Beating Burnout Part 1: Boundaries
A few years ago in a coaching class the instructor said something that pissed me off and completely changed my life:
Boundaries cannot be violated by other people.
“What do you heckin’ mean, ‘boundaries cannot be violated’, ya yahoo?!” my brain screamed. My entire experience of life up until that point had felt a bit like one uninterrupted string of boundary violations.
I think I spent some time huffing and stomping around, debating whether to ask for my money back for this coaching course in which the instructors were obviously high.
I eventually cooled down enough to think about this and my life has not been the same since.
As it turns out, boundaries cannot be violated by other people because they are 100% in your control. They can, however, be violated by you which is exactly what I had been experiencing.
Let’s break this down with a very simple example. Let’s say you want to have a boundary about phone calls and texts after 8pm. Here’s the wrong way to do boundaries:
You post on Facebook that you are not accepting calls or texts after 8pm, and send a group text to your whole family: Please do not call or text after 8pm.
Boom, boundary. Right?
Your best friend from college texts a meme you will LOVE at 11pm. Boundary violation!
Your mom texts a recipe at 8:15pm. The nerve!
You’re suddenly struck by the fact that you’re surrounded by dolts who don’t give two poops about your boundaries.
But if you understand that boundaries are 100% in your control and cannot be violated by other people, you know that you can just put your phone in Do Not Disturb mode from 8pm to 7am and this isn’t a problem at all.
To be fair, it does get more complicated than that, which is where the concept of “Agreements” can be helpful. Other people can violate “Agreements,” which may cause you to impose a boundary.
Let’s say you’re having a conversation with another person and they call you a dolt. That’s not a very nice thing to call someone, so you might say something along the lines of, “I don’t appreciate being called a dolt. If we are going to continue this conversation, I will need you to not do that again.” If they agree, the conversation continues. If they fail to agree, or agree and then violate the agreement, you end the conversation. That’s a boundary.
Now you can see how your boundaries can constantly feel violated. If you set a boundary and then fail to take the action needed to implement the boundary, e.g., continuing a conversation during which someone repeatedly calls you a dolt, then YOU are violating your boundary.
This is very hard work. It’s very common that people don’t like for you to have boundaries. Partners, parents, children, bosses, and even friends, may have gotten pretty used to your people-pleasing, and boundary implementation can feel a bit jarring. But, that’s their problem.*
So now that you know what boundaries are, and how they work, you can start taking control of them. They can and should be used to limit the access other people have to you (like clients and bosses), which will go a long way toward mitigating or preventing burnout.
*more on that in Part 2 of this series.
