agreement. Your best is going to change from moment to moment. It will be different when you are healthy as opposed to when you’re sick. Under any circumstance simply do your best, you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret. So don’t use any of these tools that I teach against yourself to judge yourself and criticize yourself. Self-loathing, self-doubt, self-negative talk, that’s our biggest enemy. It’s our brain doing that.

The stronger, the better we get at loving ourselves and seeing ourselves honestly with love and compassion and then giving ourselves credit for how far we’ve come and learning how to be our best friend and our best cheerleader, our best validator. And we start taking action from that source of energy that we create in ourselves from this true friendship that we build with ourselves, it will blow your mind.

You will find yourself in different relationships and different friendships and it will be on purpose because you will be attracted to different kinds of people. And the friends that you’ve had for a long, long time that you’ve invested a lot in, that you’re just so lurry to give up because of the investment and because of the story you have and because you feel like it would have been a waste of time if you don’t just keep dragging them along with you. Maybe they don’t even want to come along with you.

I want you to realize you’re more important than all of that. And it’s worth the risk to figure out what you want moving forward. Risk the friendship and the true friendships will rise, will keep rising, will keep presenting themselves to you. And this feels healthy. This feels best. This feels right.

So I was going to tell you a story. I’m not going to tell it to you now because I’m out of time but I promise you, I will next time. But what I really want you to understand today is that you cannot have healthy, true friendships with other women until you have a healthy true friendship with yourself first. It will change everything for you. You will find yourself not feeling left out. You will find yourself including yourself wherever you want to be included and you will find yourself not getting your feelings hurt hardly ever.

And if you do feel that sting, that feeling in your body that you know so well, it may come every once in a while but it won’t even be a problem for you. You’ll go, “Yeah, that’s alright. I see what I did there. I had an expectation and that’s fine, that’s okay. She doesn’t have to do that. I don’t have to be included.” In fact, I really wouldn’t even have said yes if I was invited because I’m impeccable with my word. I wouldn’t even have wanted to go to that. I have other plans between me and me that I would rather do.

So I just want you to know how everything absolutely changes when you clear up your agreements with yourself first. And the four agreements is the perfect amount of agreements. It covers all of our issues that we have in our friendships. And it always starts with me. It always starts with you. And the more you grow your self-concept as a friend, because I can tell you guys, 100%, I am the best friend. I am the truest friend. I love who I am in my girlfriend friendships because they can trust me, they know they can trust me. I would never betray either one of us in a friendship.

That’s the kind of friend that I draw to myself and we’re rare. That’s probably why I don’t have a lot of friends, but I’m calling all the women in my life, even my clients, even though I’m their coach, I love them as a friend as well. And it doesn’t mean we’re going to spend a bunch of time together outside of coaching, but I see them. I love them. I’m to be trusted. But I have met a lot of new friends and Erica Tingey is one of them. She’s in my mastermind and she’s one of them.

And I have some friends in my mastermind and in this coaching world that I’m in that I love who I am in the friendship. I love that our energy is very like-minded so we’re drawn to each other. But we’re drawn to each other in a true kind of way where we’re going to be here forever, whether we talk once a year, once every 10 years, it doesn’t matter. And we have just zero expectations of what we’re to provide for each other. We’re not here to validate each other.

We’re here to love and to enjoy and to support each other, and to show each other what’s possible when we’re being our best self, our highest self. I call that true friendship, I love that. So I feel a lot more confident about friendship now because I trust myself so much. I love who I am as a friend. I trust myself as a friend. I do not say yes, when I don’t want to do stuff. I just love everybody that I’ve ever been friends with and I cheer them on, but I don’t really think about them.

And I think that’s one of the beauties of I just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what other women and other groups of friends are doing anymore. So I just don’t feel left out. I don’t get my feelings hurt because my life is so full, so fun, so fabulous. And anything I do choose to do with a girlfriend is so on purpose and it’s for the benefit of both of us. We’re just drawn together to lift each other up.

Those are my thoughts for you today. I hope those were mind blowing a little bit, encouraging, motivating, challenging for you. If you want to make some changes in some of your friendships, I say go for it, risk the friendship because you’re worth it. It’s hard to change and create and evolve a new kind of life for yourself when you’re so attached to so many friends who do not want you to change.

So I just want you to just roll that around in your head a little bit and be brave enough to risk the friendship for your sake, you are worth it, your highest self is worth it. And you’ll be 100% glad you did. Alright, I love you so much. Thanks for showing up today. Share this episode with anybody that you know would benefit from it. Thanks for all the amazing five star ratings and beautiful words of review, keep them coming in. I so appreciate you all. Have a fabulous week and I’ll see you next Thursday.

If you love this podcast, I invite you to come work with me. Go to kymshowerslifecoach.com, sign up for my next group and retreat, and let’s create your dream life together.