Creating and sticking to boundaries (part 4)

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Boundaries are the decisions you make to either protect (or not protect) the things that are most important to you, things like time with your family, date nights, rest and working-out. Every day you make decisions to either honor those priorities and keep them safe, or not. In today’s podcast, I help you understand exactly what it takes to prioritize the things that matter most and I explain the 3 most common breaks in your boundary. This is step 4 of a 5-part series on creating sustainable work life balance.

Topics in this episode:

  • What exactly is a boundary?

  • A helpful image to use when thinking about your boundaries

  • How to identify leaks in your boundary

  • The 3 most common things that rob you from prioritizing the things that matter most

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Hey, working moms. Today we are talking about boundaries. When it comes to creating work-life balance, boundaries are the decisions we make to either protect or not protect the things that are most important to us. Things like time with our family, with our spouse, adventure with our kiddos, working out, family dinners, even our confidence and our self-esteem. Every day, we make decisions to either protect these things or not. And in today's podcast, I help you understand exactly what a boundary is and show you how to identify the things that are preventing you from upholding it. This is step 4 of a 5 part series on creating sustainable work-life balance. You ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.

Hey, working moms. I am quite literally sitting on an airplane right now writing this podcast. I'm coming home from my friend Leah. She's one of my best friends. She lives in Houston, Texas, and I spent six days with her. Just me, not my kids, not my husband. It was just this amazing trip, actually. My flight got canceled on the way home and it was rescheduled for the next day, which is right now, today. And so here I am. I got to spend a whole other day with my friend and her family. It was just quite a magical trip. I had actually planned the trip a couple of years ago and then C0VID hit and I rescheduled it twice and it never worked out. And so here we are. And I just got to spend the most lovely time with her and her kids and her husband. And we took walks together and we had brunch together, and she and I spent a bunch of time just connecting with each other, and talking and working side by side. We went to the ballet, we lounged at a pool for 6 hours. It truly was just a wonderful, relaxing trip.

Living the life I’ve always dreamed of.

A couple of weeks ago, I taught step 2 of this 5 step process to creating work-life balance. That step was clarity. And as I reflect on this trip, this truly is the life that I want to be living right now. Being able to travel the country, work while I travel, be a part of the everyday life of my best friend. Even though she lives multiple states away from me, where I can be a part of her kids life, where I can continue to be a part of her community and her village. Even though we live miles and miles and miles apart in so many ways, this trip reminded me that I am right on track, that I am curating for myself the life that I've always dreamed of. I remember when I first became an entrepreneur and I dreamed of having this kind of flexible life where I could work wherever I traveled and my family could come with me and I could be near friends who were far away and I can continue to do what I do. This was such an example of making that happen for myself. As I sat here to prepare for writing this podcast, I just sat and reflected on how I truly am just living the life that I always dreamed of living. The one that I put out there to God five years ago when I started this business and I said, this is what I want for my life. I want to make this happen. Here I am just reflecting on how I'm living that it's so powerful to sit and reflect on how you are already living the life that you dreamed about living. When you show your brain that your dreams are actually coming true, even just in the smallest of ways, if you show your brain that you're already on track towards the dreams that you put out there, that you are actually living, even the smallest piece of it, I believe that that is true for you. That you on some level are already living a part of your dream. And that is so satisfying to actually see and believe. And so I encourage you to just take a moment and ask yourself, how am I already the person that I want to be? How am I already living the life that I dreamed about living? It makes our dreams so much more accessible when we see that we're in the middle of creating them, that we are so close to them, or that we even have an aspect of them versus believing that it's so far off, or that we are just at the beginning of making it happen.

Okay, so let's dive into step 4 of the 5 Steps to the creating sustainable work-life balance process that I have been teaching over the course of this series. Now, as a reminder, these are the five steps that I teach inside the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. That's my paid coaching program for working moms that really want to prioritize their family without sacrificing their career in the process. So very career-driven, achievement focused women that are doing amazing things in the world that want to be great moms at the same time and are trying to figure out how to balance two really important goals in their life.

Confidence in yourself.

Step 1 of the process is really all about you. It's you feeling good about YOU. No matter your circumstances, no matter how much you accomplish, no matter if you are successful or if you fail, no matter if you yell at your kids on occasion or you're super patient, no matter if you order takeout every day or you cook a home cooked meal every day, no matter what, you need to be feeling really good about you. You need to be choosing thoughts that remind you that you are an amazing person, that you are unique, that you are special, that you are impactful just the way you are. It's about remembering that you are enough, always, no matter what, period. End of story. Because when you are believing amazing things about yourself, you start to feel amazing about yourself. And when you're feeling amazing about yourself, you start to do amazing things. You start to say no to people. You start to care less about what they think. You start leaving work at exactly the time that you want. You start investing in yourself and the things that you want. You start seeing yourself as the number one priority. And the other thing that starts to happen is you start to unapologetically name the things that are most important to you. You start seeing your goals as inevitable, and so you start to make them happen. Clarity starts to happen naturally for you.

Get clear on what it is you want.

And clarity is step 2 of the 5 step process. In step 1, you get clear about who you are and believing in yourself. And in step 2, you get clear on what it is you want, what's most important to you, what you want out of your career, what you want your day-to-day experiences to be like with your family, the kind of dreams that you have for yourself, the things that you want to make sure happen in your life. This is about giving your brain direction. It's about saying, hey, prioritize this. Don't prioritize this. It's curating your life. Just like I was talking about earlier on how I'm curating my own life and the dreams that I have for my life of being able to travel and work and be a part of some of my friends lives that live so far away from me.

There is a direct correlation between what you think and what you do.

And then what you learned last week in step 3 is that your thoughts are the key to making this life happen, that there is a direct correlation to what you think and what you do. If you want to start creating for yourself a balanced life, if you want to start leaving work every day at 5pm, if you want to prioritize uninterrupted conversations with your partner, or working out, or a good book, if you want to start doing the things that you know are going to help you feel balanced, you're going to have to start thinking differently about things. You're going to have to start thinking differently about your work, about your life, about you. You're going to have to start thinking that you're right on track, that you are making your dreams happen. You're going to have to start thinking, I've done enough today. I'm always an asset to my company. You're going to have to start thinking, I'm exactly where I should be. I have plenty of time. Because when you truly believe these things a balanced life is going to come a lot easier for you. You're going to have an easier time leaving work at the time you want when you think you've done enough today, you're going to have an easier time pushing back deadlines or saying no when you're thinking I'm highly valuable to this company, you're going to have an easier time letting go of getting out the door on time when your toddler is tantruming and when you're thinking being a connected mom is more important to me than being an on time one.

Creating and sticking to boundaries.

And as we start talking about step 4, it's going to be really important that you understand this concept that your thoughts are what either lead you to do things or not do things. Because next, what we're going to talk about here in step 4, we're going to talk about creating and sticking to boundaries. Your ability to do that comes from your brain. It comes from the way you're thinking about things. And we're going to talk about some of those things that get in the way, some of those thoughts that cause us to not stick to our boundaries. Now, most women, when they join the collective say, ‘in order for me to start having better work-life balance, I need to be better at sticking to my boundaries.’ And what they mean is they need to be better at separating work from the rest of their life. Work can't be their entire life. They don't want to always be on. They don't want to bring work home with them. And I want to take it a step further and say, it's not really about separating work from life. It's about making better decisions to protect life outside of work. It's about your decisions. It's about your yes and your no. You make upwards of 30,000 decisions a day and when you say yes to one thing, you inevitably say no to something else. And so as we talk about creating and sticking to boundaries today in this podcast, we're going to talk about decisions that either lead you to uphold your boundaries and protect your personal time or decisions that don't.

What is a boundary?

As we dive into this, I want to get really clear around what a boundary is. I think we all probably think we know what a boundary is, but let's spend a little time discussing it. And I want to give you an image of what a boundary is to help guide us. As we talk about this, the most useful way to think of a boundary is like a fence. We put fences around the boundary of our property line to protect the things that are inside our property, the things that are most important to us, our house people, our stuff. We put a fence around animals like sheep or horses to protect them from getting out, from wandering, and also to protect predators from coming in. So a boundary is this protective barrier that keeps the things inside of it safe. And when it comes to boundaries in our life, the things that we want to keep safe are the things that you identified in step 2, that clarity step. They're your career goals, your long term goals, your day-to-day priorities, your values, your confidence.

Here are some of mine as an example, these are the things that are inside my boundary, the things that I am working to protect:

  • Uninterrupted family time

  • Sitting down around a dinner table together every night 

  • Conversation with my husband that is uninterrupted

  • Morning pilates

  • Calm brain 

  • Restful sleep

  • Confidence in myself

  • My vision for my business, and the message that I'm sending out into the world 

  • Friendships 

  • Intimacy

These are the things that I put inside my fence, they're inside of my boundary. They're the things that I am trying to protect. It's very important that you make your own list. You have to be very specific about the things that are most important to you, the things that you want to protect. You can go back to the episode just a few weeks ago and listen to the clarity podcast where I talk all about those kinds of things and kind of getting to the bottom of some of the things that are most important to you. And I want you to literally write that list down on a piece of paper so you can really see it. Here are the things that I am working to protect, they're the things that are most important to me. And then once you have that list written down, I want you to draw a big circle around it because that circle represents the boundary. And as we spoke about earlier, when it comes to creating boundaries in life, that boundary really isn't a physical thing like a fence, right? It's your choices, it's your yes, and it's your now. And ultimately, the goal is to consistently be saying yes to the things that are inside the circle, to be making choices that protect and prioritize those things inside your barrier.

Next, I want you to consider the things that you choose to prioritize or protect instead of the things that are inside of your boundary. You can kind of go one for one with your list if that is helpful to you. So, for example, instead of protecting uninterrupted family time, you protect being available and being responsive to your work. Instead of protecting your workouts and your morning pilates, you protect being comfortable and sleep. Instead of protecting a calm brain, you protect the need to get the right decisions and to always feel 100% prepared. Instead of protecting your confidence, you protect your self image, never putting yourself in a situation where you may fail. Instead of protecting connection and conversation with your husband, you instead protect work events and getting more things done. Instead of protecting your tasks and your to-do’s, you protect other people's urgent tasks and emotions. Instead of protecting friendship, you protect getting one more thing done. You could see I literally just took the list that I had made earlier that I rattled off to you and I just went one for one. What am I protecting instead? These are the things that I want you to think of as being outside of your boundary line. So if you look at your piece of paper, you have a list of things that are most important to you that you want to protect. You have a circle around it representing the boundary, the protective barrier around those things, and then all of these other things that you're actually protecting instead. Responsiveness, being available, getting one more thing done, feeling prepared, your self image. These are the things that are outside of your boundary line that are just waiting to get in. They're like wolves just waiting for that break in the fence so that they can get in and take over. So literally write them down on your sheet of paper outside of your boundary so you can start to think about them.

How we cause breaks in our boundaries.

The last thing I want you to consider is what causes a break in your boundary? What causes the things that you want to protect to leak out, and the things that you don't really want to protect to get in? In The Collective, I teach that there are 3 common breaks: people pleasing, perfectionism, and overachieving, or that need to achieve one more thing. When you make decisions to not disappoint someone, that's people pleasing. When you say yes to too many things because you don't want somebody to be disappointed, when you don't push back deadlines because you don't want somebody to be disappointed, when you don't delegate because you don't want to impede upon somebody else, when you avoid conflict, when you don't speak up - these are all people pleasing behaviors. You cause a break in your boundary. You start prioritizing other people above the things that are most important to you when you make decisions to get things right and to ensure that you never - fail that's perfectionism. You over-prepare for everything. You don't trust yourself. You second guess yourself. You over research. You seek other people's validations. You give yourself more time to accomplish tasks - all of those behaviors stem from perfectionism. It's a leak. It's a break in your boundary when you're making decisions based on the need to get it right and to ensure that you never fail. When you make decisions to get just one more thing done, one more thing checked off your list - that's the overachieving. That means you're prioritizing tasks over people. You're always focused on the next thing so you're having a hard time being present. You over schedule yourself and you just try to get one more thing done and every single spare moment, you have a really hard time resting and resting your brain. When you are making decisions based on those things, you're causing a break, a leak in your boundary, in your barrier. They're the holes that essentially need to be patched in order for you to have a rock solid boundary around the things that are most important to you.

You can decide to think something different.

The good thing is that each of these behaviors that are causing you to prioritize things other than what it is you want, they all stem from the same thing. Your thoughts. I don't want them to be disappointed. That's just a thought. I got to get this right. That's also just a thought. I didn't get enough done today. A thought. Remember last week we talked about how every behavior, every action we take, everything that we do that makes us feel out of balance? It all comes from thinking. When you think I didn't get enough done today, that's the overachieving thought. You tend to work late and log back on when you think, I don't want my boss to think I'm lazy or uncommitted. That's a people-pleasing thought. And you say yes to every meeting and every evening event when you think, I just need to get this right. That's a perfectionist thought. And that makes you work late. Research more, seek validation. Stay stuck in indecision. Every imbalance action comes from a thought. And generally speaking, those thoughts can be categorized in three ways; people pleasing, perfectionism, and overachieving. The good news is that you can decide to think something different. You can decide to think something different about your to-do list, or how much you accomplished, or the need to push back a deadline, or the fact that you have to delegate or say no to a meeting, or the fact that you aren't going to answer all of your emails every single night, you just get to decide. 

With my clients when we coach on their thoughts, when we actually start to do the work of changing the way they think so that they can create for themselves a more balanced life, I often start with the same question. What else could you believe about that? I want to get your brain to be thinking about other perspectives. I want your brain to see that there is just more than one way to think about things

Conclusion.

In the Collective, I actually give you a teaching and a workbook that helps you change your perfectionist thoughts, your people pleasing thoughts, and your overachieving thoughts. There is a process to actually changing your thoughts that I can walk you through as soon as you join. The reason creating boundaries is the 4th step in this process is because, as you can see, so much of it is connected to the way that you think. In step 3, we talked about how important it is to control your mind, that balance really starts in your mind. And when we talk about creating boundaries, we're identifying a lot of those thoughts that are getting in the way of you holding to those boundaries and then starting to work to actually address them.

Working mom's, boundaries are a very important part of creating work-life balance. You have to learn how to be able to prioritize the things that matter most to you and let go of everything else. Next week we'll be talking about the last step of the 5 step process that I've been teaching over the course of this series, learning how to achieve more in less time. Alright working mums, have a great week and let's get to it.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in being guided through the 5 step process that I'm teaching here on the podcast where each of the steps are broken down into many lessons that are each ten minutes or less so they fit easily into your day, where you are in community with other amazing career driven moms, learning to balance the demands of their job and their life as a mom, where you have the opportunity to coach with me personally to ensure that the process and steps are tailored to you and your unique circumstance. Then join me in The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. The Collective is a group coaching program that is designed specifically for ambitious working moms. The doors are always open and as soon as you sign up you will get instant access into the 5 step process so you can start right away. You can get more information and sign up at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective

Rebecca Olson