Ep #52: How to Build Close Friendships

Katrina:      You are listening to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians podcast with Katrina Ubell, M.D., episode number 52.

Intro:          This is Weight Loss for Busy Physicians. The podcast where busy doctors like you get the practical solutions and support you need to permanently lose the weight and feel better, so that you can have the life you want. This is a resource you've been looking for to guide you on the journey to overcome your stress eating, and exhaustion, and move into freedom around food. Here's your host, Dr. Katrina Ubell.

Katrina:      Hey, my friend. How are you? Welcome to the podcast. So excited to be able to talk to you today. Today, as I'm recording this, is the last day of school before Christmas break, holiday break, winter break, whatever they call it. I wanted to make sure that I got this podcast recorded, because once I have kids home, it's going to be a lot harder. Next week, they'll be home when I'm recording. I'll have to figure it out. I'll have to send them somewhere so that they don't make it a loud podcast experience. Anyway, I wanted to share with you really quickly what I just did this last weekend. It was so super duper fun. One of my amazing clients has a husband who is on Broadway right now, but the coolest thing is that he is a musician.

There's this amazing new Broadway musical that just opened in November, so it's super new and it's called The Band's Visit and the band is actually on stage. He is part of the band and is actually on stage as one of the characters, so he doesn't actually talk, but he plays music on stage and off stage throughout the whole thing. It was super fascinating. A really, really beautifully done show. Funny, touching, wonderful music. I highly, highly recommend it. It's called The Band's Visit. You definitely should check it out. It's at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York. The other show that we saw while we were there was Dear Evan Hansen, which I kept thinking I needed to listen to the music beforehand, get to know it, find out more about it. Never got around to doing that, but it didn't matter.

It was totally great. We had these amazing seats. We were in the second row and the stage was like right in front of us. The person who played Evan Hansen was fantastic. I mean, it's super, super emotional, but really, really timely topics. Also, highly recommend. I did not wait in the long list to get tickets by any stretch. I just did StubHub and overpaid, which I highly recommend too if you just know you're going to New York for a certain weekend, you just get the tickets. It's worth it. The value's there. That's the way I look at it. I just know I want to see it. I don't care about getting the best price. Anyway, we did those two shows. It was so amazing. In between the two shows we had some Ethiopian food, which I've been wanting Ethiopian food since I went to Ethiopia in 2016 and it was so delicious.

This restaurant did not disappoint. It was called Queen of Sheba and it was actually really close to the Theater District, so we were able to just walk there no problem and walk back, because we did Dear Evan Hansen as a matinee and then the night show was The Band's Visit. Then the night before that we just walked around at Rockefeller Center and saw the display at Sachs and all those different iconic things to do at Christmas time in New York City. It was so great. It was even snowing a little bit and it was just really perfect. Really, really pretty. We took a walk through Central Park, that was so nice. I just love New York. I swear, I want to live there for at least a year at some point. I just love the energy of that city. I don't know if I could live there forever full-time. I always say, “I'd love to live in New York City if I had no kids and unlimited money.”

I think it would be fantastic, but that is not the case. Maybe sometime I can just do a little short-term kind of getaway to live there for a while. I love it. You know what else? At the museum … Okay, here we go again. You know what else? At the Museum of Modern Art, they have a exhibition going on right now about fashion as modern art. Another coach who you guys know too, Susie Rosenstein who was on this podcast a while ago talking about kind of the midlife funk, she is actually featured in that. I totally took a picture of me pointing to her article. Literally, they found her store on Etsy and put it in the MoMA as an exhibit. I mean, it was super, super fun. You know what was even cooler? Was we show up thinking like, “Well, let's just see, maybe they have a discounted ticket,” because we didn't have that much time to go through it before we had to be somewhere else.

It turned out that on Fridays it was free admission. We were like, “Oh, fantastic,” so we went through there and that was totally great too. It was really, really fun. For sure, you need to go see The Band's Visit. Definitely need to go see it, so good. Okay. Now, I want to talk to you about reviews really quickly on iTunes. I'm at 297 now, you guys, which is fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm getting to my goal of 500 and I wanted to talk to you. I have known about this issue for a little while, but I'm getting more emails and messages from you guys letting me know that you're struggling with it too. That sometimes on your phone you type everything in, everything's right there, and then you hit the post button and it just won't go. I've had people tell me it was on their phone, on their iPad, like the same thing, and it just wouldn't go through. I don't know why that is. Maybe somebody has some insider info into Apple. I have no idea.

What I do know is that a lot of people have a lot more success if they just do it on iTunes on their computer. Even if you haven't been on iTunes or opened that app up on your computer for a really long time, you can still go back to that and just search for Weight Loss for Busy Physicians, open up the kind of the big square picture of the … My image, open that up, and there you'll see ratings and reviews and you'll be able to type it in and post it a lot easier. If you are a PC person, you can download iTunes for PC as well. Doesn't mean you ever have to buy anything from them, or anything like that. You can just download it and do that. I know some of you have been really trying hard and I appreciate that so much. Just so you can cross it off your list, if you could do it on iTunes that might work better for you and I would so appreciate it.

I wanted to just read a short review for you guys today, because I wanted to let you know that not all of them need to be long. Really, anything you could write would be super helpful. The title of this one is, “Thanks Katrina,” and it's by Laybar, She writes, “I weigh less than I did before kids thanks to Katrina. It's been work, but integrating her principles has been key to my success. Now transitioning to maintaining my low weight and I'm so glad to have these podcasts to listen to regularly. Highly recommend to anyone trying to attain permanent change.” See, nice little short one, but look at that, right? If you're wondering, “Can I really do this?” Yes, you can. You absolutely can. I'm giving you all my best stuff for free here on this podcast. All you have to do is apply it and you can see these results too, so good.

Okay. Listen, today we're going to talk about friendships and we're going to talk about adult friendships, women friendships, lady friendships, things like that. Because I hear about this often and I really think this is something that a lot of women struggle with and they don't really feel like they can talk about it a lot. It really is a sore point for them. It's a sticking point. It's something that they struggle with and so I want to give you some good tools to help you with this if this is something that you struggle with as well. We all know people who stay close friends with their old friends. They are maybe for the last 20 years, once a year are having a weekend with this friend and that friend, or their friend from kindergarten, or people like that, or they have a really close friendship, relationship with their sister or their brother.

We think, “That would be so nice,” right? “We don't have that, so now what? I wish I had that. I wish I were that kind of a person.” I think that for physicians in particular, it's less likely for us to have those close connections for a lot of different reasons. We tend to move around a lot. We go all over the place for our education and then even possibly out in practice as well we're moving around. We definitely have limited hours available to us to interact with other women. We can be so tired at the end of the day that we just don't feel like we have the energy to put anything into somebody else, or we think we're already doing a terrible job taking care of ourselves, and our families, and keeping up with our work stuff, so it feels indulgent to spend time with friends.

I think another one is that a lot of us kind of find that most other women don't understand us, or I know that sometimes I would feel like once they found out I was a doctor that they acted kind of weird, or especially as a pediatrician they would think that I was judging their children, or how they were parenting all the time, or something. Which I of course wasn't at all. I always found that the women who were either doctors themselves, or married to a doctor, were the most normal. In the sense that the non-physician women who were married to doctors weren't impressed. They were totally like, “Yeah, you're a doctor too. Okay, whatever. Let's be friends.” It was not a big deal. I think there's so many other reasons too, or other kind of explanations why we maybe are less likely to have these close connections.

Ultimately, I think many of us are really lonely. We want connection with other women and we want it in a meaningful way. We don't want just the superficial, “Hey, how are you? Oh so busy. Oh, are things good? Oh, how are the kids doing? Oh, yeah things are good.” Not that kind of thing, right? We really want somebody that we can talk to, that we can share with. When we don't feel like we have that, then we turn to social media where we kind of know people, right? We know them in quotes. We, “Know them.” I think that that's like a friend buffer, right? It makes us think that we have friends, so we don't feel as lonely, but when it comes down to it, we wouldn't even know how to get it touch or contact most of these people if we really wanted to communicate with them.

They certainly aren't the people we're going to ask to watch our other kids for us while we run to the emergency room with our kid who just broke their arm, or something, right? I don't think it's a problem to have friends who are mostly virtual, if you actually really know them and develop real relationships with them. That probably includes seeing them in person from time to time. When you are, “Friends,” or connected with people online in different Facebook groups, or things like that, it still is more of a superficial interaction and then we aren't taking time that we could use to foster in real life relationships to do that, right? Instead, we're just spending that time on social media with a bunch of people that we feel like we know, but that we don't really know.

I think, I believe that it's important for us to have at least one person who's a good friend, really that we can confide in that will truly support us. That we can be honest with. That we don't feel like we have to put up a front, or make our lives look a certain way, or that we feel like that person's judging us, or is somehow not being a good friend. Years and years ago, I saw Brené Brown in an interview and she was saying how she felt that women were somehow getting this message that we were supposed to have so many, a dozen, or something, or more of really good close friends. She was saying that in her research that she found that if you can find one or possibly two good friends in your life, you're super, super lucky. That's the most that any of us can really expect or wish for.

Now, that doesn't mean you have more friends, or don't have more friends. It means that you just have a couple friends who are really, really close. The ones that you can tell anything to and will give you the shirt off their backs, basically. For some of us, I think that's our spouse or our partner, but a lot of people also argue that it's good to have a friend outside of the marriage relationship too. Not so you can sit there and complain about that person, but the marriage relationship is different, or some sort of relationship like that, and it's nice to be able to have somebody that you can talk to in a different way about what's going on in your life. I think that when we see other people who have these longterm friendships, or are getting together with friends from college, or high school, or even before that, I think it's easy to think that something's wrong with us if we don't have that.

That somehow we are failures as friends, or people just don't like us as much, or that there's something kind of fundamentally wrong with us, that we don't have that. I want to make sure that we work through that mindset. The way I look at friendship is that they have seasons and that they also have a lifespan. By seasons, I mean that there are times when maybe you're super connected, and you communicate a lot, and maybe you see each other in person a lot, and you do a lot of fun things together. Then, maybe things change. Maybe school's back in session. Maybe one of you moves a little bit further away. Maybe somebody's really busy at work for a while. Maybe one of you has some project that they have going on and they just don't have as much time, and so you aren't as connected with that person.

I believe that that's fine. We don't have to think that something is wrong. We don't have to think that our friend has to be always the same in terms of availability, or communication, or connection. At the same time, I do think that friendships have a lifespan. I do think that sometimes friendships kind of run their course, so to speak, and that can be totally okay. Just because we become friends with somebody, doesn't mean that now they have to become a lifelong friend with us. That's definitely happened with me, where there were friendships that I had that were maybe really, really close and intimate, that were revolving around a certain event, or a life event, school event, some sort of activity, maybe an activity that my kids were in, or something that I was doing. Then, life changed, and then those friendships just kind of dissolved.

What we found is that after that mutual connection no longer was something that was as important or something that we were spending time doing, we didn't really have enough left in common to keep us together as friends. This is all okay. That doesn't mean something's going wrong. It just means that that friendship now is coming to an end and it's time to look for another friend to take that person's spot and fulfill your need for friendship in the way that you need it now. How do we go about finding friends, right? I used to think it was so easy to make friends, right? Or relatively pretty easy and it is when you're in school, because you see people regularly and you're a similar demographic. You have a lot in common. Same thing in college and same thing in medical school.

Then we get to residency and basically who has time for friends? Of course, our resident friends are our real friends, because they're the people we spend the most time with and they're the people who really understand what we're going through. Then some people will move away, right? Have to start over. Or maybe you stayed put and all your friends from residency left. That's what happened to us. Then you kind of have to start over and some people find that they start as an attending, and they make a bunch of good friends as their coworkers, or in their coworkers, but not everybody connects with their coworkers in that way, or even really wants to. I don't think that that's a problem. If you just find you like keeping it kind of clean, like your coworkers are people you work with, and you have a certain kind of relationship with them that's not as friendly to just keep things clean and simple.

Then you want your friends to be people who are outside of work. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, if that's what you want. I also think that deciding to be friends with the people you work with is wonderful if they really are people that you connect with and that you want to spend time with. We want to find new women to be friends with and where are they? We've talked about this in my current coaching group and we kind of joke that we need like a Match.com for female friendships. We need some way to be able to connect with people, and find these people, and they're looking for friends too, and then you can meet them. This was the thing, we don't need Match.com, just like you don't need Match.com to meet your mate. There are other ways of doing it and that's what I want to talk to you about here.

In general, finding new girlfriends is very similar though to dating in general and online dating. These are the similarities. You have to put yourself out there. You have to be willing to be vulnerable, and to open up, and to share about yourself. You have to be willing to be rejected sometimes over, and over, and over again. That means you have to be willing to feel that rejection and feel the pain of it. You have to be willing to manage your mind through all of this. Because you have to remember that when somebody else isn't interested in being your friend, that literally has nothing to do with you. Has everything to do with them. We have no idea what's going on for them. Maybe they feel like they can't take on another friend. Maybe they … I mean, really, right? It could be any number of different things.

Maybe they just don't like you and that's okay. Maybe they think you're a certain way and you're really not. That's when we work on letting other people be wrong about us. In fact, when we try to convince people that we're awesome, we tend to come across as weird, and needy, and creepy, and they want to run the other way, right? What we want to do is work on showing up as our authentic selves, and being who we truly are, and attracting the kind of person who wants more of that, who wants more of what you have to offer in their lives. Also, just like dating, you need to determine what you want in the friend relationship. If you were dating, you would want to know what are you looking for? Do you want to get married? Do you want to just hook up with somebody? Do you just want to have someone to go to dinner with sometimes? What are you actually wanting?

I think a lot of us in terms of friends don't really know that. We kind of see what other people have and we think, “I should have some more friends,” and then we feel bad about ourselves. Versus really going, “Okay. Well, but what would that look like? If I had more friends, what would I do? Would I have parties? Would I invite them out, to go out? What would we do?” It's really important that you think about that. Do you someone to have a weekly girl's night date with? Do you want someone who's available to text back and forth with you all day long? Do you want to walk with somebody a few times a week? Do you want someone who has kids a similar age as you? Do you want someone you look forward to seeing just at organized events? Someone you can call on in an emergency to watch your kids for you?

Someone to go out with as couples, because then it's not just the friend, it's possibly her spouse as well? Do you want someone to go on vacation with, or travel with? It's really important that you think about all these things that you would love to have in this friend. Then you need to believe that this person exists in the world. That she is out there and she's looking for a friend too. She's looking for you, you just haven't found each other yet. It's really important that you believe that, because otherwise it's so easy for you to tell yourself that, “This person isn't even out there, so why bother?” Just stay at home, and never do anything, and never create that life that you want. I do want to just have you remember that you may actually already know this person that you want, okay? To be friends with. You may actually already be friends with her, so you may not even need new friends at all.

What you may need to do is just rekindle relationships and friendships that have gotten kind of stale and neglected over the course of time. You maybe kind of forgot about that person, or maybe in the past it was kind of hard to get together because of certain scheduling things, but now those things have resolved, but you always really enjoyed her company. You could really be served by thinking about those people and reaching out to them again. You might also be able to get what you need and want from a friend who doesn't live in town. It might be an old friend from a long time ago who lives somewhere else, but that you talk to, and text, and FaceTime with regularly. Then maybe you get to see them in real life once or twice a year. That can feed this need. That can make you feel less lonely.

Now that you know what you want from your new friend relationship, the question is often, “Where can I find them? Where are they?” This is where I want you to start thinking outside the box. I saw this sign at my children's school today I thought was so good. It said, “The only way to have a good idea, is to have lots of ideas.” I could not agree more with this. I want you to brainstorm places that you could meet other women and don't let your brain immediately tell you why something won't work, or that you already know that you don't like anybody there, or that that won't work because of this or that, or your schedule is too hard, right? I mean, our brains will immediately show us all the obstacles. I want you to forget about all the obstacles and just brainstorm.

What are all the things that you have been wanting to try or learn, but haven't? What kind of new hobbies would you like to develop? What could you do in terms of some sort of art, or crafting, or music, or nature activities, or physical activities like scuba diving, or something fun like that? What kind of social clubs or events could you attend or join? Maybe it's through helping your kids at school. Maybe it's by getting involved at your place of worship, or with your neighborhood association. Maybe it's by volunteering, or doing other forms of service that are important to you. Make a huge long list of places where women congregate, where they get together, and then let those ideas simmer in your head without immediately telling yourself why they won't work, okay?

It's really interesting, you think about that, that quote on that sign, “The only way to have a good idea, is to have lots of ideas.” There's somebody who I listen to, his name is James Altucher, and he loves to talk about brainstorming and your idea muscle, meaning your brain, really working that and coming up with new ideas all the time. He talks about how the vast majority of your ideas will be terrible. They'll be horrible, horrible ideas and that's okay. What you're going to find is that you're going to have that little needle in the haystack from time-to-time. He also talks about something he calls, idea sex, and what he says is that sometimes you have two terrible ideas, but then they mate and you get a great idea out of it.

I wanted to bring that up here, because it could be that you have this one idea that isn't going to work and this other idea that isn't going to work, but you can mesh those together and basically figure out a way to do something new, or different, or take elements of both of those and create something that will work. I want you to just let that marinate in your brain and come up with some of those ideas. The reason why this is important is you might have thought, “I do really like to knit, but I don't really do it very often, or I'd love to learn how to do that.” Then you decide to go to a weekly knitting group at a local store. Anybody can come in it. You can work on your project and if you have any questions you can get some help.

Through that process, you might meet somebody that you wouldn't ordinarily ever cross paths with. That's why it's so worth it to try all these different things. You may not have anything but knitting in common with them, but that may be the common thread, sorry no pun intended, that you really need to develop this great relationship. It might be really refreshing that it's somebody who's totally different than you. I want to make sure that you recognize too that you might not even hit it off with somebody immediately either. There are definitely people I can think of right now off the top of my head that I know, that when I first met them I was like, “I don't think this is going to be something that develops into anything.” Then they've turned into very, very good friends.

It's really, really important to just be open-minded and to promise yourself that you'll interact with a group, or a few people at least three to five times, maybe even more, before deciding that there's no friend potential there. That it's just not going to work out. That you want to try something else. It's important to recognize that people can be kind of weird at first, when you first meet them and not really show you who they are. You might be coming across that way too. I know that I can come across when I first meet people as somewhat kind of aloof and not that friendly, which you may think that sounds crazy because I'm so friendly on this podcast, but that's because I feel like I know you, right? Like I have this connection with you already. When I'm meeting people for the first time, or feeling kind of socially awkward, I can be quiet and I can see how I can come across in that way.

When somebody gives me the benefit of the doubt, and let's me interact with them a few more times, it gives me an opportunity to feel more comfortable and to show them who I really am. The way I think you should approach finding these friends, finding these people, is how I approach dating when I coach people on dating. This was basically the same thing. If you are needing some help with dating, this is the same thing that you do. You have to think about it this way, if you were to meet 100 women, it's probably pretty likely that you would like at least one of them enough to spend some more time with, right? To really start getting to know them. If you think 100s not enough, then maybe 150 or 200, right? You meet 200 people, there's probably one in there that you're going to connect with. Let's just say, 100.

What you then do is you make a commitment to yourself that you're going to meet 100 new women over the course of the next however long, six months, nine months, 12 months, whatever you think you can do. Then you manage your thinking, right? You get out there and do some things to meet these people. You put yourself out there and you ask somebody if they want to grab coffee with you. You ask them if they want to go for a walk with you, or something like that. Then rather than feeling bad about yourself when you see if that mom wants to grab coffee after school drop-off with you, the one free morning you have all month, and she turns you down, you just recognize, “Oh, she's not the friend, okay. I thought maybe she would be, that she might be and maybe I would get the bullseye on number one, but oh it turns out it's not her. Oh, okay. Onto the next 99 women to meet,” right?

It has nothing to do with you. It doesn't mean anything about you, or your likeability, or your lovability, or whether you're worthy of friendship, or whether you're accepted. It's so easy for us to go right into mean girl kind of thinking, back to middle school, and, “Fine. If you're going to reject me, then I'm going to reject you right back. You're stupid, and ugly, and all of that,” right? That's what we have a tendency to want to get to and it's really important to just know that she has good reasons why she doesn't want to do it. We don't know what's going on for her and that doesn't mean anything about us. It just means, “Okay. Maybe there's somebody else I can ask to grab coffee with me, or I'm going to try one of the other things that I put down on my list.” I do want to mention too that you have to know what you have to offer too.

It's important to know what you're looking for in the friend, but you need to know what you're offering. It's not going to work if you want someone to be totally available to you, but you aren't willing to be available back to her. I've often thought that about myself. Like, “I want a friend like this. I wish I had a friend who was like this and that.” Then I kind of catch myself and I'm like, “I'm not even willing to put in the time and effort to develop that kind of a relationship with somebody right now.” Like, “That would be great to have that, but I know it's going to require effort and commitment on my part and I'm just not at a place where I can do that.” That's totally okay too. You can be honest with yourself about it and don't let your brain tell you stories about how nobody likes you and all those kinds of things. Maybe it's just not the time in your life right now where you can put a lot of energy into fostering a close friendship.

That can be totally fine if you decide it is, because who decides if it's fine or not? You. That doesn't mean you have to go live in a hole by yourself and never interact with anybody, it just means that there's a limit to what you can offer and there might also be a limit to the closeness of the friendships that you concurrently have, right? If you can only interact on kind of a part-time basis, then that friendship might be sort of a part-time friendship. You can decide though, that in this season of your life it's just not one where building relationships can be a top priority. Then maybe you still work on maintaining the relationships you currently have, rather than letting all of your friendships resolve, but you just aren't in a position where you can explore finding new people to be friends with.

I think that finding a new friend or a really good friend can be a goal. It can be like a project for you, and you can decide what outcome you want, and you make it measurable, okay? Like, “I want a friend that I either talk to on the phone, or see in person once a week, every week. I would like to have her in my life, set up in this way, by December 31st of this year,” right? You have a distinct endpoint. Like, “If I need to meet 100 women and interact with them a couple of times by the end of the year, I better get cracking,” right? “I better start showing up to some meetings. I better go to yoga class.” Like, “I better start doing some stuff so that I can meet them.” Then you also list out, “These are my nonnegotiable qualities in this friend,” right? Maybe you don't want someone who's a drug addict, let's say, right?

Maybe something else like … I know, I kind of joke, but maybe somebody who drinks to excess every weekend is not your idea of fun and that's just not somebody that you really want to be friends with. It's important that you understand what those nonnegotiables are for you and then you also decide, “This is what I can offer. What I can offer that potential new friend is this.” Then you make a plan to meet and interact with these 100 women and not just that quick handshake, “Hello,” but actually talking and interacting with them. It's really important to keep an open mind to possibilities and don't necessarily make those quick judgements based on your initial impression. Just like we wouldn't want people to judge us on their initial impression with us … About us always, same goes for us to them.

When it becomes clear that she's not the one, that's totally cool, right? Like, “Onto the next possibility on the list. I thought number 36, she … I thought maybe she was going to be the one. Turns out, she's not. Okay. Maybe 37 is going to be and that's cool.” If anything, at the end of 100 friend interactions, right? Meeting new women, you definitely are going to have some great stories. You're going to know a whole lot more people. You're going to have so many more connections and ultimately you're growing yourself as a person. You're doing something hard, but it's because you want the end result.

You're not hiding behind the social media computer screen kind of diluting yourself into thinking that those are your friends. You're getting out into the world and creating that life that you want. There really is nothing that's more important or better than that to work toward in your life. On that note, I'm going to say goodbye. Thank you so much for the iTunes reviews. If you haven't left one and you like what you're learning here, I would so appreciate it if you could leave me one. I will talk to you all next week. Have a great one. Take care, bye-bye.

Outro:        Thanks for joining us on Weight Loss for Busy Physicians. Now, take the next step and go to KatrinaUbellMD.com to download just what you need. The Busy Doctor's Quick-Start Guide to Effective Weight Loss. Join us again next week for more support to keep you in control and on the path to freedom around food.