Setting Boundaries

…what does that really mean?

Setting boundaries is a topic that has come up frequently in my life for the past year. People talk about setting boundaries online and in their insta feeds. Therapists talk about setting boundaries with family and friends. Coaches talk about setting boundaries for yourself to manage your energy and where you place attention. Mental health practitioners, blog writers, and information hosts talk about setting and managing your boundaries to take care of your mental health.

So what does setting boundaries really mean and how do I do this?!?!

I struggled with these two questions when I was in a place where I needed to set boundaries. I want to share with you what setting boundaries means to me and what it looks like in my day-to-day life.

What Boundary Setting means to me. So setting boundaries, to me, means learning about myself and my needs and what I need in my life to show up as the most complete version of myself, most of the time.

That is very high level, but when I read that statement all the facets of my being are yelling “YES! Let’s take care of ourselves, set our boundaries and stick to them.”

If you’re not sure where to start maybe thinking about what “setting boundaries” means to you, would be one good place to start. Again, as you may see a trend in my writing, most of it circles around the concepts of knowing yourself and self-discovery as core anchors to where all of the things stem from. As per usual, self-discovery, self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-acceptance are all central to setting boundaries.

How I set boundaries. When I first learned about setting boundaries I was thought to myself “I have to have a conversation about what boundaries I have and share those with people in my life? I have to communicate what I need to others?” It all felt very awkward and forced to me. Then I started to set my boundaries in my own way. To do this I basically followed this formula (that I made up for myself because it felt good and it worked):

Step one: Identify what I need and from who, what is draining me, what I love doing, what I want to do more of, how much time I have to dedicate to others, what is the priority of the thing someone else is asking me to do, how do I feel this week, what part of my menstrual cycle am I in (this matters for me and women in general because our hormone and energy levels change according to where we are in our cycle), and what is important to me at this time.

Reassess these as often as I need or life asks me to. This usually looks like me feeling uncomfortable in a situation and realizing that that is signalling to me that I have a boundary that is being crossed. Me then thinking about this or meditating on it or walking in the forest and assessing how important this boundary is to me, why it’s there and whether it needs to be there.

Step two: Be more of myself everyday.

I started to learn what was important to me, how I wanted to spend my time, how I will make money to support myself, how I wanted to behave and who I wanted to give my energy to. In learning these things and changing my behaviour to match the things that were important to me, others had to change around me.

I didn’t actually have to have conversations that asserted my boundaries. Things in my world kind of just started changing on their own. When you change one thing in the system, the system changes. Some may see this more of a “passive boundary setting”, however it works. And I do the things that work because they work until they don’t anymore.

Step Three: Do all this with self-kindness and compassion.

Setting boundaries isn’t easy, in my experience. It is easy to be hard on myself and judge myself as I am learning to set my boundaries with myself and others.

Sometimes it involves difficult conversations with myself and others, which isn’t easy. Being kind to myself by using encouraging self-talk and self-compassion by reminding myself that this is a new skill I’m cultivating and it will take time to feel comfortable have been key to developing and setting my boundaries.

Having someone to talk to about your boundaries could be helpful - it was for me. One of my therapists worked with me on this and I found that it kept me accountable to what I said I would do and work out any kinks I was experiencing while learning to set my own boundaries.

I encourage you to try to find what works for you when it comes to setting boundaries; not only with others, but also yourself.