What are boundaries?
The way to describe them is, our own personal limits for acceptable behaviour, in people around us. Often the quality of our relationships depends on how good we are at establishing boundaries with others.
Boundaries are our measure of our own level of self-respect & if people around us are ‘pushing’ our boundaries we can often feel uncomfortable.
Weak personal boundaries leave you feeling vulnerable or taken for granted. If you have ever had that feeling of “That was not fair”, or “I don’t deserve this”, then you have come up against a “boundary issue”.
One way to check whether your boundaries need a re-think is to see how the people close to you treat you?
Do they use humour as a subtle put-down? Do you have people in your life that label you? In other words “She never finishes anything, she is just lazy!”
Do you have people who take advantage of your good nature? Do some interactions with people leave you feeling guilty afterwards? If you experience these things on a daily basis this could be an indication that perhaps you need to re-set your boundaries at a level that feels more comfortable to you.
Strong personal boundaries protect us from people who:
• waste our time,
• who always take without giving in return,
• who tell us their problems but never listen to ours,
• who put us down,
• who always seem to remind us of our failures,
• they lay guilt trips on us,
• they blame us for their own failings, or
• who use us to vent their feelings of frustration and anger.
The people we need to set boundaries with might not only be our immediate family. The same rules apply to friends or even work colleagues.
Setting limits for people around us encourages them to treat us with greater respect and lets them know that we are not someone who can be walked all over.
So how do you go about setting some new parameters for your life? It is a 5 step process:
1. Look at all the people in your life & decide what it is that they say or do that makes you feel uncomfortable or hurt.
2. Write down what they say to you, or how they phrase it. Often put downs are disguised as ‘humour’, or so subtle that other people don’t really see them. See if there is any pattern to the issues they bring up – what is their ‘hobby horse’ that they use against you.
3. Write down some new rules. Choose the issues you are going to take a stand on. It may be that people can no longer dump tasks on you at work, it may be that you are not longer going to accept anyone being rude to you, it may be you will no longer tolerate bad language, just set the “rules”.
4. Then work out how you are going to respond. How can you politely, yet firmly, establish the new boundary and enforce it. If it is a ‘swearing’ issue you could say something like “I’m sorry, I don’t think that is appropriate language to use – please don’t use that type of language in my company”. You may not feel comfortable doing this that is why we need to write down several responses & practice them until we feel ‘brave’ enough to confront the person responsible.
5. The last step is to ‘just do it’! Setting new boundaries with people is not always easy & it needs a quiet determination on your part. In essence you have to re-train someone else, which you have to know may take a while, however, when they see you are not going to budge or back down on the issue – they will stop it.
Setting new boundaries will help you feel so much better and so much more in control of your own life. When you establish boundaries people give you respect. They don’t mess you around, you can just be yourself, you can ask for what you need and behave without fear or judgement.
Any life change has a price tag – remember there are people that won’t want you to change. This means that you may even lose some people along the way, however, any relationship worth having will survive and thrive.
Source of article:
Adele Howell-Pryce
Creator of the "CHANGE YOUR LIFE" email coaching program - for more click here
Life & Business Coach based in Durban - for more info on Adele, click here
Cell: 082 490 6567
Email:
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