 Here's one from Hailey. I'm currently listening to the podcast Episode 722, What Matters Most in Difficult Conversations, and I have a question regarding emotional bids and personal boundaries. I have a friend that I've known since third grade in the past four or five years. She has not been the kind of friend I would like to have in my circle. However, since I've known her for so long, I feel that I have to be loyal to the friendship. In the past, she has expressed selfish behavior. And whenever I have tried to have a constructive conversation with her, she gets defensive and starts emotionally attacking me. I don't get anywhere with her, and I bottle up my problems with her because of past conversational trauma. Within the past year or two, I've started being more conscious of her behavior, and I've noticed that she only reaches out to me when she has a problem in her life, and she never reaches out to genuinely see how I'm doing, which makes me feel used and abused. Even when I respond to her messages, she never says thank you for the listening and never turns the conversation over to how I'm doing after she has her rant. It's as if she opens the conversational door simply to dump all of her crap on my laugh, and then walks out the door and shuts it without a thank you. So my question is this, how do I bring up my issues with an emotionally sensitive friend, and how do I set boundaries without seeming harsh? Thank you for taking time to read my question. Keep up the good work. Can I just say, I want to read this, I want to quote this. It says, it's as if she opens the conversational door simply to dump all her crap on my lap, and then walks out the door and shuts it without a thank you. No, that's not what that's as if that is exactly what she's doing. And okay, let's unpack this layer by layer. I think the first thing is you have been friends for a very long time, so it is worth attempting what we're going to lay out there. But I will be honest, setting boundaries has to involve some level of harsh. It has to have something on the other side to change this behavior. And that example that David gave earlier about the co-worker coming in late, I can't be your friend any longer if this behavior continues. Not yelling, just like saying, calm, you know, I would love to be your friend. I've enjoyed being friends with you since the third grade. In fact, we've had a number of great times together. But your behavior towards me when you yell at me, emotionally manipulate me, dump all of your problems on me, makes me feel unsupported in this relationship, makes me feel like an unpaid therapist in a lot of ways. And I don't think I could be your friend any longer if this behavior continues. You're absolutely correct in that. And I want on that also add that that it's going to take a lot of courage to do. And this is going to come out of nowhere because in the past you haven't done this. And so it's going to feel harsh. It's going to feel uncomfortable. And I'm going to say that you will be getting a emotional response that you're going to have to weather through. Now, this person could actually hear that, take it to heart and apologize. But from reading this, this person has gone off. Now, and I expect her to go off and you should as well. And just say, I want you to sit on that for a few days. And then we're going to have a conversation moving forward. Action speak louder than words. Someone who is a sociopath, someone who is a severe emotional manipulator is going to say, oh my God, I'm sorry, is going to do everything in their power to salvage the relationship through words. So look at the actions. Is there movement in the direction of the behaviors that you'd like to reward and you'd like to be around? Or is it just lipstick on a pig? Is it just saying it so that she can alleviate this conversation? And then next week she's back to dumping her problems on you. Boundaries have to have some teeth to them, which means when this happens again, you've laid out the boundary, it happens again. It's saying, okay, I'm not going to answer her phone call. It's texting her, we can no longer spend time together. You continue to exhibit the behavior that for me is a deal breaker in our friendship. And in that moment, this is when real friends start to change their behavior. Behavior does not get changed with soft boundaries, no boundaries. Behavior gets changed when the one thing that that person wants, your attention, your support is now removed from the equation. That now allows the person to see, hey, I have to do something to change my behavior or I'm going to continue to feel bad in this relationship. First of all, I'd love to hire you as a copywriter because this was really well written. When you let an employee go, that's a very tough thing to do. I've been doing this many times and it's always very unpleasant. In some bookarets, they call it the 48 hours of pain. You kind of feel really shitty leading up to this and then you don't feel really good afterwards, but you have to make these drastic steps because you're the sum of the five people that you surround yourself the most with, right? And you cannot have somebody on the team that's dragging you down. So it's really important that you make these tough choices. See, like your business, you cannot afford to have an employee that's not performing at all, that's even negative towards the outcome that you desire, like let's say happiness or whatever. Absolutely. And cultivating, as we talked about earlier, the thoughts that you consume, the news that you consume, the positivity that you surround yourself with is a big reason that successful people talk about ending up on the show here. That is that cultivation and that discipline of surrounding yourself with passionate, supportive people, making sure that we're not just constantly consuming the negative from social media or the news, allows us to feel happy, allows us to move through some of life's hardships with resiliency. But man, if you got a friend like this who's just piling all of her problems on your shoulders, it's going to be tough for you to deal with your own problems. Yeah.