Healthy boundaries - a bridge to greater fulfillment

In our crazy fast-paced world, we often hear about the importance of self-care of various kinds and one of the most impactful acts of self-care we can practice is to establish healthy boundaries. 🖐🏼

Whether at work, in relationships, or within our friendships and families, boundaries are essential for maintaining emotional well-being and for fostering mutual respect.

Healthy boundaries can help protect our mental and emotional health, foster respect, prevent future resentments from piling on, and flex the muscle of personal growth. 

Establishing boundaries is also in the top five 5️⃣ most common coaching topics I encounter. 

The context can vary greatly... delegation, productivity, work-life fit, procrastination, perfectionism, people-pleasing, moving from individual contributor to manager, parenting, the list goes on. 

The challenge essentially stays the same:

• Sometimes tough choices need to be made in a moment of heightened emotions. 

• Sometimes it can be hard to trust ourselves and our judgments in those moments. 

• Sometimes our words and/or our emotions fail us. 

Borrowing from Positive Psychology, there is an easy solve for this... 

💡It is the idea of an "IF-THEN" rule... 💡

It essentially means proactively creating a metric 📈 for ourselves in advance of a difficult choice needing to be made in order to add more objectivity to it, and reduce the emotional load on ourselves as we create a boundary.

In practice this may sound something like 🔉:

-IF the same type of client challenge gets escalated to me four times THEN it's time to rework the process

-IF a deadline is missed three times THEN it is time to have a performance conversation

-IF in a future meeting my heart starts pounding and I feel I need to speak up THEN I will do so

-IF at the next meeting they talk to me this way again then THEN I will confront them

-IF over the course of 1 month I have to cry three times a week because of work THEN it's time to start looking for another job (that one actually belongs to a former boss of mine) 😂 

Healthy boundaries are not only barriers—they also serve as bridges to a more balanced and more fulfilling life. 

What boundary or IF-THEN rule can you set today to protect your well-being and respect your own worth?

IF you won't have your own back THEN who will?