Mixing Friendships and Network Marketing

Being excited about starting a home based business and announcing it to your friends, can be an experience you hadn’t counted on.

Friendships are essential to our sense of who we are. We value friends, but the path of friendship, like love, rarely runs smooth. After all, we are individuals first with our own deep desires, fears, and experiences and all through our lives we are molding ourselves to who we think we need to be based on our friends’ perception of us.

This can be especially true when we approach our friends about our desires to become an entrepreneur.  Whether it be a brick and mortar business or a home based online business, if their perception of what that entails and looks like is in disagreement with yours, there’s immediate conflict.  There’s a tenseness to the conversation and a strain on the relationship.

More often than not, our friends will not be quick to support us in starting a home based business, but rather to shut us down.  There are many reasons for this and it could be as simple as their own past failure in a network marketing business opportunity or fear that if you succeed, they will have no place in your life.  They may not even be able to recognize the real reason on the surface.

When our friends approach us with aspirations of starting a home based business, we might find it hard to give objective advice inasmuch as we want them to the person we want them to be. We may feel jealous of a friend’s achievements or desires for success when we want to feel happy for her. We can be reluctant to allow each other to change, sometimes falling out in a way that is painful for all involved. And yet, friendships are vitally important; central to our enjoyment of life.

Friends are central to this all-important sense of validation we all need. When a friend confirms to us that our home based business ideas are good, and wants to support us in our endeavors, we feel safer, reassured.

On the other hand, when we say, “No, home businesses are scams”, we are killing the inner entrepreneur that God created to surface in that person.  Not only that, but we are validating our friend in a negative, hurtful way…. Insinuating they are stupid for wanting to start their home based business.

Before we share with our friends our intentions of starting a home based business, or if our friends come to us with the same news, let’s be careful to jump to conclusions.  Life is a beautiful journey with friends.  Give space, approach with love and care and allow your friend to explore his/her entrepreneurship desires with you.  It doesn’t mean you join and partner with them in the actual business, but it does mean to be their biggest fan and cheer them on.