Hey, y’all, welcome to No Invite Necessary Podcast, and I’m your host, Nolita, aka TheMonaLita. This is where I share the real stories of the grinders, the hustlers, the doers, and the dreamers who have faced some of life’s toughest challenges. And they’ve come out on top, not only better, but stronger and wiser and way more fulfilled.
I’m talking about practical resilience, growth, and transformation. This show is for anyone who’s ever felt sidelined or underestimated. Whether you’re finding inner peace, rebuilding after a crisis, or making waves in your community, here is where I spill the tea with my guests on their hustle and the lessons learned along the way.
Remember, it’s your journey, your hustle, your rules. Let’s get into it.
So hopefully if you are watching this episode, this is episode three, but hopefully you have watched episode one and two, and now you are on episode three, which is when business and pleasure collide, protecting your heart and your wallet, the cointage. The money, Zichata. Okay. Zichata. So, business and pleasure, pleasure and business, the pleasure of doing business.
Baby, we are in a day and age where so many lines can quickly become so blurred. Because we have really an endless amount of access to one another. The requirements and just the demands of life are so much different than What our grandparents, our parents even experienced, right? So, I’ll give you an example.
Our grandparents didn’t have to experience someone expecting for you to be available after five, because what? Somebody would have to call the landline. People weren’t calling your house at 11 o’clock at night about work, but people have pushed the, the boundary of when work starts and when it stops far beyond its normal limit.
So now, you know, we spend a lot more time together as coworkers and colleagues. We do more things in closer facilities. And sometimes, you know, the business will become pleasurable in that sense.
We are not talking about pleasure, pleasure, not that kind. No, not the hanky panky. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are talking about, we not talking about your work husband or your work wife. We not talking about that. That is a whole nother episode. And we may actually need to do an episode about that. Put that in the comments.
If you want to hear about. work husbands, work wives, and yeah, let’s, that whole cult, that is a culture. But no, this episode, business, when business and pleasure collide and protecting your heart and protecting your wallet is maintaining, how do you maintain the healthy boundaries to get the work done, have valuable relationships with your colleagues and your acquaintances, but not overstepping and oversharing.
I’ll share a story. I’ll share a story. You know, I love Golden Girls, so picture it. I am the marketing professional that I am in marketing. If anybody has worked in marketing or worked alongside a marketing team, you know that marketing does not have its traditional hours of nine to five. Oftentimes you travel a lot, you interact a lot before, during and after work, and that can create almost a false sense of intimacy and closeness.
So. I’ve had an experience where I had a colleague that became a friend. And when I say, or what I assume to be a friend, we cried together. We prayed together. We had shared personal stories and instances of just life experience where I truly, truly, truly felt that we have bonded. But. Up until a certain point, we had done a great job at balancing those two, right?
So, we were able to get the work done and go out for lunch and have a little kiki. Okay? We would kiki, we would da da da da da. You know? Invited into personal moments, personal wins for me. But there came a time where that was put to the test and it forever changed me and the relationship. So I’m working, I’m working, I’m working.
Um, there’s a meeting of sorts. I am just in the flow of a conversation, right? And I’m showing a particular screen on my computer and I’m on a group meeting and I’m sharing my screen. And in my flow, I’m not realizing that I made a mistake in showing information to a group of people that are associated with this colleague who is also my friend.
And after I finish speaking and I look to my text, my text messages, I have these text messages that I miss because I’m speaking right. And it’s alerting me to take that down, take that down. Please don’t show this, that, and the third. So I, immediately recognized what my mistake was. I called said person to rectify and apologize and to acknowledge that I made a mistake unknowing to me and I’m sorry for that.
How can I fix this? But this person did not answer. So I was like, okay, I definitely need to speak to my manager about this. I get up to go speak to my manager and as I knock on the door, I hear yelling. This colleague slash friend has skipped past allowing me to, at least given me the option to apologize.
They’ve skipped past that and went directly to my manager and were, from what I could hear, they were enraged. And, I didn’t have an issue with
why they were angry because yes, I made a mistake. What I had an issue with and what broke my heart was I, in all of my years, I’ve never heard anybody speak about me like that, especially to someone that had a position of authority over my career, over how a report like that could have been taken and blown out the water.
And I just was stunned and shocked. It broke my heart to hear that this person would not even, that even in their anger, they would not reference. my character that would give them pause to say, I know I’m angry, but let me take a moment.
Exactly. My intentions were not to do that at all. And I’ve never done anything to put them in a position to have any hardship or strife in that sense. So to hear them screaming on the phone with my manager, Those walls were very, very, very thin where I worked at that time. Um, like I said, it broke my heart.
Like it just made me feel that I wasn’t given an opportunity, um, for my character to stand in the gap for me in that sense. And after that, I went back to my office and I remember I sat down and, cause in general, I just had a very stressful day. So this added on top of that. I went back to my office and I got emotional about it.
And I cried because I truly, truly felt like this was a close friend. Like this person has been around my family. It’s been around my. personal friends, like in very intimate moments. So very near and dear to my heart. And I just wanted to be given the opportunity to apologize and to rectify it. But that was taken from me because of the anger that they gave into.
So after that, I was asked by my manager to, you know, come back and come to our office. You need to speak with me. She didn’t know that I had heard the conversation through the wall. So when I came in there, I didn’t assume that that’s what she was going to talk to me about. And I said, Hey, I need to talk to you about a mistake that I made.
This is what happened. These are the details. I need to fix it. She and I discussed how I should fix it. I immediately went to my office, ordered flowers to send to this person to apologize. And I didn’t order flowers. On a company car or anything like that, because it was my personal mistake. So I wanted to personally, you know, fix it.
So I send the flowers and I’m riding home and I’m on the phone talking to someone else. And I realized that I had gotten a phone call from the friend slash colleague, but I didn’t answer. I. then got a text message. Because mind you, before they called me back, I did attempt to call them again after I spoke to the manager.
Still, silence, radio silence. And I text and said, I’m so sorry. That was never my intent. Radio silent. The text message that I got was, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely beneath the level of anger and rage that I heard them spewing to my manager. So it just made me feel that, I guess it more so just reiterated that maybe we were never friends at all, because if we were friends, you should at least be able to tell me how angry you were at me.
And us have confidence that our friendship and relationship could take having to address that confrontation and that stressful moment and that we could work through it. But instead, the person downplayed it and chose to kind of just like brush it off like, Oh, you know, mistakes happen. I had to take a moment, but they still didn’t know that I heard them in the thick of their anger.
I probably will never. I won’t say never. I am just moving forward. I am going to be extremely, extremely careful to not blur the lines between a colleague and a friend or to allow a colleague to become a friend because of how that could have affected my work. It has affected me just being open because I guess now I’m in a state of.
not trusting my discernment to see if somebody is really my friend or are they just making nice with me because I’m the person that they have to work with or report into. And I think I’m just in a place of being very on guard because if I protect my heart and I just keep it with the business side and you know, we can be cool and get the work done.
Cool. But then also it doesn’t put me in a position where My money is involved and you playing with my livelihood because you had an angry moment. Now I don’t want to have to be in friendships where I have to walk on eggshells and be nervous that not even that you’re going to get mad because all friends are going to have disagreements.
but that you’re going to be mad enough to not even speak to me about it.
No, because I’m a professional, so I’m still going to maintain the business side of it. But the, the personal and sharing about family, friends, dating, um, any hardships, any wins that I have. No, I would never share that because I think that’s where the, the blurred line came with the familiarity. And just becoming too friendly, just because we spend so much time with people and we work with them and we talk to them for hours on end about work, it does not mean that they are our friends.
But what if it wasn’t just business? She just hurt so much, maybe, or maybe she didn’t have healthy tools to maintain a friendship? That’s why she reacted in that way. I guess it just puts me on pause because that portion of it wasn’t my truth to navigate. And again, if you valued the friendship enough to really almost cement a little bit more of I’m really rocking with you because, but I felt this way and I value our connection as friends and I was angry and this is what I said and this is how I felt.
Yeah. Like an honest moment. Like if you really my dog, like you really, you’re going to keep it a buck with me.
Exactly. Because the same way that it was a conscious decision to downplay those emotions, that means it’s going to be a conscious decision to probably still downplay those emotions. If I bring it to you. How did you heal from that? Was it easy to put it off? To be honest, to be honest, like I’m still healing
from that. I’ve had a lot of experiences from when I was a child in school to college where I’ve made mistakes as a friend. Friends have done things to me that have, you know, really anchored itself in me as far as pain. And I have finally gotten to a point where, cause you know how for years I be like, my cousin’s my friends, and Alex that I started college with, that’s my friend.
I have no other friends. And I was completely fine with being, I won’t say friendless, but just I don’t have like, I didn’t have a large group of friends, and especially just being open to being vulnerable with more women, but I’d Now in my maturity, I know that there’s so much value in acquiring more friends as I get older because what I need as a friend now who’s living in a state where, yes, I’m from here, but I mean, I came back and I didn’t go to school with any of these people.
I didn’t have that time to create those type of bonds like I did with Alex in college. So I had to be open to making more friends. So this was just another extension of me making myself vulnerable beyond the hours of work. To say, Hey, you know, I really find this person to be very cool, very relatable, you know, very, very inviting personality.
This is the type of person that I would appreciate as a friend. To have that disrupted by hearing what I heard, it gave me a little bit of a setback. So I am, like I said, I’m just going to be more apprehensive about, are you really being my friend because you want to be my friend or are you playing? As if you are my friend because of the dynamics related to how we work together.
I think for me, what I initially took note of, and I’ve taken note of this just in general and me evolving and walking closer with God because prior to intentionally seeking the face of God, I. had an anger issue. And I’m not really sure where it necessarily developed because I didn’t grow up in a household where people had outbursts and no abuse, none of that.
But as an adult, I think just the frustrations and probably not feeling Like I had safe spaces to express myself. I developed an anger issue, but the one thing that I prayed to God for was, just give me the, the grace to pause myself. And even in me being in my office and crying and feeling very hurt and heartbroken, I still knew that, Because this is tied to my business, I had to be very careful as to how I responded moving forward, because I knew that it would affect potentially my performance and also my reputation based off of how I reacted, because just because that person had, you know, a less than stellar moment, because not at all, do I think that this person is horrible?
No, I still value them for who they are here in the earth. But. I couldn’t allow their actions to dictate how I responded. So that’s why they don’t know that I know what they’ve said and how they said it because I still attempted to show up as professional and as much of my authentic self in our interactions afterwards without allowing my pain to turn into anger towards them.
I have talked extensively to my therapist about it and just how it was triggering for me to have another experience as an adult woman, where I felt betrayed and where I felt that As much as I’ve worked to refine myself and become a better person, that that wasn’t, that didn’t warrant any credit. Like, I didn’t, I didn’t get no extension.
I couldn’t put nothing on layaway. Like, this mistake couldn’t be put, you know, just up for examination of who do I know her to be before I just assume that she’s doing something as a transgression against me. I was appreciative that the manager, I believe she referenced my character and she knew that I would never do that on purpose and that it truly was a human error.
So take a page out of my book. When it comes to protecting your wallet, right? You have to be careful of how you respond to people when business and pleasure collide, because it can affect your performance and it can affect your reputation. So even If something disrupts your day or you’re hurt, get in the habit of taking a moment to just take a breath, process the actual events that occurred.
What role did you play in contributing to it? Because we have to also be self aware. And then, begin to assess how you feel and how you want to move forward so that you can retain the reputation that you have and so that you can also retain the level of efficacy that is associated with your performance because you are still a representation of yourself.
So that’s the first one for your wallet. Now for protecting your heart, I think just in general with business and pleasure, setting clear boundaries from the start, that’s what you got to do. You have to make sure that you’re having an honest conversation about what’s business and what’s personal. That way everybody on the same page and you can avoid any misunderstandings down the road.
Right. Also keeping a communication professional, keep your communication professional, keep your emails, messages, and meetings focused on work. Save personal chit chat for after hours to maintain a clear separation. Easy. Third, I would definitely say document everything, write things down, whether it’s an agreement or a financial transaction, having it in writing protects both parties and keeps everything legit.
Cause you know, in friendships, you get real conversational, you get real fast and loose and you may not remember something the way they remembered it. But if it’s, you write it down, if it’s documented, Y’all can always go back to the black and white. That’s where the safety is. Don’t play favorites. You have to be fair and consistent with everyone, even though that’s your home girl.
If she ain’t the best fit for this, you gotta go somewhere else. And she should understand that because that’s the business side of it. That’s just what it is. Um, you know, it’s very tempting to give our friends a pass, but remember fairness is key to a healthy relationship and a healthy work environment.
Next, I would say you have to prepare for the potential conflicts because life is going to give you moments of conflict. You can’t get around it. Conflicts happen even with your friends and your family, but you have to approach them calmly, focus on finding solutions and then, you know, keep your personal feelings out of it as much as possible.
Next, I would say regularly review your relationships. I think I mentioned this in episode one, I have experienced being on autopilot when it comes to relationships, but my dating relationships, relationships. Help me to identify that about myself. So that’s why I’m very keen to check in on what is going on with the relationships.
So take a step back and see how things are going. You know, if your friendship is hurting your business or vice versa, it’s okay to make changes. Hey, y’all thanks for tuning in to no invite necessary today. We talked about some essential tips for not mixing business with pleasure and how to protect your heart and your wallet.
Now, I want to hear from you. Which tip resonated with you the most, or maybe you have a tip of your own to share. Drop a comment below or tag me in your posts with your thoughts and experiences. Let’s create a supportive community where we can all learn from each other’s journeys. Also, I’d love to know what future topics you want me to discuss.
What challenges or questions do you have that you’d like me to cover in upcoming episodes? Your feedback helps me create content that’s meaningful and relevant for our community of hustlers, grinders, dreamers, and doers. Don’t forget to subscribe, like, and follow for more inspiring content. Can’t wait to read your comments, hear your stories, and see your topic suggestions.
Remember, no invite necessary, your journey, your hustle, your rules. Bye!