2024-10-07
45 分钟They have been best friends for years. He opened a book store and she was his first employee. Things were great until they weren't. She left to preserve the friendship- but a year later they still haven’t talked about what went wrong with them professionally. Esther talks to her about how to start a different kind of business relationship if they were willing to give this another go. This is a special episode of How's Work?, a one-time, 45-60 minute interventional phone call with Esther. It was edited for time, clarity, and anonymity. If you have a question you would like to talk through with Esther, send a voice memo to producer@estherperel.com. Esther’s two new courses on desire are now available inside The Desire Bundle. Go to https://www.estherperel.com/course-bundles/the-desire-bundle to learn more about Bringing Desire Back and Playing with Desire. Want to learn more? Receive monthly insights, musings, and recommendations to improve your relational intelligence via email from Esther: https://www.estherperel.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Welcome.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Shall we listen together to the question that you send, and then if there's anything you want to edit, we can do so, too.
Okay?
Okay.
Yeah.
Let's go.
My friend, who I've known since elementary school, decided to open a bookstore in 2019 and asked if I would work with him.
And I said yes.
And so we opened this bookstore together, and it was going really well.
He was the owner and the manager and my boss, but it was really just the two of us there for a long time.
But things eventually started to feel hard between us.
He, as I mentioned, was my boss, but he was also my really good friend, and we didn't have any systems in place to talk about job performance or anything like that.
So from my perspective, it just felt like he would randomly make kind of snippy comments about things he didn't like that I was doing or that I could do better.
And then I would get defensive, and then it would feel tense for a while between us, and that was escalating.
And eventually, after a couple of pretty big altercations between us where I was yelling and then he was, like, mad at me about that, I decided it was in my best interest to leave, and in both of our best interests, really, so that we could stay friends.
So I left.
I got a new job, and we are still friends, and I still go and work there sometimes, but I'm really sad that it didn't work out, and he's really sad that it didn't work out.
And I miss working there.