Dharius Daniels - Everybody We Call a Friend Isn't One

Listen, I’ve learned something: how much you grow and how far you go is not just determined by who you are and what you have; it is equally impacted by who you are with. I cannot tell you how important it is for you to live with not just emotional but relational intelligence, because relationship management isn’t just relationship management; it’s life management. One of the most important relationships you can ever have is friendship, but we use that word frequently and throw it around flippantly. Today, I want to teach you how to develop a framework for friendship because not everyone we call a friend is truly one. Listen to me; I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again—it’s part of my life’s message—and that is this: there is no area of your life that is not directly or indirectly impacted by your relationships. I’m going to say that one more time: there is no area of your life that is not directly or indirectly impacted by your relationships. Your spiritual life is affected by your relationships, and your emotional life is affected by your relationships. Maybe you’re watching this and you can acquiesce; you can agree without arguing because you can look back over your life and say that some of my toughest emotional times were a result of something that happened relationally—maybe a breakup, maybe a divorce, maybe betrayal, maybe grief. Your greatest joy and greatest pain often come from the same place: people, relationships. There’s no such thing as a neutral relationship; people are either assets or liabilities. Now, when I say assets or liabilities, I don’t mean good or bad, or right or wrong; I’m just saying they’re either making deposits or making withdrawals—it’s that simple. So, if relationships are that important, relationship management has to be a life skill. It really confuses me—I’m being straightforward here—that when it comes to people developing life skills, we are not telling people how important it is to develop what we call interpersonal skills or relational intelligence. Relationships aren’t just about relationships; they are about life. One of the things I teach in relational intelligence is this idea: first of all, you have to define relationships; you can’t align until you define. I think one of the most important and consequential relationships in our lives that needs to be defined and aligned is friendships. I will go so far as to say your friendships are probably, besides your family—and I’ll get into that in a minute—because the Bible says there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother, which means it’s possible for you to be closer to some friends than to your family. So, anyway, besides family, your friendships are probably the most consequential relationships in your life. I will even go so far as to say your friendships probably affect you more than your mentorships because your friends are the people who you feel understand you. They are the ones with whom you tend to be more vulnerable; you are going to be more honest with them, so they will have more opportunity to see the real you. I’m just telling you this: many of you know this—I’m a coach, and I run coaching groups and mentorship programs, and one of the things I’ve noticed often is that when people are mentored by someone they admire, their initial response is trying to impress the mentor instead of exposing their true selves. But when you’re with friends, you’re not trying to impress them, so they will have the most opportunity to speak into your life. When something is this important, we can’t afford to be elementary in our understanding of it. We live in a culture that throws that word around loosely; I mean, even on certain social media platforms, people who simply click a button to follow your profile are called friends, and I think this is shaping the way we actually see friendships. The most reliable source of information to live your life by is the Bible, and it provides us with a framework for friendship. This is why you need to be clear on who fits in this category and who doesn’t. When you know who fits in this category and who doesn’t, you know how to invest and what to expect. I’m going to say that again: you know how to invest and what to expect. Some of our greatest frustrations come from investing in the wrong places or in the wrong people, rather, and expecting the wrong things from those investments. I say this all the time, guys: you can paint stripes on a cat; it doesn’t make it a tiger. You can call the cat a tiger, and it doesn’t make it a tiger. If you expect that cat to respond in dangerous situations the way a tiger would, you’re going to be frustrated. A lot of our relational frustration and disappointment comes from the investments we’re making into people that we’re calling one thing but they actually aren’t, and then we have expectations from those people. If you’re calling someone a friend, remember, the Bible says a friend loves at all times; so you have this expectation—good, bad, up, down—that your friend is going to be consistent. But if I’m calling somebody your friend and they actually aren’t one, meaning they don’t meet the biblical criteria for it, then what’s going to happen?