Friendship and Leadership Are Not the Same Thing

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From Others Over Self, it's Hardcore and at Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rood. You've spent years learning how to lead a team, run a program, hold a room together for people who need something solid. While leadership and friendship, while they're not the same skill. I spent most of my adult life trying to figure that out. Two women veterans I love, they don't talk to me anymore. Both of them choose that, and both of them were right. Today I'm telling you my perception of what happened both times so you can recognize the same moment in your own friendship before you pay what I paid. This is Hardcore and At Ease. 2 women veterans I love don't talk to me anymore. I've never told either of these stories out loud before today. It feels like failure, but we're going to talk about it today because command comes easier to some of us than female friendship does. For most of my adult life, I've not been a very good friend to other women. I'm just now figuring that out. And I think a lot of that comes from confusing leadership with friendship, like they're the same skill, but they aren't. You see, leadership asks you to decide fast and keep the mission moving forward, even when somebody on your team disagrees with you. On the other hand, friendship asks you to slow down. It asks you to sit inside of someone else's uncertainty without trying to fix it. Now leadership rewards being needed, but friendship asks you to let yourself need someone back out loud. And right there, that's the part that I never trained for. I can lead a team. I can hold a room. I can run a program with 100 moving parts. That skillset doesn't automatically make me a good friend. I could not give either of these two women the presence that they needed in their moments, and both of them knew it before I fully did. Both of them set a boundary for their own peace, and they had the courage to act on it. I respect them more for that now than I did when it happened. Now, before we get into that, I want to take just a moment to honor one of my listeners. This past Saturday night, as a guest of Colonel Nancy Dakin, I attended the Fisher House Gala at the Ford House in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. From where we ate, we could see the boats on the water still catching the last of the evening light. And I sat next to Michelle Angelone. She's with the Daughters of the American Revolution. Oh, I have to tell you what that seat meant to me, because years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution gave me a college scholarship. And Saturday, I got to look Michelle in the eye and thank her in person as a grown-up. And she told me that scholarship is one of the hardest ones that's out there to win. So Michelle, if you're listening, that seat next to you, it reminds me that we're not alone in our quest to be hardcore and at ease. Thank you for what you do. Now let's get back into today's show. I was just talking about my friend Nancy Dakin, retired Air Force Colonel, over 3,000 flight hours. She told me a story recently about a flight over Alaska. There were 5 aircraft, total darkness, And then the Northern Lights showed up. Every radio in the formation went silent. She said the lesson that night wasn't about what she accomplished. It was about what she let herself receive. The full story of hers publishes this Sunday at MissionWildflower.com. I could never do it justice, so I will not attempt to retell it here. That story belongs to her completely. So subscribe now to MissionWildflower.com. And it will land in your inbox this Sunday morning, August 2nd, 2026. If you're listening after that date, you'll be able to find it in the archives. It's called The Quietest Flight. I've also linked that in the show notes for you. Nancy also serves as our company's fractional chief operating officer. Earlier this week, we were together in a training session with my leadership team. She taught us as women veterans how to stop introducing our own military service with the words, "I was just..." It's common to hear women say, "I was just a weapons loader." "I was just support." And even in my training room, I watched my fellow teammates who flew missions with the Russians, who worked treaty compliance, women who kept a base running in a blackout. They all reached for that same small word. Just. And I've done this myself. I've made myself small in a room plenty of times. But the two stories that I'm about to tell you about aren't about shrinking my service. They're about shrinking my need and what that took from me both times around. Here's the first one. I gave birth to my second son at the birth of the pandemic. He came with special needs. We hadn't planned for it. And I didn't have anything left inside of me to reach outside my own house. He wasn't just born in the hospital, he lived there for nearly his entire first year. Around that same time, a woman veteran that I was still learning how to love, well, she was living through a significant chapter of her own life. She was chronicling hers on social media. Well, I never saw a single post. Do I have social media? Yes. I also have automated systems and algorithms and teammates that are dedicated to helping me keep my social media up to date, so I don't interact on it a whole lot. So this other woman veteran and I, we knew each other for a short time before this happened, and we hadn't really figured each other out. We didn't know how to love each other well as friends. I needed more time in my life to make room for her because my life had just been completely rearranged. She, on the other hand, needed more than what I had to give. As I mentioned, she was going through her own wilderness. She decided to end things very suddenly and very hard. She wrote me an email that was more like a letter, and it read like a final goodbye. It read like a breakup of two romantic lovers. It read like someone who had a broken heart because the other person had decided to stop loving her back. And she told me plainly that her heart no longer held space for mine. That hurts. You see, I'm a sunflower, and my consistency wants to be visible. It wants the check-in. It wants the proof that I'm still welcome. And she, as an individual, she moved through the world like more of a daisy. She was built to adapt to whatever the moment requires, and in that moment of time, she was adapting to the distance between us. She was choosing to carry her own season. She wasn't reaching out to me directly, and then she read my silence as proof that she had never been worth reaching for in the first place. Yes, that's a miscommunication. And here's what I mean when I say this. When I didn't call, when I didn't check in, she took it as her answer to a question that she'd been probably asking herself all along. Was she worth someone chasing? And my silence told her no. Now, in her life, she's not married and she doesn't have children, at least she didn't at the time. So when her friends also weren't checking in with her or calling, it made her ask that question at a deeper level. Now, it wasn't true. It's just what she heard, that maybe she wasn't worth being checked in on. I bring you this story to share that neither one of us was wrong about what we needed at that time. We were standing in two different kinds of terrain at the same time in life, and neither one of us really had the language to be able to say this out loud. I really do think about that email that read like a love letter quite often, especially as I work with women veterans and friendship. Curious to know which flower you are? Take the Wildflower Personality Assessment for Women Veterans right now on any device. Do a simple web search for Wildflower Personality Assessment for Women Veterans. Start loving yourself more today. Search for Wildflower Personality Assessment for Women Veterans. And that brings us to the second story that I want to share with you today. I went 2 years without seeing a woman veteran. That I love, and it was after she had lost one of her parents. In that grief, she pulled away from her spouse. Her body started breaking down under the weight of all of it, and she started drinking again after years of choosing to stay sober. When she finally showed up in public again, I saw her at an event for women veterans, and she asked if I had time to reconnect afterwards. I said yes, I meant it. I was really glad to see her there. It's a wonderful and special thing to be able to share a moment of public recognition with somebody that you know understands our experience. So I sat through the rest of the event looking forward to the time that I would soon have with her, and I wasn't prepared for what it actually was. After the event ended, the next 30 minutes were spent off to the side in a semi-private area. And I heard, "You weren't there for me," over and over again. Her grief and her blame ran together. I couldn't tell what was grief and what was blame. It felt like I was being dumped on for nearly half an hour continuously. And here's what she couldn't have known, because that conversation, it left no room for me to say anything. During that time that she was grieving the loss of her parent and managing through it, while I was carrying my own wilderness those same 2 years, I was walking a loved one through suicidal ideation. I was the sole income holding my family together. I was facing my own hard terrain. It didn't exempt me during the 2 years that she needed me and I couldn't be reached. I stood in mine while she stood in hers. And that 30-minute container, it didn't have room for both. So I walked into that event expecting to leave inspired and ready to keep building the work in front of us together. But instead, because of this extra 30 minutes, I walked out feeling like a wounded soldier trudging off a battlefield. I was wearing a smile, but it was a mask. I was trying to hide how much it hurt to be accused with no room to answer. Now, it's hard for me to share both of these stories with you because even now they still feel like failure. But here's what I know to be true. There's an old line that's often credited to Aristotle: "A friend to all is a friend to none." I simply don't have the capacity to be everyone's best friend, and neither did either of these women, not while carrying what they were carrying. Both of them knew what they wanted out of our relationship, and both of them had the courage to communicate it and to act on it and to take their own agency back for the sake of their own inner peace. I love that, and I admire them for that even now. If I could rework both of these stories, what I would ask for is just one more thing: more presence for myself in each of those moments. But hurting people rarely have the room to make that ask with patience. And I understand why. Asking either of us to show up exactly right while standing inside of a difficult wilderness, it's not a reasonable expectation either from her or from me. If this sounds familiar, there's one more layer here that I wanna present, and it's a mindset. Here's a mindset that will keep you from ever finding any real ease inside of these situations: "With me or against me." Do you have a friend that says that? "You're either with me or against me." Does she act like this? "You're either with me or against me." "I can't deal with you right now. With me or against me." That binary choice feels very protective when you're hurting. But it isn't healthy, and it will not lead you to the kind of ease that this show is named for. Give yourself permission to take a break from a friendship if you're standing in your own wilderness right now. Give yourself permission to put a relationship on pause until you're standing somewhere different. And while you're in that pause, don't hand the other malice. Don't send hatred out to other women or spite just because she isn't showing up the way that you need.

Are you a woman who has kept everyone else standing while your own foundation cracked? Perhaps in your life as a veteran, you've made choices where both options cost you something, and you keep questioning if you did the right thing. You know what it's like to be the one in the room who carries the weight that nobody else sees. You're built for that. And you deserve a community where you embrace who you are when you're not performing for others. Mission Wildflower is a newsletter built by and for women with military experience. Twice a week, bring a little joy and understanding into your life. Take part in real conversations about the situations you're navigating, the choices that don't have good answers, the permission to build a life that's truly yours and not just what the terrain around you demands. We publish twice a week. Go to shellyrood.substack.com and subscribe. Mission Wildflower is powered by others over self.

You're listening to Hardcore and at Ease with certified business and life coach Shelly Rood. Now back to the show. So here's what I want us to sit with. The friendship that ended. If it ended on you and you got dumped on like I did, recognize that it might not be your fault and it might not be hers either. It might be two women, both navigating real terrain, and one of you finding the courage to name a boundary that the other one couldn't see was even needed yet. Leadership and friendship are not the same skill. I told you that at the top of the show, and both of these women proved it to me. I commanded in military intelligence. I ran broadcast newsrooms under deadline pressure that most people never see, and none of that taught me how to need someone out loud the way that real friendship asks. So here's the reframe. I didn't tell you these two stories so that you'd feel bad for me, even though I still feel a little bad for me. I also didn't tell you these two stories so that you would think less of the women involved. I'm sharing these with you today because these stories show me what agency and self-respect look like inside of a friendship, and I want you to have that same clarity without it hurting quite as deeply as it did me. Here's something else that these two stories taught me, and it matters just as much as the first lesson. A woman veteran often finds her way into a peer group because of the person leading it. She hears me on this show, or she meets me somewhere, and I become the reason that she walks into her first wildflower gathering. That's a lot of weight. To put on one relationship, and it was never meant to hold that much. If you attend a group and there's a leader or a facilitator, her job is to simply open the door. Her job, once she's in the room, is to give the other women standing in it a real chance at friendship, not just the one who invited her. That's what happened with both of these women. These are success stories because even though neither one chose to keep a relationship with me, both of them are still loved and cared for inside our community by other women who have showed up for them in ways that I wasn't able to in that season. That does my heart good, and I can be at peace without those two friends specifically for this reason. After all, this is the whole reason that our woman veteran peer groups exist in the first place. So you know what? Mission accomplished. This week, I want you to pick one friendship where the rhythm has gone quiet. Before you and your friend are assuming this massive distance and maybe even a need for a break, I want you to just ask the same question that these two women were able to answer for themselves. Are the two of you moving at different paces? Are you both still fully committed to each other, or is one of you carrying more than her share? Because if that's the case, then she deserves the same courage that those two women showed. I wanna encourage you to name it and to act on it. It's okay to take that break if it's what's needed. You see, it's about a rhythm of friendship. Let her keep her pace and you keep yours. Send that voice memo from the car. Go ahead and texture a photo. You don't even need a caption with it. Remember the appointment that she was not looking forward to, and then just ask about it a few days later after everyone else forgot. These are small, repeatable steps that you can do that can help keep the pulse of the friendship going. And I haven't always been very good at that. Now, today gave you two true stories and a question that I want you to carry into your own friendships. Friendships this week. Today's a short episode, but it's incredibly meaningful if you choose to apply it to your life. With that, I'm host Shelly Rood. I so appreciate you spending time with me, and I encourage you to go read Nancy's full story, The Quietest Flight. It publishes this Sunday at missionwildflower.com, and that link is in the show notes. In our next solo episode, I'm bringing you a much harder discussion. You can't have a healthy relationship with an unhealthy person. That's where we're gonna go when it's time for boundaries instead of patience. Until then, I want you to stay hardcore, be at ease, and trust the process. You're listening to Hardcore and At Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.