#196 - The BIGGEST lesson I've learned in business
As we step into the new year brimming with potential and opportunity, I find myself reflecting deeply on the lessons that have shaped my journey. I hope your festive season was everything you wished for, filled with joy, relaxation, and precious moments with loved ones. As we transition back into the hustle and bustle of business, I want to share a revelation that has been pivotal for me—a lesson that even after nearly six years in my current business and over a decade earlier in litigation, I continually revisit. It’s a lesson in boundaries and the complex dynamics between business and friendship.
As accidental friends—those we perceive as more than mere contacts due to regular business interactions—the line between professional relationships and personal friendships can blur all too easily. For years, I found myself repeatedly grappling with the notion that business partnerships meant true friendship. It was a cycle that led to misunderstanding whenever those connections inevitably shifted once the professional tie ended.
If you've ever stood at the crossroads of this confusion, thinking, "Of course, a business relationship doesn't equate to true friendship," or perhaps hoping it does, this story might resonate with you. Perhaps you've assumed that client relationships could seamlessly transition into more personal ones. While this can sometimes happen organically, my lesson is this: reciprocal expectations and interactions need to stand on their own merit outside any business agreement.
When engaging with wonderful clients and supportive collaborators, genuine rapport and trust naturally develop. We start seeing them as friends, leading us to neglect the fact that business dynamics should remain professionally defined. The real test comes when business needs change or conclude, revealing whether the bonds are genuinely personal or were simply circumstantial.
Time and time again, I found expectations becoming unclear and boundaries dissolving. Would I answer professional requests at all hours because we were 'friends'? How available should I be on weekends? These questions became a source of stress and disappointment, as unintentional as they were. Passion, dedication, and vulnerability are inherent in establishing business ties—it was clarity in boundaries that needed reinforcement.
This realisation, though initially hard-hitting, has gradually fortified my approach. Clearly delineating expectations and boundaries not only maintains professionalism but also preserves energy—so crucial for anyone dedicated to showing up as their best self. It has empowered me to deliver high-quality services confidently, without the emotional drain of uncertain personal-professional lines.
Perhaps you, too, have felt the strain of relationships built solely on business endeavours. Rather than exhausting you, understanding this lesson can be empowering if used as a catalyst for personal growth. Acknowledging this challenge doesn't diminish your care or moderation but rather enhances the quality and sustenance of both your work and personal relationships.
As we embrace this year, let's enter it with newfound awareness and openness to learning. Establishing clear boundaries in business helps not only in thriving professionally but also in managing personal energy efficiently. This clarity can transform disappointment into gratitude for the lessons learned, guiding healthier interactions.
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[00:00:00] Tracey: Hello everyone. And welcome to the new year. I hope you have had the best festive season and Christmas and a beautiful break, whatever that looks like for you. I appreciate this episode is coming to you before you hit the ground running in your business for the new year, but I wanted to share with you something today that I have been contemplating sharing for months and months and months, and I feel like the time's right because there's so much value in this for me.
[00:00:49] And I'm hoping that there'll be so much value in it for you. Just before the Christmas break, I shared with you an episode on my reflection and reset process, which is particularly valuable for me at that time of year. And I hope that you've listened to it and I hope you loved it.
[00:01:04] What I want to share today is the biggest lesson I've learned so far in my business, almost six years, because it's really important to me to remind myself of this. And it has been something that has come up on my What Didn't Work So Well list for the last few years running in my business. Not so much the year just gone, but certainly the couple of years before that.
[00:01:30] This lesson is something that kept appearing on my This Didn't Go So Well list. And if you listened to the episode for Christmas, this will make a lot of sense to you. If you haven't listened yet, please do. I talked to you in that episode about my reflection process at the end of the year and the process I go through to identify what worked and what didn't in business and in personal life to set myself up for success in the year to come. Much more detail in that podcast episode. [00:02:00] So the biggest lesson I have learned in business is that just because you do business with someone, doesn't make them a friend. My gosh, this is something I still need to remind myself of, even now, almost six years into this business, 12 years previously in litigation and dispute resolution and running that practice. It's a lesson that I've learned over and over and over again. And I can share that openly now that it has taken me so many times of having the same experience and getting really hurt and upset about relationships that I thought were friendships because we did business so regularly and so often and so well, and we connected and all the things only to then realise that in fact, no, that's not a friendship at all, because as soon as you stop doing business together, for whatever reason, it's not that, or you're treated a certain way. When you hear this for the first time, I'm sure you might be thinking either, duh, Tracey, of course, of course, it doesn't make them a friend just because you do business. Or you could be thinking, yeah, of course you can be friends with people you do business with. And absolutely both of those are perfectly valid.
[00:03:18] So I hope that you're listening to this and you're thinking, duh, of course, just because you do business doesn't make them a friend. I hope that that's you because it means you won't have had to have had the experiences that I've had or learnt the lessons over and over that I've had, which are unpleasant and not that great.
[00:03:36] Or you could be thinking, but you can be friends with people that you do business with. And I'm not saying you can't, you absolutely can. Of course you can. My point is the lesson I've had to learn is just because you do business with them, doesn't make them a friend. Friendships develop and nurture in their own way, and they don't automatically appear or automatically arise just because you're doing business.
[00:03:55] That's my point. It's really natural, I think, when we're working with [00:04:00] beautiful clients, and we're working with people that support us in our business, and we spend time with them, and we connect with them, and we develop a rapport with them. We trust them. We feel connected. We feel safe, often. I think there's often a natural tendency to think that that's a friendship, even when it's not.
[00:04:21] And that's where the big life lesson comes when you part ways and you realise, huh, there actually is no friendship there. There's nothing left. We've parted ways in the business context, but now there's nothing left personally. That can feel really upsetting. And that's the scenario that I'm talking about being my biggest lesson that I've learned in business over and over and over again, over more than two decades. I kid you not. I often say to my kids, and I say it on here sometimes, you don't need to do that to learn the lesson. You don't have to jump off a cliff to know it's going to hurt. Let's not all jump off the cliff. Okay. Learn from somebody else. Same thing goes for me here, Tracey, look at previous examples of this, look at what's happened in the past.
[00:05:01] Don't just dive in and wear your heart on your sleeve here and be so incredibly gracious and giving and all the things, because this is a business relationship. It's a lovely business relationship, but that doesn't mean it's a friendship. And the nuances here around where the line is, when to give more, when not to, has been really challenging for me over many, many years.
[00:05:25] And I'm really okay with admitting that now. I feel really vulnerable in saying so, but my intention here is to share with you my learnings here and going into the new year after having identified what has served me well and what hasn't, I know that treating people like friends just because we're doing business doesn't serve me well.
[00:05:49] Friendships can naturally grow and flourish in their own time, and that's beautiful and lovely as it should. And yes, I have those. I absolutely have those. But it's [00:06:00] the relationships that we treat as a friendship, just because we're doing business, which are the ones that can leave us hurt, exposed, sad, disappointed, all the things.
[00:06:13] What I discovered is that when I started treating a relationship or viewing a relationship as a friendship, just because we're doing business together a lot, but a friendship, it meant that boundaries were becoming blurred and expectations could become unrealistic. So when will I be available on Voxer?
[00:06:33] Will I respond to you on WhatsApp? It's 10 o'clock at night. Because we're friends, do I need to respond to this now? And that would become difficult for me to navigate. On the weekend, here you go, here's a really long message. I'm just thinking something through. Can I bounce this with you because we're friends?
[00:06:49] And I would give so much of my time into it, only to realise in fact, no, that's not a friendship. And because I viewed it as one, the boundaries became blurred. It was tricky to manage expectations, and now I feel really disappointed when the relationship took a different path to what I was expecting.
[00:07:06] Those lack of boundaries and unclear expectations would make it really tricky to navigate. I found time and time again. So the emotional vulnerability that would come with those relationships taking a path that I wasn't expecting or that I wasn't anticipating wore me down. I think is the best way to say it. It wore me down. But what I've done is I've looked at now and thought this is fantastic because the universe has delivered this to me to teach me a lesson, to teach me about self preservation, to teach me about the importance of boundaries if I'm to give a stellar experience to my clients and to businesses that I work with, if I'm to provide that stellar experience that I have a reputation for, and that I take pride in delivering, I need to make sure that my boundaries are clear, expectations are clear, and that I'm not leaving myself vulnerable, and I'm not leaving the relationship exposed.[00:08:00]
[00:08:00] So I feel like all of these lessons, the biggest lessons that I've learnt, have been experiences or lessons that the universe has presented to me, me. For my benefit, for my learning, for my growth. So I appreciate all of them. I actually genuinely have gratitude and I appreciate all of them. That said, I've got the lesson now.
[00:08:22] I don't need any more. And I have recalibrated how it is that I deal with these relationships. And I've got really strong boundaries now in my business around how it is that I connect with these beautiful people and how it is that I deliver. And when I don't deliver, I don't engage with my clients on WhatsApp.
[00:08:43] Just don't do it. I don't take instructions in Instagram. It's too hard. It blurs the lines. I don't do that. I don't take instructions on Voxer. It's not something I do. I have really clear parameters and really clear processes in place so that I can take instructions, give advice, deliver documents, deliver strategy in a way that supports the business and in a way that supports stellar service for my clients and for my business partners, it's the partnerships with other business owners that I work with. If I am consistent in that, delivery remains high, quality remains high and my expectations are managed and there's no disappointment because I'm not confusing the relationship.
[00:09:31] I'm not confusing it and letting the guard down and letting those boundaries get blurred. I'm not. So it's been very valuable. I think this is really important as a business owner to learn this lesson because it safeguards our professionalism and it safeguards the quality of the services that we provide.
[00:09:52] We always want to provide quality as service providers. We want to do our absolute best for every client that we act for or that [00:10:00] we work with. We always want to do that. And if we don't have an appreciation of what can go wrong, it can be easy sometimes to let the guards down and blur those boundaries.
[00:10:11] And that's when things can get a little out of hand, things can go awry, and there can be issues with service delivery. There can be issues with vulnerability, disappointment, and that's when the emotions come in. And in my experience, there's no good news stories at the end of that. So we want to avoid that.
[00:10:28] This is why this is such an important lesson that I'm choosing to share with you at this time of year, because I have no doubt that there'll be some of you listening along to this thinking, yes, Tracey, that's me. I've done that. Uh huh. It's happened to you too. My goodness. Okay. What can we do about this?
[00:10:43] Why is it important? Fantastic. This is a valuable lesson. That's what I'm hoping that some of you will be able to take away from this. We want to make sure we set ourselves up for success with clients. I talk about this a lot, so we don't want misunderstandings. We don't want situations to arise where we are delivering in a way that's not landing with our clients.
[00:11:04] By having solid boundaries and managing expectations well, we can set ourselves up and our clients for success and deliver the stellar outcomes. As you know about me, if you're a long time listener, you'll know I'm a very spiritual person. I'm not religious, but spiritual. And you'll know that I very much enjoy exploring the world of human design.
[00:11:23] It's been a game changer in the way I run my business. It's been a game changer in how I manage my energy and that flows on into my personal life. What this lesson that I'm sharing with you today has the potential to do, I think, because it has done for me, is it helps us better manage our energy because we're not spending time and energy worrying about what's gone wrong, in a situation with somebody who we've treated as a friend just because we did business.
[00:11:52] So much mental bandwidth can go into that when things go awry and you're feeling vulnerable and it's not going the way that you had expected or anticipated. It [00:12:00] chews up a lot of bandwidth. It takes up a lot of space. It chews up a lot of energy. I'm not about that. I'm all about managing my energy well, so I can show up to whatever I'm doing at any given point in time as my best self.
[00:12:16] And I'm a projector, which means I do that, I achieve those things, by managing my energy. That is absolutely the number one most important thing in me setting myself up for a successful day is managing my energy. So being really clear that just because I'm doing business with someone doesn't make them a friend doesn't mean they won't become a friend, but it doesn't make them a friend just because I'm doing business.
[00:12:39] That helps me preserve my energy because I don't need to give it any more thought than that. Clear boundaries, clear expectations deliver well every time. It's a win win both ways. It preserves the relationship. It preserves my professionalism and it preserves my energy. So that is what I wanted to share with you on this special first episode for the year.
[00:13:06] My biggest lesson I've learnt in business is just because you do business with someone doesn't make them a friend. I am hoping that you were able to take away some little nuggets of gold there that landed really well for you, particularly at this time of year. If you're in a situation where you're finding that there's been an energy drain on you because of a particular relationship, now might be the time just to pause and take stock and think about that relationship and think about the opportunity you have for learning and growth here.
[00:13:36] Because I always find that that, being able to reframe it and treat it as learning and growth opportunity, we can take so much more from it. So rather than exhausting us, it can be empowering us. Thank you for listening. Happy 2025 everyone.
[00:13:53] Thank you for being here. Thank you for choosing this podcast over the many, many, many others that I know that you have available to you. We are [00:14:00] certainly spoilt for choice when it comes to podcasting. I hope to have you with me throughout 2025. I have so much planned for you and I cannot wait to deliver more valuable episodes of the podcast, which will hopefully contain nuggets of gold that resonate for you, so you can implement them to move the needle forward in your business. Thank you so much for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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