Advocate Boundaries
Two sentence summary of this post:
Healthy boundaries begin with yourself grounded in self-awareness, clear communication, and consistent reassurance. Practice is essential from corporate life to motherhood to protect well-being and presence alike.
Boundaries tend to mean different abstractions for people in various contexts. What’s important to you might not carry weight for others. That’s fairly universal. What’s also common is that enforcing unique boundaries might be a challenge.
I engaged in discussions with people in wildly different environments this past week, all having one thing in common. They all had a question in mind: “How to emphasize their personal limits?” The answers boiled down to one key element. Their boundaries with themselves. Strange, isn’t it?
The honesty of those talks warmed me, and I hope you’ll find something useful in the following thoughts.
What are boundaries?
My guess is you have a definition already in your head, similar to this: boundaries are a set of rules to interact with your surroundings. Plain and simple. So where’s the catch?
The catch is consistent communication rooted in self-awareness. Let’s break this down.
Consistency means that you don’t keep changing things up based on your mood or the current moon phase. That way, people around you know what’s right and what’s not, at all times.
Communication means letting people around you know about your limits that you’re aware of. If they don’t know, they can’t respect them. They might ignore them intentionally or by mistake, but that’s a different story.
Self-awareness means if you don’t know what’s right for you, you can’t expect others to read your mind. Not that you can expect them even when you do, see previous point.
Without venturing too deep into definitions, the nature of boundaries is something you should also keep an eye on. Limits can be loose when you tolerate way too much and therefore everyone - including you - will ignore your needs. They could be tight where you keep snapping or become completely detached.
A healthy way on the other hand is when you remain open to interactions but can also stand up for yourself in a respectful but firm manner when your lines are being crossed.
After laying down the foundations, let’s have a look at three different examples, what boundaries mean to actual people. Or their lack of.
To a leader in corporate
If you have ever worked in a corporate environment then you know, it’s like a pressure cooker on a ceramic cooktop. There are mountains of heat followed by valleys of pauses, producing a relatively even pressure to achieve better results than expected. Saying no by creating healthy self-respect boundaries is inevitable.
The trick is that you’ll never be able to reach human sustainability. The system is not designed with that goal in mind. Just think about what human resources mean.
Now picture yourself in the position of an excellent and true leader who puts their staff’s ability to perform in the center of attention. Not their own humanly possible well-being, including rest. Perfect recipe for overachieving.
They keep on being attentive to the team and what their needs are, completely ignoring their own need to rest. When asked what they were lacking in that moment, they said “sleep, exercise, rest.“ Static hiss became the loudest in the call.
To an entrepreneur
Working on your dream as a job can feel like a relief compared with life in a colossal company. But entrepreneurship might become the illusion of limitless possibility. Especially if you are doing everything on your own. Quite common in early years to be alone. Such an environment most certainly will test work-life boundaries if left unchecked.
The dopamine rush of reaching your goals feels unlike any other. You keep pushing through lows like they’re shallow pits. You have your eyes on the prize at all times. You’re super motivated because your life depends on it. So after a blurry point, you discover that you no longer care.
You pay the prize in attention. If you focus on your environment, then your business might not grow as fast, or you might miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That’s what you keep telling yourself.
But if you lose yourself in constantly building, you might miss birthdays. Maybe not physically, but by not being present.
It’s certain that you have at least one example in your life who said out loud: I shouldn’t have pushed so hard, I should’ve put my phone on silent. I should’ve just adored life growing around me.
To a mother
Mothers are a force of nature, quite literally. They can endure more than they’ve ever imagined and look absolutely fabulous while doing so. Motherhood is a realized dream where you keep longing for a break.
As a mother, you’re more than half of the known world for a long time. You may feel that if you don’t show up, a few others can. You have to take care of nurturing life.
At the same time you start to understand how quickly and without second-guessing life keeps marching forward. You might feel that it can become unfair, that you have to juggle a little human’s life and your own growth at the same time. Not to mention rest, as seen above.
Embracing motherhood is demanding, 24/7. Mothers are the source of everything worth cherishing. This is the very reason why lines start to become blurry. Boundaries are blown away like sand mandalas.
One of the toughest challenges is to grow to become your own advocate. To understand and appreciate your needs, therefore being able to choose yourself sometimes. To take care of your own needs as well, because that’s the foundation of well-being of those around you as well. But you have to tell people around you.
How to set boundaries
Let’s go step-by-step in reverse order.
Evoke self-awareness and learn where your boundaries are. As an adult, you’ll know a lot of them. What you’ll also notice is the frustration when someone else doesn’t. Notice that feeling of being uneasy when a line is crossed. That’s a telltale sign that you have work to do around there. If you are journaling, you might have valuable data written down there. Look it up and be honest with yourself: “is this boundary known to my surroundings?“.
Step two: start communicating. Don’t assume others know what’s in your head, ask them what they know. You might be surprised how little your loved ones really do know about your limits. When you get your answers, you can start telling the world how you feel seen and heard. You can start by telling them “I want to enjoy my warm coffee in the morning for 10 minutes.“ It’s a game-changer.
Lastly consistency. Rules are only fair if you keep yourself accountable as well. You can’t become mad if you got your 10 minutes and now you want 30. Back in your head again. I mean you can, it’s just unmanageable for those around you.
If you want to change things up because something doesn’t serve anymore, go back to square one and repeat the process.
As closing thoughts, I think that what’s most important is to accept ourselves as flawed individuals and don’t hold grudges with ourselves, or with others. We’ll keep making mistakes, that we can’t avoid. We can, however, choose how we stand up for our boundaries.
It’s perfectly okay to ask for support. You don’t have to figure everything out on your own. While I believe everyone is their own best expert, I’m also a big believer in asking for help to create change together. It’s comforting to have someone by our side as we go through transitions. If you’re feeling motivated to expand your comfort zone and curious about how I can support you on your journey, let’s talk.
