That Girl Radio

JanYouary: Know Your Roles

• Rikki Lee • Season 3 • Episode 18

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Navigating the stormy seas of platonic relationships requires a keen sense of self and the courage to anchor down with the right crew. You're not alone if you've ever felt the weight of trying to be all things to all people, and in this heart-to-heart, I'll share how I learned to differentiate between those who drain us and those who sustain us. My mother's legacy of love through service has been my compass in seeking out relationships that are reciprocal, and I'll divulge how maintaining grace amidst pettiness has brought about an empowering sense of self-worth.

Every friend is a choice, and some choices are tougher to make than others. In the throes of life's challenges, we all need our 'sisters in Christ'—the ones who hold us accountable and push us toward our potential. I'll take you through the intricate dance of vulnerability and communication that builds these irreplaceable bonds, and I'll get candid about when it's time to release the 'dead weight' friends who keep us anchored in the past. The art of friendship is a two-way street, and I'll reveal why selective access to our lives is vital for nurturing a community of mutual respect and care.

Lastly, we'll chart a course for surrounding ourselves with the shining stars in our galaxy. It's about trusting in a higher power to guide our judgments and learning to set boundaries that protect our peace. Let's ponder the roles people play in our lives—some fleeting, some permanent—and why not every departure needs its press release. This episode isn't just talk; it's a lifeline to those ready to refine their circle with intentionality. 

Did you enjoy today's episode? Leave Rikki a voicemail about what you took away to be featured on the next episode.
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Speaker 1:

Hey guys and welcome back to Daco Radio. It is your lovely host here, ricky Lee, and for today's episode of January, I want to talk about knowing your roles. Okay, I'm not talking about job roles, I'm talking about your roles in relationships. And for today's episode, I'm not sure if I'm going to do as much of a deep dive into romantic relationships, because I think that is something that we can dedicate to a whole other podcast episode. But for this particular episode, I want to focus on platonic relationships, specifically relationships that are long term, because, if I know better than anyone, friendship breakups are truly hard. They are one of the hardest things that I've ever had to experience, and I've experienced a few in this lifetime, and it was always because I either outgrew a person or, you know, circumstances just didn't really allow for us to continue being friends. And navigating that sort of uprooting of you know, memories and laughter and love that you had with the person and having to act as though you know you both were never as close as you were, is really, really hard. But when you navigate through this life knowing the role in which you play in the people's lives that you occupy spacing in particular you can feel a lot less pressure to be perfect, to be everything for every person, and also put less pressure on those around you to be everything for you. I think because I am someone who is a jill of all trades and a master of none.

Speaker 1:

Often in a lot of my relationships I am required to give a lot, and in some spaces it's not in ways that I particularly would like to. But because I am a giving person and I am kind hearted, I will over extend myself for the sake of love, because my love language is gift giving, my love language is acts of service, and so if you ask something of me, I'm going to honor my word and I'm going to do what I can to make you happy, because that is what was modeled for me as a kid. My mother filled in the spaces by doing. She couldn't be everything for my sister and I as a single mother, but she would just do everything as much as she could and she would fill in the spaces with gifts and with her time, and she showed me every act of love. But acts of service I felt like was the most abundant source of love in my household. And in that same way, that is how I operate most well in relationships and a lot of times I overplayed and overstayed my role in some people's lives and it exhausted me and it made me very resentful towards relationships with certain types of women.

Speaker 1:

And now I'm in a place where I'm trying to recover and learn how to navigate relationships with women, because I would say the relationships that I navigated before that were rather toxic and I overplayed my role was with girls. There's a difference between girls and women. Women give into relationships, they don't just take. When it's one-sided and we have a conversation and I'm giving all of the thoughts, I'm giving all of the tea, I'm giving all of the space and you're just taking it up, it's just like is this a friendship or is this, like you know, a convenience ship? I'm confused.

Speaker 1:

You know, when you learn to calibrate your senses, to pick up on the fakeness and the phoniness, you'll start to be able to play your role a lot better. And God's girl, aka that girl, does not do tick for tech. I'm not gonna go as low as you went. I'm gonna play my role, but I'm never gonna go low. You feel me, I'm not a dirty player. God has called me to be a woman of grace and for me to have favor. I have to move in such a way that models how I should have been treated, and so I think that I am blessed today. Forget think I know that I am blessed today because I have chosen the high road, the holy road. On so many different occasions when I could have gone to hell, I could, you went low, I could have gone to hell in this situation, but I chose peace and I chose to be a woman that stood on godly business and was not going to indulge in such petty behavior, going back and forth with people online. You know trying to go back and forth over this and over that, because it's just not worth it. At the end of the day, when you play your role, you know what you bring to the table and somebody is playing in your face. Just remove yourself from the situation because, at the end of the day, you were the MVP.

Speaker 1:

A lot of the times when people act like that and they play in your face is because they know the type of value that you bring to the table. They know the type of value that a lot of other people seeing you and on the day to day, they want to diminish that. They want to diminish your light and make you feel less than so, they. They can feel bigger and that's another difference between a girl and a woman. A woman can sit next to you and put you on a pedestal and not feel like it puts her on the ground. You get what I'm saying. A girl will sit next to you, see your worth and, because other people put you on a pedestal, will try to pull you down, and I think that that is truly it's sad and it's indicative of a lot of women's maturity level, because when you see someone's blessings as an indication of your lack, you have to understand that you can't be around me.

Speaker 1:

I really do have to listen and pay attention to a lot of the conversations and things that people have, because a lot of times people will never have anything negative to say about you, because they can't have anything negative to say about you, but you have to listen to the things that they say about other people and man, oh man, oh man. When you start to listen to that and you think to yourself like this is really how you think, it starts to make people much more unattractive and you just have to start to lessen your role. You might have been a chief people officer up in their life, but now we're just gonna be an associate. You feel me like I can't even. I can't even be chilling with you like that at executive board meetings and chilling and going on vacations with you. We can't be doing that. I'll just be an associate. I'll see you when I see you, like it's just. It is what it is.

Speaker 1:

I was talking to my good friends about this concept today and I just thought it was so good, because so many of us are playing a full-time role and a lot of people's lives when we should really be only playing part-time. They don't deserve all of you. They don't deserve you all the time. Overplaying your role and people's lives is a way of saying I willingly give you my power, I willingly submit to you and I am at your beck and call to do whatever you need me to do because at the end of the day, while God hasn't called us to be tick for tack kind of people, at the end of the day you do not need to over extend yourself in spaces that are not serving you and not serving your growth and not serving your potential. I'm not going to exhaust myself giving to a friendship that is doing nothing but taking for me. I just can't, and I feel like God has made it extremely evident for me that there is a complete difference between someone being an anchor for me, for you, and someone being dead wait for you, and when you can distinguish between the two, you can honestly set yourself free.

Speaker 1:

I have had situations where friends have been an anchor for me, and those are what I like to call my sisters in Christ, because I can be vulnerable and share things that I am going through, and, while they may also be going through things too, we can be there for each other and it's just this beautiful space that is shared, that is intimate and nothing but loving. It's so unconditional and that is the type of place that I am willing to overplay my role, because they have been there for me. But when you're in a space where you're giving and you're sharing and you're being vulnerable, and because there's so much more to friendship than just going to brunches and going to birthday dinners and going out together, there's the portion that happens in the level of communication that you have, the type of communication that you have, the respect within the communication that you have, and that is really what provides depth for relationships for me, and it starts to become dead weight and not of an anchor when the person won't allow you to move forward, when the person won't allow you to evolve. They want you to stay complacent and they're they're weighing you down and it's like you're trying to move forward and get to the next page in your life and they want you to stay on chapter five and it's just like, well, I've been in the writer's room with God and we're over here, you know, pre-planning for book two, three and four, and you're sitting here trying to get me to stay in chapter five because this is where we've been and it's been fun and we've been doing this and we've been doing that. And you know you're also afraid of your own potential. So you haven't even consulted God about what's what's to come for the next chapters of your life hell, even the next book. But because I'm your friend, I'm willing to sit here in this space with you and support you and try to get you to understand that we have to move along. But there's only so much time that you can spend back in chapter five before the book deal is closed.

Speaker 1:

Guys, like God's not going to sit here and wait for you to decide that you're ready to arrive and arise to the occasion for your purpose. When you play in his face for so long, it's just like well, if you want to surround yourselves yourself by fools and you want to surround yourself by people who are nothing but dead weight to you, then how about you just stay right where you are and I'll show you what that feels like to have nothing but dead weight around you. And I've been there. I've been there in times in my life where I've had so much upward mobility. I was like trucking along and I was consulting God and we were in the writer's room, just kind of like figuring out and crafting and constructing, like okay, who are the next characters that are going to be in this next chapter? Like what's to come, like what jobs are we going to be doing? You know what kind of involvements are we going to have? And it was like I had in mind what my future was going to look like and he was at the very center of it.

Speaker 1:

And then, when I wasn't willing to cut those ties that he told me were dead weight, I ended up being stuck in a place when it could have taken me what six months to get to where I am right now. It's taken me about seven years because I was distracted. I had dead weight around me that wasn't feeding into who I could become. They saw who I was right then in that moment and that was enough. And it was just like we want you to stay.

Speaker 1:

Just like that, like you can't get too too, too big, your head can't get too big. Like we need you to stay right here right now. You're successful right here and I don't want you to go anywhere else and I feel like a sister in Christ, I feel like a woman of God. She is not going to require you to be stagnant. She will be your anchor and help you stand tall when you don't know where to go, when you're lost, when you feel like all is all is done and you can't keep going, she will be your anchor and remind you that you know what girl you got this. I'm not going to allow you to sink ship like I'm here for you. We don't figure this out and let's go.

Speaker 1:

That's where you overplay your role, because she's overplayed her role for you. She didn't have to be that kind of woman. She didn't have to be that kind of friend to you, but she was, and so I will always ride and die for women that are like that in my life, because you didn't have to, but you chose to, and that's what makes it all the more special. And so I don't complain when people do the bare minimum in my life, because all I have to do is play my role. I know that I don't give the bare minimum in any facet of my life. I am someone who is very abundant. I have a lot to give, I have a lot to offer and I'm not going to withhold back what I can offer. But what I can do is withhold my access, and you will not have access to me in a full-time capacity when you are not qualified for a full-time role within my life. It just doesn't make sense, because why would I give you access to the resources, the love, the care, the types of talks that we can have, if it is not mutual, if it is not a situation where you know I would be able to call you and get the same sentiments? And once you realize that and you experience that quite a few times in young adulthood you will start to learn that you know the saying is true birds of a feather flock the same pretty much. I mean, that's not the exact saying, but you always have to remember that and I will never forget.

Speaker 1:

After a party in high school, I had gone out with my cousin and a girl that I used to be best friends with was there and I was in the middle of talking to my cousin and the girl came up to my cousin and just started talking to her, as if to cut me off and cut me out, when originally the two of us were engaging. And in that moment I was so hurt because one I'm like why? To my cousin I'm like why would you engage in a conversation with her when it's clear that she's trying to be a main girl? But I just walked away. I walked away and I had to remember my why and I had to remember that while this doesn't feel good, while this is low, you can't go low. You just have to rise above, because that's what people want from you.

Speaker 1:

When people are dead weight and they realize that you realize it they're gonna be upset. When you choose to remove that dead weight from your life, they're gonna do everything to criticize you and bash you and say that you're a bad person that you're weird, that you're this, that you're that because you've chosen to remove them from your life. But at the end of the day, I had to do what was best for me and I think she was really operating from a place of hurt and pain because I decided to no longer be friends with her and so maybe that was her way of coping. But I do remember going home and sharing that with my mother, and that was the first day she said to me that where pigeons whoa, where eagle, soar pigeons cannot fly. And I now have a tattoo on my arm of an eagle because I constantly have to remind myself that I am called for better and I realized that my favor isn't fair. But the reason because I'm favored is because I move with the utmost grace.

Speaker 1:

I've had such weird things happen to me. I've had people hurt me in the most outrageous ways and if I was to tell you the stories, you guys would be very upset. But because I know these people and they're living and breathing and a lot of times I still loosely engage with them. I would never try to bash anybody online or anything like that. But just knowing that in real life people can be cruel, they can be cruel and you can overplay your role in their lives. You can speak nothing but highly about them and the whole time, while they're giving you a gift in your face, they're stabbing you in your back. It's like a double-edged sword, and so you have to be constantly listening in to God and asking for him to remove people who are not for you and saying that you are willing to move forward, no matter who he writes off Like.

Speaker 1:

I feel like God has truly been shawnda rhymes a couple of times when it comes to my story, because when I tell you it's like back to back to back to back to back, characters would just fall out and I'm just like, whoa, wait a minute. God like this is crazy, what are you doing? But what he's doing is stripping me of a lot of the things that I once knew, that dead weight, so that I can make room and also cut such strong ties to the place where I once was, because he's taking me to somewhere new. And, if you ever like, notice, it's so much harder to move forward when you have strong ties. That's why long-distance relationships are so hard, because it's just like I don't want to leave my boyfriend. I don't want to leave my girlfriend like I want to be close to them. I don't want to, you know, not take this opportunity.

Speaker 1:

But when God starts stripping people from around you, just know he's preparing something for you and you. You got to get ready and he's. He's eliminating all distractions and he's gonna keep a few who are going to be evidently the anchors in your life that are gonna keep you and a firm foundation to remind you of who you are. And I like to call those like my little divine appointments, and he'll sprinkle in some new ones, he'll bring back some of the old ones, but they are simply put divinely and in the divine timeline to come back and speak life into you and just be like wow, I forgot who I was, let me get back into it.

Speaker 1:

Because whoo I, when I'm, I'm saying like when you are surround yourself with people who make you forget who you are. It's almost like dang. How did I do that? Like? How did two years go by and I allowed myself to be the butt of every joke? How did two years go by and I allowed myself to be a part of such weird dynamics? Like how did that happen?

Speaker 1:

And but once you get that wake-up call you realize that it's worth experiencing the bad for you to finally get to a place where you do meet your anchors and your divine appointments, to know how to be a good friend. You'll know how to play your role because you've seen all of the bad habits, all of the bad traits, all of the bad conversations and whatever else that happened to make the previous situations go sour, and I feel like I have endured relatively horrendous friendships from high school to also in college to finally be able to say I truly think that I am a phenomenal friend because I've experienced the utmost pain from friendship and I know how I don't want to be treated and I feel like when you experience that, it just it forms a new perspective on people and for a lot of people it may harden you, it may make you want to not be friends with women, but I think as women, that is the most beautiful thing that we have is our friendships and our sisterhood and our ability to be formable with one another. And, you know, cast our worries aside and come together and, you know, pray together and so many different things to build community, and I don't want us to feel that way about one another. So you just have to know how to play your role and be intentional about not looking backwards and always being ready to move forward, because a lot of us I talked about this in the last podcast episode are trying so hard to rewrite old chapters when we need to be looking to write our next chapters. And it's hard to move forward when you still have, you know, ties to things that happened in the past.

Speaker 1:

You have characters that are traveling over from previous chapters and you're trying to figure out where they're gonna fit in in the next and it's just like, how does this all play out? But you have to trust God. You can't question anything, because what's for you is for you. Look, I'm gonna play my role. Just tell me. Let me know God, tell me if he is for me, tell me if she is for me. Remove them right now, like I will have the utmost peace, so long as I know that I am surrounded by those who you call to speak life into me.

Speaker 1:

I don't want people who are here to split your seeds of doubt. I've had enough of that, and so I'm very, very, very protective of what I allow myself to consume and to hear and digest on the regular, consistent basis, because your thoughts become your reality. And if the people that are around me think negatively of me, what do you think my reality is gonna become? I want people who think highly of me around me, and if they don't think highly of me, then maybe I need to change some of the things that I'm doing. But regardless, I say all this to say you have to know your role and be okay with removing yourself from a CEO level role, full-time role in people's lives, to a part-time role.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes it's just gonna happen. The demotion is gonna happen, and you don't have to have a conversation about it all the time. You don't have to say oh girl, I'm not friends with you, no more, we're done, no, bars like you don't have to do that. You can just simply ask God for a graceful exit and say you know what, god, I don't think I see this relationship serving me that much anymore and so I'm just gonna walk away from it. I'm gonna take some time away. I'm gonna, you know, take a step back and this will be part-time and I'm gonna give my time to something else, to another relationship and that has served me so well in this life.

Speaker 1:

Everyone doesn't deserve a conversation or an explanation from you on as to why you're doing what's best for you, because it's not even about them, it's about you. Like you're doing, your safeguarding yourself from them, you're safeguarding yourself from their self-destruction, yourself safeguarding yourself from their narcissism, your safeguarding yourself from their negativity, like whatever it is. You don't have to have a discussion about it. Babe, when you call me and you want to do this and that I'm so sorry, I Just I'm sorry I can't and realize that no, is a Sentence, a complete sentence as that. It doesn't have to be a compound sentence, it doesn't have to be complex, it doesn't have to be anything. No, no, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me, but I Planned to spend this evening Inside. That's how you got to say and like if someone can't respect your boundaries, they're not your friend in the first place, they shouldn't have any role in your life, and that's just that. On that.

Speaker 1:

And the last piece is knowing that some people are gonna have contractual roles in your life. These are people who serve a very specific purpose, similar to in business. You don't hire a full-time plumber, you contract them out for when there is a need for that type of business. So a lot of us are contracting Party girls but then we're putting them on a full-time role and then upset because the conversation has no substance. The conversation is not going anywhere. It's still talking about what's going on at the club on this Wednesday. You can't be mad because you've given this person who only likes to party and that's not what you're interested in doing in your life anymore a full-time role and now you're upset because the Conversation is not serving who you want to become. And that's just in a very surface level example.

Speaker 1:

But there are a multitude of different ways that we can take contractual people and put them on a pedestal to a full-time role. And you have to stop promoting people who don't deserve the promotion and Beyond deserving, because everyone is deserving of community right. Everyone is deserving of relationships right. But we have to start to get real with ourselves and stop just being friends with people because we think they're pretty or they fit our Aesthetic or they would look good when we go out together. It's like who, at the end of the day, is going to be an anchor for you? Who, at the end of the day, can speak life into you when you forget who you are? Who, at the end of the day can be your match when you have no fire left in you. That's the type of friends, those are the type of people that you want to give full-time roles in your life.

Speaker 1:

And Now more than ever, my hiring process is starting to look like Google. It's starting to look like these cybersecurity companies, like this process is about six interviews long. It's no longer just oh hey, girl, like you're a friend of a friend, let's be friends. It's. It's very serious for the full-time role now, for part-time, for contractual. You want to go out, you want to go get brunch, you want to go get lunch, you want to go get our nails done, like, well, oh, you're in, girl, but when it comes to being my friend, for you to be my sister in Christ, for you to be something that I consider an anchor, I'm going to do a little bit more vetting, and I would like for you to do the same, because I don't want to waste my time spending my days Getting on FaceTime, sending texts and doing all of these things, foraging relationships with people who just tolerate me.

Speaker 1:

I want to build depth with people who genuinely love me deeply and would do anything to make me happy, to see me be happy and that takes being brutally honest and I think so many of us are afraid to be honest about how we feel about the people around us and it's not serving anybody. Y'all are hogging up the good people. Y'all are hogging up the fun people. Y'all are just hogging up people because you just want numbers, you want convenience, you want quantity. How about this year? We seek quality. Okay, we don't just want anybody getting hired for a full-time bestie role in your life. You need to get serious, because we've allowed a lot of people to slip through the cracks and have full-time roles in our lives and we know deep down inside we can't stand this person. We would just love more than anything for them to leave us alone, but we're too afraid to be honest, to be real and I'm here to tell you got to rip that band up, band-aid off this year and start getting serious about your roles.

Speaker 1:

So down an audit, use the life audit that I have in the B Mindful journal. If you haven't already gotten it, it's on the Ricky Lee calm Slash shop. It's the B mindful journal and there there's a life audit and I normally instruct people to think of the things and the People and the Viroom in the environments that they put themselves in and categorize them in joy, pain or growth. And this is a Venn diagram and for this I want you to just write down all the people in your life, all the people who are in your circle and All the people who are in your outer circle, and just kind of think for yourself like huh, does she bring me joy, does she bring me pain or does she bring me growth?

Speaker 1:

Hmm, it looked like this relationship brings me a lot of pain and then ask yourself, or ask God, how can I give this a graceful exit? Or am I willing to have the tough conversation and talk to this person about how they're bringing me pain so that it can start to become a more joyous and growing relationship For the things that are bringing you growth? We want that to stay. Those are full-time employees. Okay, those are your besties, the people that bring you joy. Those are like the part-time and full-time, depending on you know the extent of the joy that they bring you. You want to have those people around as much as possible. So I really do hope you guys enjoy today's episode about knowing your roles.

Speaker 1:

This is something in particular that I'm going to be putting into practice in this year's video Because I want my besties for the resties. But I don't need to rush the process. I really want to be intentional about the women that I am surrounding myself with, because I realize If I surround myself by fools, I will become a fool, but if I surround myself by wise, poised, graceful proverbs 31 woman I then will become just that. So I love you, guys. If you have an R-rated relationship I'm going to be putting into practice in this year of 2024 because I want my besties for the resties. So I love you guys.

Speaker 1:

If you haven't already followed us on Instagram at that girl radio, make sure to do so. If you're not following me, your lovely house for key glee co. Make sure to do so on Instagram. And If you haven't already left me a voicemail, please do so. This Friday I'm going to be doing a Q&A and advice session, so if you haven't had the chance to drop a question in the question box on my Instagram, you can still do so by dropping a voicemail into my voicemail box. There is a link in the show notes of every episode where you can drop a message and tell me a little bit about what you're going through, or just give me some words of encouragement, or even tell me how much you love the show. I will be featuring all of them in Friday's episode and I'll be diving into your Q&A. So I love you, guys, and I'll catch you bright and early tomorrow.