Moving From Overwhelm to Empowerment: Real-Life Boundaries That Matter

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 153

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So whilst many people talk to you about boundaries and why you need to be good at setting them in your life, I wanted to take a bit of a side step and speak to you today about what the cost is of you not setting boundaries.

Because what I often hear from people is. A lot of other people are chastising them about how boundaries should have been set better. Or people saying, "I definitely needed more boundaries" or "I needed better boundaries", but there's very little placement in everyday scenarios, and that's what I wanted to give to you on today's podcast is some real life situations as to where boundaries are important and why it's of benefit to you to be able to put these, "yes, I do want this in my life", and "no, I don't want that in my life".

Strategies around the life that you live in.

The first one I think, which is so important for so many of us, is boundaries around work in this particular moment in history, it is so easy to get lost in this idea that if we just do more. We get all of these things finished, then we are going to feel financially secure, Our job's gonna be safe, and we can just breathe for a minute. I don't know about you, but I've actually never found a point where I've got to a place on my to-do list where everything is done rosy, and we get to breathe a little bit. What I've actually found is the more things that you do, the more things that you have to do, especially in employee environment.

And so this idea of work-life boundaries or work life balance can feel pretty preposterous to most of us, I think. But actually when we are not setting those boundaries between our ourselves, our health, our personal life, and our work environment, what happens is first it costs us money because we are often doing things like unpaid overtime, we are doing things like not taking our holiday, wasting our own time, feeling guilty for taking our holiday and accepting more work and less money and more responsibility, and this can all feel like a really difficult thing to juggle, I get it, when there are things like power dynamics and security at stake. But none of those things get to the foreground if you have no in or no idea as to how to set boundaries within your own life. So we can look at the power dynamics, we can look at the sense of safety, we can look at. The job market and how you may think about the idea that setting boundaries within the workplace is a terrible idea because you might lose your job.

But all of those kind of feel like excuses if you have no idea or no intention of setting the boundaries in the first place.

So let's get down to the baseline.

Because there is a financial cost to you not setting boundaries in the workplace, and there is definitely a health cost.

A second area that I wanted to speak about was boundaries in your relationships. Now, When people hear relationships, they often think romantic relationships, but of course we also have family relationships. We have friendship relationships. We have relationships with ourselves.

Think about the person that you think is always available to take things from you and never quite does the same back. Think about the amount of time that you spend doing things that you think that you should have to do, but you sort of spend all the time that you are doing that thing resenting it a little bit.

These are the kind of places where boundaries are really essential, and where these uncomfortable feelings are massive little arrows that maybe we wanna do a little bit more work here.

The reality is that when you are not setting these kind of boundaries and you are not vocalising what you want and what you don't want, how are other people meant to know?

I get that if you are not used to saying this stuff, quite often, you don't know but that's a practice and that's something that we can work on together.

But it is unfair and unrealistic to resent people for not being able to guess what's going on in your mind when you haven't got around to telling them in the first place.

So that is something that we work on in www.selfcareschool.co.uk, but it's also something that you can take a moment and pause and look without doing any further work of.

Every time you are just like, oh, that person always takes, that person always expects me to do this. of just had taking a moment and going, "Hmm. Did I actually tell them what I wanted? Did I leave them guessing? Did I give them any clues at all as to what wasn't okay for me in this situation?" And that can be a really good starting place to start looking at how you can set some boundaries in your relationships.

A third, I'm very often missed boundary. I think that is very important is health boundaries. How often do you overextend yourself with things like doing more than you know you are capable of? Not resting when you know you should be doing? How often do you extend and overextend and reextend your bedtime because you feel like your day has been gobbled up by other people's obligations and damn it, you want some time to yourself?

These kind of things are not listening to our bodies, not taking care of our bodies. Even as simple things is how many times do you sit at your desk, like typing away, thinking that as soon as you finish this email, you're gonna run to the toilet? Listening and checking in with what our bodies actually need is a form of boundary setting and is a way of building trust within our bodies in a world that quite often tries to disassociate ourselves and turns us into productivity factories.

It again comes back to a lot of the work boundaries that we can set. But it also comes back down to becoming our own personal rebellion against a lot of the productivity and hyper-focused beauty standards that most of us don't agree with politically.

How you tune into your body and the respect with which you treat yourself in regards to the signals that your body gives you. Those are important boundaries that you can learn to set.

Time boundaries are essential game players in these modern times where we all have 700 hats to be wearing at the same time. And an awful lot of roles to do and way more things than we are probably gonna complete in three lifetimes.

Being able to work out how we work a schedule and not to be leaving our fun stuff and our enjoyment stuff until a last and cramming them in right at the last minute or letting them slide is the only way to be able to create any kind of sense of joy and playfulness and creativeness and exhaling within the kind of hectic schedules that most of us have.

At www.selfcareschool.co.uk, we prioritise pleasure, that is built into the way that we run our diaries. I've got a few workshops that are available within the membership and you can have a look at www.selfcareschool.co uk, which is Get the Damn Thing Done, and How to Make Time for Yourself. These really teach a way to be able to schedule things even when you've got caring responsibilities or perhaps a wayward body that centers your own pleasure, your own needs, and sets boundaries around other people not being able to assume that you are always available for whatever catastrophe they have coming up that you need to come and solve

Time boundaries are essential for you to be able to look after yourself.

And the final point that I would like to make, in regard to the cost of not setting boundaries, is that if we don't learn how to safeguard our own wellbeing, to speak, our own needs, to include ourselves in the amount that we are giving out there, There is no time for ourselves, for our dreams, for our aspirations, for our creativity, for our joy, for our pleasure. We get lost in the entire mix, and that is a surefire recipe for burnout, for exhaustion, for overwhelm. We often think that setting boundaries can be quite selfish because we are taking things away from other people. But actually in this action, hand action, I notice as well, what we miss over when we think of things like that, is that we are actually resourcing ourselves.

And when we resource ourselves, we have more energy to spend on all of the things we want, which may well be other people as well, but it means that we are not exempt from the list. It means that we are included in intrinsic part of the network that we are nurturing and fostering, and the lives that we are living.

I don't want you to have to leave your plesaure an afterthought when you are. Finally get to a stage where you think that all the bills are paid and your knees don't work anymore. I would like us to have a sense of pleasure and joy and frivolity, rippled throughout our lives, all the way to all of the stages of life we get to.

It's really hard to do that without boundaries.

If you would like to learn how to set. Better boundaries in your life throughout November. I'm running a four week live course. We're gonna be looking at all of this stuff together in real time. We have weekly group coaching calls through video lessons, and there are workbooks to look at your specific situations and to make sure that you get more joy in your days.

If you'd like to join us, I'd love to see you inside. I'm gonna put a link in the show notes here and I will speak to you next week 

Join Better Boundaries November 25