This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
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“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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Anyway, what exactly am I referring to? Yeah, I’m about to get into all-a-dat. For the sake of the intro, I’ll just say that if "TMI" stands for "too much information," in general, I bet that you can just about guess what "PMI" in the dating world means. Let’s get into it.
What Is PMI in Dating All About?
GiphyOkay, so before I break down what PMI actually is, are you able to take a guess? If TMI is “too much information,” when you’re first dating someone, what could you run the risk of doing as far as PMI is concerned? If your immediate thought is giving out too much personal information, you would basically be correct. Yep, PMI stands for "premature intimacy" — and a lot of people do indeed fall victim to offering up just that.
How? Well, for one thing, it’s my personal opinion that many folks date the same way that some people grocery shop: they do it when they’re hungry. What I mean by that is…have you ever compared and contrasted the difference between when you’ve gone to the store (or even ordered your groceries online and then had them delivered) when you’re hungry vs. when you’ve already eaten? When you’re hungry, suddenly everything looks good to you. When you’re full, though, you can make more discerning decisions. Same goes with dating.
If it’s been a while since you’ve been on a date, you’re out with someone who you’re super excited about or you’re dating a goal more than a person (meaning, you really want to be in a relationship or you really want to get married and so you’re trying to rush things along), you can find yourself putting yourself in the trap of PMI. You might be giving them too much information about yourself. You might be expecting more than you should (dating is not courting, courting is not engagement, engagement is not marriage — there are levels to this thing). You might be giving it up too quickly (more on that later).
When these types of things happen, not only can they leave you emotionally exposed and hella vulnerable, but they can also cause the person on the receiving end to find you overwhelming and exhausting because you’re revealing way too much…way too soon.
Yeah, I know some of y’all probably don’t want to hear this, yet it must be said: PMI oftentimes translates as a form of desperation even if, from where you see it, you’re simply an “open book” and/or you’re just super enthusiastic about engaging someone. However, that’s the thing about something being premature: oftentimes, it’s not about what you’re doing being “wrong” so much as the timing of you doing it — whatever “it” is — being off. Way off.
That said, oftentimes what you’re offering up in PMI isn’t the red flag; it’s the fact that you’re so “hungry” for the dynamic that you’re moving at a faster pace than you should — for your sake and his.
So, now that you know what PMI is all about, let’s pull back a few more layers concerning it.
How Can You Know That You Have a “PMI Pattern”?
GiphyThere’s a client I have who’s a single woman. To be honest, I pretty much only hear from her when she’s made a reckless decision and she wants me to help dig her out of her consequences. And yes, one of those is constantly being a PMI type of person: talking too much, having sex too soon, acting like she’s the only one who gets a say in where things are going with a guy. What’s wild is it never fails: almost every time that a man starts off really liking her, about six weeks in, he phases out, and they all basically tell her that it’s due to the same reason: “She’s doing too much.”
If you’re triggered, just by reading that, ask yourself why. Is it possibly because you can relate and it’s easier to tell yourself that the guy is the problem when it could be that it is actually time to take some accountability and accept that you could be the issue? As a wise person once said, “Everywhere you go, there you are,” which basically means if the common denominator is always you, some self-reflection could do you a lot of good.
Anyway, whenever she finds herself back at the same ending, and we recap what happened, she’s chill for the first 3-4 dates, then she has sex, then she’s telling all of her business, and then she’s upset because she feels like they should be damn near at marital status — all because she moved too fast, too soon. And all of this? What all of this represents, in live and living color, is what it means to be in a PMI pattern.
The reality is that relationships are a lot like an onion in the sense that there are layers to it all. And what I mean by that is no one should have immediate access to all of who you are. Time, their character, the consistency in how they treat you, the reciprocity that you receive, good old-fashioned common sense and discernment — all of these things should play a direct role in how much information someone receives…mind, body, and spirit.
So, keeping all of this in mind, if you find yourself always hearing that “you’re doing the most” or a guy feels overwhelmed or that you’re liked, but they wish you would slow things down — that definitely sounds like a PMI pattern to me. In response to this revelation, you can either act like everyone else is wrong and you are right…or you can do some pondering and figure out where you could stand to realign some boundaries. Including when it comes to sex. This brings me to the next point.
Sex Too Soon Can Qualify As PMI Too, By the Way
GiphyListen, even if you didn't hear your own grandma (or at this point because grandmas are getting younger by the day, great-grandma) say, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”, I’m pretty sure you heard it said somewhere. And while this type of elder wisdom is pretty much speaking of giving it up before marriage, I’m gonna tweak it a bit and say, “Having sex for merely recreational use without stopping to see if it could serve you better to wait isn’t very smart” because, even though the current state of our culture is out here acting like humans should see sex as no more than a “dogs in heat” activity, you were given a brain and a heart for a reason. Yes, as antiquated as it may sound (and if it does, I don’t care, I don’t care), sex should still be seen as an intimate act.
You know, if you were to ask a lot of mental health and/or relationship experts to define what intimacy is, they would probably say something along the lines that it consists of mutual trust, an established connection, and a warmth and tenderness between two people. How this can all transpire after just a couple of dates (if you didn’t know the person beforehand) makes absolutely no sense to me. Can attraction, lust, or infatuation make you believe that it has? Yeah. Is that bona fide intimacy, though? Absolutely not.
So yeah, if you’re reading this and you’re trying to figure out if PMI is something that you are prone to doing, don’t take sex out of the equation. Premature means things like “too soon” and “before the proper time.” Proper means “appropriate to the purpose.” Purpose means “the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.” If the only reason why you plan on sleeping with someone is to have a little fun, you’re grown, do you.
HOWEVER, if you want something more than that, it’s best to slow down and ask yourself what the purpose needs to be BEFORE giving it up. Because once you’ve had sex with someone, you can’t undo it — nor can you control how they will react or respond to you on the backend. Use forethought; it helps to prevent you from moving…prematurely.
3 Things You Can Do to Avoid the Premature Intimacy Trap
GiphyOkay, so what if you’ve read all of this, and you can’t help but admit that you’ve got a bit of “PMI” going on in your dating history? Moving forward, what can you do to prevent it from happening again?
1. Ask yourself, “What’s the rush?” The person who once said that haste makes waste was a wise individual. It basically means that when you rush things, you tend to cause confusion and chaos on some level because it can cause you to overlook red flags, skip necessary steps, and make a relationship a goal over establishing a genuine connection with a person. Look, I get that few things beat the thrill of a new situation with a person who seems to check off all of your boxes. However, if it’s real, it’ll be there weeks later too. Slow down so that you can see what’s genuine — and also so you can finally break your pattern of moving prematurely. Oh, and do literally ask yourself “What’s the rush?” If fear or anxiety are a part of your answer, that’s another reason to slow the hell down.
2. Make people earn access to you. Your thoughts, your feelings, your body — all of these things are privileged information. And since all of us have so many layers to us, each time someone learns something new or more, that is something that they should earn. They can’t do that if you’re giving them everything at once; plus, folks tend not to appreciate it when interactions with people go down that way. That said, am I for game-playing and making a man damn near kill himself to get closer to you? Absolutely not. At the same time, I do think that, as relationships evolve and mature, that’s how you can know what to give and what to hold back. And evolution and maturity take time.
3. Don’t tell men what you want; have them reveal who they are. One of the most ridiculous relationships that I’ve ever been in consisted of a guy who asked me on the first date what I was looking for in a man. When I rattled off some traits, his response was, “I can be that.” Please tell me that you caught the red flag: not he IS that, but he can PRESENT HIMSELF TO APPEAR to be that way. And that’s just how the relationship played out, too. This is a not-so-obvious indicator of premature intimacy: telling men what you want instead of letting them reveal who they are. Yeah, don’t do that. That’s how you can end up with a character more than someone with character (if you catch my drift).
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If most of us were truly honest with ourselves, we’d have to admit that we’ve fallen victim to it in some way; that’s the not-so-great news. The good news is a few simple adjustments can break you free from finding yourself in that kind of dating drama again.
A wise person once said that the right thing at the wrong time is still the wrong thing. Premature intimacy can get you into this type of dynamic, for sure.
Bottom line, if it’s real, it ain’t goin’ nowhere no time soon.
Slow down and let the relationship evolve.
So that you can have intimacy instead of regret — all because you moved too fast.
Because rarely, is that ever a wise move. In dating or honestly…life, in general, sis.
Be careful out here, ya hear?
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