How Setting Boundaries Influences Your Life
Setting boundaries is incredibly important. How well you have defined and set your boundaries will influence every aspect of your life. How you make decisions, how you behave, how you feel and how you perform are directly proportionate to your boundary setting skills. But what are boundaries? How do we set them? Are you good at it? Question after question will pop into your head right now and we will try to get you all the answers.
Types of Boundaries
There are many different types of boundaries in our life. Sometimes you will have learnt to respect them. In some cases not at all. And sometimes only partly. But before we look at the types of boundaries let us check out the language definition. For our purpose, the right definition is “the limit of what someone considers to be acceptable behaviour.” As you can see this is a highly subjective topic and everyone for themselves defines their own borders. So now we know it’s all about acceptable behaviour and perspectives.
Emotional boundaries: How you deal with opinion of others. Whose fault is it when someone gets upset at your opinion? Do you feel the need to fix others? Does guilt stop you from making decisions?
Physical boundaries: Are you reserved or comfortable with affection? Do you like to be touched or touch others (handshakes for example)? What is an acceptable distance between you and others?
Financial boundaries: How do you spend your money? How much do you give away? How much do you defend your material goods?
Moral boundaries: Do you align your behaviours with your core values? How do you react when others act different to your believes?
Mental boundaries: Do you have an open and flexible mind? Can you deal with criticism? Do you react overly emotional?
Spiritual boundaries: What are your spiritual believes or what is your lack thereof? How do you react to other’s believes?
Sexual boundaries: How well do you understand your comfort level around sex?
A good start to see how well you can set boundaries is to ask yourself the questions above and to see how well you can answer them. If you have trouble with knowing what you are comfortable with and see some over defensiveness in certain areas, then you are lacking in defining your “comfort zone”.
When Do We Learn to Set Boundaries?
From my personal perspective to start off, I was very bad at setting boundaries and still I am not good at it. However, I am improving steadily. The more I research on it, the more I think about it and the more I try to set them, the better I am getting. After all, to become an expert at something you need about 10.000 hours of practice. The same applies to seemingly simple tasks such as setting boundaries. I did not grow up in an environment, where boundaries where set or respected. How well you can set boundaries depends primarily on how you grew up. No worries, this does not mean it is set in stone.
There are two sides of the coin when it comes to boundaries. The first is that you need to be able to set boundaries for yourself and defend them. The second is that you learn to accept the boundaries of others and do not overstep them. As a child, we learn by mimicry from our environment. So, we watch carefully what others do and then we copy the behaviour. Essentially, if your tribe is not good at setting and accepting boundaries, neither will you be. Think back onto your childhood and answer these questions for yourself:
Where my needs as a baby tended to?
Where my wishes as a child respected?
How often was I forced to do something?
Did my opinion matter?
Did my parents spend sufficient time with me?
We can extend the above list into eternity, but those 5 questions should be a good starting point for you. If your parents or caretakers had narcissistic tendencies, you will most likely have issues with setting boundaries.
I had a married couple as my caretakers additionally to my parents. This is not so unusual in wealthy families as the parents often focus on the business. Thus, the time I spent with my parents was rather scarce and so my ability to set boundaries suffered from this. Coming from an aristocratic family I also grew up with the mindset, that being aristocratic you are obligated to behave and act in certain ways - especially towards your community. The wellbeing of the community comes before your own. You need to uphold certain values and ways of behaviour to be a role model. In the wrong context or rather with lacking context, this is very confusing for a child. Due to how my parents liked to handle things around my “free time”, I spent most of it on my own. Social situations are when you learn to defend and respect boundaries, so I am lacking in that early on experience. I did have some role models in my life, who were very clear on their boundaries. This helped me later on in life to start a process of finding my comfort zone.
The first seven years of your life are the most important when it comes to learning behaviour and beliefs. Have a look at your first seven years of live and try to distil what behaviours and beliefs you picked up then. For anyone who grew up in a business family I suggest paying close attention. From my experience the problems are very similar for most and there is a good reason why about 70% of wealth destruction stems from behaviour. Not being able to have your own frontiers is in my opinion the number one reason for this. Yes, it is the parent’s job to teach this to you, but life is not always how it should be, so it is in your own interest and responsibility to learn setting boundaries. You learn this for your own greater good. It will do a lot of damage to you if you do not sort this out. Not only in your work life but also your relationships with friends, family, loved ones.
Consequences of Not Setting Boundaries
Not having boundaries often means being a people pleaser and being busy saying yes to everyone’s requests. Here we have the first big consequence, which is that if you say yes to every request you ignore your own inner compass. You can also call it your gut feeling. If someone requests something from you, you will have an immediate answer inside yourself and that is yes or no. If you do not know how to set boundaries you don’t know how to say no to a request. In the worst case you will say yes to everything and in the second worst case you will often tell people that you will think about it and then ghost them. Both will lead to you leaving a bunch of unhappy people in your wake – you included. Either you say yes to too much and then get overwhelmed and cannot deliver properly, or you just don’t get back to people. Both will leave you with a reputation of not being reliable.
As humans we are in a constant battle of adhering to our own needs versus the needs of any group, we are in. Boundaries are all around us and make groups work. If you are not careful and make sure you set the boundaries for yourself clearly, you will be in a constant tugging war. Do I adhere to what others expect of me, or do I listen to what I want? Without set boundaries, you will not have an answer to this question when it is needed. By setting boundaries you basically predefine decisions for certain situations. If you do not do this, you will revaluate at every time a decision is needed. This will consume huge amounts of willpower from you and as we know, willpower is a finite resource we have each day. You will end up with decision fatigue and this will ultimately lead to you not making decisions anymore. You will either push decisions along, till someone else will decide for you - believe me, the decisions others make for you are usually not good for you - or you will make decisions according to other people’s “advice”.
Ultimately being a people pleaser and not being able to make decisions, will lead to your performance lacking. To get results you need to focus on a goal and work towards it. But first you need to DECIDE on your goals and if you have too many, you will not have the resources to reach any. Moreover, you will end up choosing goals not of your own, but those of others. In order to set the right goals, you need to have a bigger vision that you follow.
One massive consequence that I and others in my family have felt is in investing. Not knowing how to set boundaries, results in making bad investment decisions. The mechanics behind it is simple: you have troubles asking for what you want and thus the others will push onto you what they want. Not a great position in, to invest. I suggest to anyone, to work on their boundary setting skills and get them right before making any investment decisions, where other people are directly involved.
You will probably have heard about the importance of having values and principles. Your values and principles act as a kind of checklist for your decisions and behaviour. Before doing something or deciding on something you should always consult your defined values and principles. Basically, setting boundaries and having values and principles is the same thing. The boundaries are your principles. Acting upon principles that are clearly defined will instil integrity in you. When people clearly see why and how you do things you will be portrayed as a person of integrity. This of course depends on your principles and is an oversimplification. I am a firm believer that deep down we all have good intentions and ideally want to act with integrity (leaving away the myriad of psychological reasons that can lead to people acting without integrity).
Not understanding boundaries can also result in some toxic behaviour. We looked at the consequences of you not defending your own boundaries. But what happens when you do not know how to accept other people’s boundaries? As mentioned above boundaries make groups work. If you enter a group and are not aware of boundaries, you will repeatedly overstep boundaries either of the group or of individuals. This behaviour will make integration into the group a lot harder than it would be otherwise.
You might tend to indulge in “emotional vomiting”, where you overly share your emotions, wishes, thoughts, sexual desires. Things that for most are intimate and only shared with people that are trusted. To be trusted takes time. If you are not familiar with people’s limits you also tend to be intimate too quickly. You might tend to trust and love others too eagerly. It will result in heaps of pain for you, when this easily given trust and love is not returned or betrayed. Or maybe you tend to go into All-or-Nothing relationships, making yourself completely dependable of one person and giving up everything for them. This can seem quite overbearing for the other person and actually scare them.
Ultimately, combining all the consequences above, the emotional strain you might put on yourself will result in psychological “disorders”. Constant rejection from your anti-social behaviour, constant betrayal from the people you trust too quickly, constant failure from taking on too many responsibilities, not adhering to your principles, will have the following results:
Low self-esteem and low self-worth
No self-compassion
Low confidence
Low self-trust
Slipping into the “Child Role” in communication
The above issues again have consequences of their own. We could go on and probably write a whole paper on these consequences. For now, let’s just agree, that these things are not good for your success in life.
The biggest consequence of them all is depression or burn out. Especially when things get difficult or you are in a crisis scenario, not having boundaries will burn you out. You end up trying to make everyone involved happy, but in a crisis you will have many unhappy people. Ultimately you are your most important resource in a crisis and thus you need to invest into yourself. It’s like a car, you need to refuel it regularly, clean it and take it to the mechanic to be checked and repaired. The same applies to you. If you try to be limitless you will end up in a black hole.
How to Set Boundaries?
So far, we looked at, the influence of childhood on the ability to set boundaries, what the reasons why we find it difficult to set them and the consequences of such behaviour. So far so good. Now the most important part is, how to actually set boundaries if you are struggling with it. A few of the suggestions are things that I have done myself to improve and some are things I am still planning to do, which are recommended by professionals. Let’s have a look at a few techniques.
1) The base is to actually go and set your limits. Easy right? It may seem incredibly difficult, but in reality, it is not. As we discovered earlier on, your limits can be your principles. I used a holiday in sunny Italy to sit down in peace in the garden of the AirBnB and just started to write down things that are important to me. Do this on your own and in quiet with no distractions. You can do this anywhere, as long as the atmosphere is right for you. Of course, your principles are not the only thing. Once you have written down what is important to you, you can then start with what is NOT important to you. After that have a think about your own personal limits. For example, if your personal limit is, to not spend more than one hour with a certain college at work per week, then write that down and start to defend this limit. These 3 steps should get you started. You can do them in any order, just start with whatever is the easiest one for you.
2) Start to use “no” more often. Get comfortable with it, because saying no can be dammed hard. People will tend to get angry or sad when you say no. Saying no will seem like a rejection to most, but it is better for both. Be conscious about the consequence and remember that saying no will bring a sharp but short spike of stress. On the long run though this spike of stress is minute in comparison to the stress from committing to things you do not want to do.
3) Communicate directly and politely. In a recent workshop about communication and effective meetings by Interactifs I learnt that people like to be communicated with in a direct and polite manner. What happens when you do not set boundaries? You communicate only politely or use suggestive speech. Setting boundaries does not mean that you need to be rude to anyone. Keep it very clear and direct in a polite fashion. If you are about to communicate a no it helps to practice ahead and write your plaidoyer down. Especially when you are going to discuss it in a video call or phone call you can keep looking at your written down words.
4) Listen to your gut and tune into your feelings. Your inner compass will communicate pretty clearly to you. If something doesn’t feel right, then do not do it. No matter how good it seems, if you do not feel good with it, it will stress you. If you do something you really do not want to do, it will result in a bad performance, bad results and discontentment. From a personal note, I can only advice anyone to listen to their gut. In my case every time I decided not to the process resulted in heaps of stress.
5) Set your boundaries one step at a time. If setting boundaries is new for you, do not rush it. You will have trouble to implement all your boundaries at the same time. Start with the most urgent or the easier things and work your way from there. One very simple step I took is to use the flight mode on my phone frequently. I turn it on about 1-2 hours before going to bed and I leave it on till about 2 hours after getting up. This way I have my peace before going to sleep and in the morning. No one (apart for my partner) is then able to disturb me. I also use the flight mode when I sit down to write.
6) Get yourself support. This can be anyone from a therapist to a mentor or a friend, who is good at setting boundaries. As with anything in life, if you do not know how to do something or put it into action you can ask some kind of expert for help. You can also try to find other people with the same issue and exchange experiences on how each of you deals with learning to set boundaries.
7) Change your environment. If you have people around you, who repeatedly ignore your boundaries or your attempts to set boundaries, then reduce the time you spend with them. I use the words reduce, because there are people in your life that you may not be able to just “delete” from it. An environment that made you “sick”, is not the environment that you can heal in. You need to try and create an environment, which will not boycott your attempts at self-improvement. Try to create an environment that supports and encourages your mission.
8) Increase your self-care. Not setting boundaries means that you put others before yourself. On top you may also be a giver as described by Adam Grand in his book “Give and Take”. Therefore, an easy shift in mindset is to focus on self-care. Do an audit of yourself and write down what you are lacking in your life. It may be enough free time, it may be exercise or healthy diet or enough sleep. Put these things that you really want in your life on the top of your priorities. Now whenever a responsibility comes your way you can think about how this will affect you. Will it steal time of your important things? Will you need to increase the time on self-care to compensate? This is an important point, if you are experiencing a crisis.
9) Set time limits. You will have several responsibilities in your life. A simple trick is to sit down and set time limits. Make sure to inhale these limits. Print them out, track them and stick to them ferociously.
10) Use the 100% rule. To explain this rule, I would like to simply use a quote: “100% is easier then 98%”. Commit 100% to decisions and changes in your life. An easy example is alcohol. Say you want to stop drinking alcohol, then you should go all in. Decided that you will not drink anymore for the rest of your life. This way you have made a decision once and that is it. No need to contemplate if you should have a beer if a co-worker is bugging you. The answer is simple. This mindset shift can create wonders. I have a strict diet. I had health issues and changing my diet was the start to a journey of healing. Back then I made the decision to change my diet for life and thus it was easy to stick to it.
11) Respect the limits of others. This should go without saying, but as we discovered earlier on, you may also have trouble respecting the boundaries of others. When interacting with others just keep in mind that they have limits of their own. Also keep in mind that groups of people have their own boundaries reflected in their social norms. Try to imagine who has which limits. Maybe even sit down and write down things that come to mind for the people close to you. Or just ask them. It took me (an extrovert) quite some time to understand that my girlfriend (an introvert) needs time alone when something disappoints her. As an extrovert I like to talk about things immediately, while introverts need some alone time to process disappointment first before sharing it. Since I respect this (or at least most of the time) we have less disputes.
There are many more techniques and tools that you can use to incorporate your limits into your life. The 11 tips above should be more than enough to get you started if you are struggling with it. Starting to take care of your own wishes and desires will do you wonders if you have not been doing this in your life so far.
Potential Issues With Boundaries
Before we draw the finishing line to this topic, we should look at some potential problems when setting boundaries and accepting boundaries of others. The two main points to consider are.
Operating outside your comfort zone. To grow you need to step outside your comfort zone. Now if you are not careful with defining your limits, you might end up staying in your comfort zone. Pay attention, that you continue to try out things, and that you don’t say no to things just because they are hard, or you are afraid. The only constant in life is change and with that your limits and boundaries should also change. They are not something static, they change as you grow as a person. Your boundaries are fluid, keep that in mind!
Being a non-conformist. Especially when looking at boundaries of groups. There are many instances where your personal principles and the boundaries of groups will clash. Keep your goal in mind there. What is it that you are trying to achieve? Is it some greater purpose that you have committed to and some rules are in the way of you achieving it? In that case don’t let traditions take you down. In the end it comes down to your goal and how groups and their rules are in relation to it.
There is much more on this topic out there and you can go incredibly deep on this. If there is one thing to take away, I would suggest it is the following: the better you are able to set your boundaries, the better the better your performance, your decisions and your mental health will be. I hope that my overview will help you just as much as myself.
