Making the Case by Kimberly Guilfoyle

Author:Kimberly Guilfoyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

ADVOCATING AT HOME

CHAPTER 8

The Power of Friendships

When most people think of advocacy, they think about it being exercised in public arenas. It’s just easier to see how it works in a corporate setting, in a court of law, in legislative reform and public policy, and through our active volunteerism and involvement in a wide variety of charities and social causes. But whether we are aware of it or not, we also advocate for others and ourselves in more private settings and relationships every day. Mastering this art at home is what frequently gives us the skills and confidence to do so in the larger world.

From the time we make our very first friend to the time we date, get married, have children of our own, define our family values, send our kids off to school, and see our parents—and ultimately ourselves—through our final years, we are advocating for ourselves or someone we love. And it definitely happens every time we field one of those crazy curveballs life tends to throw at us with intense velocity and speed. Even if you haven’t reached some of these life milestones yet, preparing for them now ensures you’ll be a better advocate later. For this reason, I wanted to set aside a significant portion of this book to explore these other areas with you, starting with a type of relationship that definitely played a pivotal role in my own life and I hope in yours too: friendship.

I’m sure many of you have heard friends describe themselves as a mutual admiration society, but I really believe that a more apt description of friendship is a mutual advocation society. As mentioned earlier, when we are young, learning to stand up for ourselves with family is relatively easy because they understand us just by virtue of living with us. It’s advocating with total strangers, especially authority figures, that’s hard. But friends tend to provide a comfortable middle ground where we can really learn to articulate and assert our needs, and respond to others’ needs as well. They start out in our lives as strangers, but if we advocate for them and ourselves well enough in the relationship, they ultimately become more like family.

When I was a prosecutor, the presence or absence of a victim’s or defendant’s friends in the courtroom always said a lot about them and their life circumstances. I often wondered if having better friends—or better influences as we sometimes call friends—could have kept many of them out of the trouble they found themselves in. It was easy to see how as kids, one wrong choice—or even one right choice—made at the coaxing of a friend could have changed the course of a lifetime for some of those we were prosecuting.

It was just as sad to see that sometimes I was the only one present for the victims—the one person there to step up and fight for them. Fear of reprisal might have kept some of their friends away, but if your dearest friends are not at your side in adversity, they aren’t good friends at all.

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