The Truth About Creating Boundaries Between Work & Home

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Family is your #1 priority, but are you actually prioritizing them? Is your work getting your best self while your family gets the leftovers? In this episode I’m spilling the truth about what a boundary is and what it takes to create them between work and home. There are 3 things that are keeping you from holding to your boundaries, people pleasing, perfectionism and hyper-doing and I will explain what it takes to overcome each of them.

Topics in this episode:

  • A new way to think about boundaries

  • What are you actually protecting with your boundaries?

  • The missing link between prioritizing your family and honoring your boundaries

  • 3 common leaks that cause you to not stick to your boundaries

  • What you need to do to actually stop working and prioritize your family

  • 3 questions to help fortify your boundary so you stick to it

Show Notes:

  • Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective – This is a group coaching program for working moms looking to create the building blocks to sustainable work-life balance. The program teaches you a 5-step process, includes weekly group coaching and a private community of working moms all determined to create a balanced life. Find out more information here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective

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Transcript

Intro

Does the boundary between work and home feel a bit blurred? Can’t seem to stop working or turn off your work brain? When a last-minute meeting is called, do you stay late to attend or spend time preparing for it? Yes, family is your priority but you spend so much more time working or thinking about work that your priorities seem a bit skewed. In today’s episode, I am talking about boundaries. The line or barrier between work and home is not an actual, physical object…so, what is it actually? I will break down exactly how to think about boundaries and dive into the 3 things that make it hard for us to stick to them. 


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, how's everybody doing today? My family is headed out to Disneyland in a couple of days and so I am beginning to prepare for that. It's a trip that we're honoring my grandmother who passed away in July of 2020 because she was a big Disney fan and my brother, his family, my dad and myself, and my family are all coming together to honor her and be with each other. We had to delay the trip from the fall of last year due to COVID to this year and I'm just really excited. So I'm in the middle of wrapping up details with work so that I can truly shut down my work brain and not check email or notifications in any way and just be fully present. Here's the thing I know going into this vacation, there will always be more to do. I won't be able to accomplish enough in the next two days to get down to a to-do list of 0, and so that's not really even my goal! I know that what it's going to take for me to truly wrap up work and take a six-day vacation is for me to believe that I have done enough (even though there's always more to do), to believe my clients are taking care of and that I have done everything I can to prepare them and to trust in myself that when I get back to work I will be able to prioritize well and get right back into the swing of things as if I was never gone.


I know that my brain, all throughout my vacation, is going to want to suggest that I should check my email or social media or it's going to want to think about my clients and their needs and how I could better serve them. I know that that voice is still going to be in my head and then I'm going to have to manage it so that I don't actually listen to it and log on to my email or social media or my internal communication system with my clients. I'd expect that my brain is going to keep offering to me that I should do more and that people need me, and that really isn't a problem - so long as I don't listen to it and that I make choices to prioritize the things that matter most to me. and for sure been super present and focused on my kids and being in Disneyland is 100% my priority. What is NOT my priority is prompt communication and being 100% prepared for the work that I have coming up when I'm back. 


And this makes a good segue for today's episode, where I'm going to talk about boundaries. Now I'm going to talk about boundaries in a way that you probably have never heard somebody talk about before. 


What actually is a boundary?

Let's start with what a boundary actually is. The definition of a boundary is a protective barrier, think of it as a fence. We put fences up to protect things that are important to us. We have fences around our yards in order to protect our house and our plants and our pets. On a farm, you have a fence around your farm animals like cows and chickens and goats and pigs in order to protect them from predators or from just simply wandering into the road and being hit by a car. 


When we use the term boundary when we talk about work-life balance, we obviously are not talking about a physical barrier like a fence, we're talking about a different kind of barrier that I'm going to get into explaining that in a moment. 


So what is this barrier protecting? A boundary is a protective barrier and when talking about work-life balance we are protecting something, what is it? Think about this for a moment, when you think about putting a very clear boundary between work and home what are you protecting? 


Protecting our time, energy, and our priorities.

You're protecting the things that are most important to you, but they're not physical things like a house or farm animals or pets - they are intangible things like our family time, our energy, our goals, a connected and loving marriage, time for yourself to read a good book, family game night, seeing your daughter score a goal at her soccer game, teaching your son how to ride a bike… when we talk about creating good boundaries between work and home we're talking about wanting to protect our time, our energy, and our priorities.


Ok, so what is it that actually protects these things? It's not a physical barrier like a fence or the walls of a house, instead, it's our choices. Our yes and our no.


We make over 30,000 decisions a day. Most of them are at an unconscious level. Some of those decisions affect our time and our energy and our productivity and our ability to be present and it's those decisions that either protect the things that are most important to us or they don’t. 


Images are very powerful for our brain and so I want you to imagine a big circle on a page, and if you're sitting or standing somewhere where you could actually draw this it'll be very powerful and effective for your brain. Draw a big circle on a piece of paper, and inside the circle I want you to write out the things that are most important to you, things like spending time with your kids, a loving marriage, time for yourself, a good night's sleep, successful career, 1:1 focus time with each of your children, get specific, the more specific the better – don’t just say “family” what about your family? Sitting around a table together, adventures together, time with each one of them on their own? Get specific, and whatever is most important to you – that goes inside the circle.


Now that circle, the line specifically that surrounds the things that are most important to you, represents your decisions – your yes and no. Now if you drew your circle with a pencil, I want you to erase a little portion of that circle, maybe a couple of inches wide. If you drew your circle with a pen, just make a big X somewhere on the line that creates the circle. This is a leak, and it's created when you make a choice that prioritizes something other than what's inside the circle. And the more and more you do that and make that choice, the bigger and bigger that leak in your boundary gets the harder it can be to plug it up.


Now that leak in your boundary is kind of like a broken-down portion of a fence. Maybe it starts with a few loose bolts in the fence and then over time the wood starts to break away and falls down and creates a large opening in the fence.


Now, what creates that leak? What loosens the bolts and causes the wood to fall down and create this opening in your protective barrier?


There are four types of choices that I see with working moms that create the most common leaks.


People pleasing

Perfectionism

Hyper-doing 


I want to give you examples for each of these so you can really see how these types of choices cause a leak in your barrier and allow for your energy, your time, your emotions, and priorities to leak out.


People Pleasing:

I had a student in The Collective come to me for coaching in one of our weekly group coaching calls, and she said that her boss last week called a last-minute, end-of-day meeting. So my client was planning to leave work that day at 5:30 to be with her two daughters and her husband for the evening and her boss called a last-minute meeting at 5:30. She didn't feel like she had a choice, so even though she didn't want to, she attended the meeting. Now when I asked her why she did that, she said that she thought her boss would be disappointed in her if she didn't attend. Ah, whenever we do something out of fear that someone else will be disappointed, that is people-pleasing. That is making a decision to do something to protect somebody else's emotions. So in this case she had a choice to either protect something that was important to her, which was eating dinner together as a family and having more downtime so that she felt more rested for work the next day OR she could protect her boss’s emotions and what he thought about her. Now what I want to make sure is clear, is that there is no right or wrong to this decision, but it's not a decision on whether she should attend the meeting or not, it's a decision about what she wants to protect. When we make decisions to protect other people's emotions or thoughts or priorities, that is people-pleasing and because other people's emotions and thoughts and priorities are rarely within our own circle, they are rarely within our boundary that we want to protect, they cause a leak. And in this case, what leaked out was a family meal and rest.


Perfectionism:

Ok, here's another example of a type of decision that causes a leak in our boundary. I had another student in the collective say that she didn't want to work this weekend, but she didn't feel prepared for a presentation she was giving on Monday and so she would likely spend a few hours working over the weekend to be more prepared. The need to feel prepared stems from the need to not fail. It’s the avoidance of failure which is essentially perfectionism. Now, this student wasn't telling me that she wasn't prepared at all, she was just saying that she didn't feel prepared enough. And she had a choice, to protect that fear of failure and increase her chances of not failing or looking like a fool – she could protect that, or she could protect and uninterrupted time with her family, and maybe a trip to the park or some other activity that she would give up in order to work. Again neither one is right or wrong, it's just a choice on what you want to protect. Likely, setting yourself up so you never fail is not something that is found within your boundary. If it was, it would likely take up an immense amount of space inside your boundary. The student chose to protect her time with her family, which ended up being a fun time with friends, family, and birthday parties. 


Hyper-Doing:

Ok, the third type of leak I call hyper-doing. This is the need to get one more thing done. To check one more thing off your list. To fill every space and every moment and every ounce of your energy in doing something. Now, remember, a balanced life is a life that has some spaciousness to it. You can't be go, go, going and do, do, doing all of the time and create a balanced life. There has to be downtime, and rest, and reflection, and space to just take in and experience all of the goodness in your life. When we are actively doing things all of the time we don't think about how amazing life currently is and how good we have it and how much we love our kids - those types of thoughts and reflections happen when we're not doing something. When we pause for a moment. So a life of hyper-doing is the life of unrest. It’s a life of actively trying to do more, to achieve one more thing. A lot of hyper-doers I speak with say, I just can’t help it…their brain doesn’t find rest until they accomplish that one-last thing. But here's the thing - most of the things in your circle, the things that you are trying to protect, are not achievements. Some of them might be, some of them might be goals that you have for yourself in your life or in your career – but most of them are not. They are spending time with your kids and being present with them while you play go-fish or while you build with legos. The point isn't to get through as many rounds of go-fish or to build the most amazing tower out of legos, the goal is just to simply be present with them and to enjoy their company and to love on them and to be loved back. Time for yourself might be in your circle, in your boundary, but not to achieve a cleaner house, but to do a craft project that you've always wanted to do or to bake because you just love to do that or to read a good book. Again, the point is to not get through as many books as you can or to bake as many cookies as possible but to experience the enjoyment and the rest of those activities. One of my students Erica was working on taking an actual lunch for herself because her tendency was to always work through lunch and to eat on the go, or to eat while she worked. And in taking a break at lunchtime, was an intentional way to just prioritize herself and take a little breather in the middle of her day. And every weekday she had a choice around noon, she could keep working and accomplish one more thing on her list or get back to one more person on in her emails which would be prioritizing prompt communication or a short to-do-list OR she could stop for 30 minutes and call her mom, read a book, or even rest her eyes. When she did that she was prioritizing self-care and a rested body. I remember getting a message from her one day that said, “I did it, I finally did it! Instead of answering emails and sitting on my phone or computer during lunch…I read a magazine and I didn’t feel guilty about it. It felt luxurious. It felt restful. And I knew it was exactly what I should be doing at that moment.” 


So good, right? 


Ok, so let's do a quick little recap, when we talk about creating boundaries between our work and our home life, what we mean is that we want to make choices that prioritize the things that matter most to us - which generally are things related to our family, not our work. And the most common three types of choices that prioritize our work instead of our family are: people-pleasing, perfectionism, and hyper doing.


Focus on making stronger, more confident, decisions.

So when you think about creating stronger boundaries for yourself, what you need to be doing is focusing on making stronger, more confident, decisions. Caring less about what other people think or the fact that others may be disappointed, caring less about the possibility of getting something wrong or getting it not quite right, and caring less about how many things you have on your to-do list or how many people you have waiting for you. That is what is going to fortify your protective barrier, your boundary.


Conclusion

So I have a reflection question for you to answer, to help plug up each of the three leaks we talked about today: 


  1. Why is it ok for people to be disappointed? 

  2. What positive things come from failure?

  3. If it’s not the amount of things you accomplish, how else can you define success?


Dig into each of these. I want to encourage you to push past the first few answers that you write down and release with it, even if you stare at a blank page for five minutes before you write something else because guaranteed the 8th 9th or 10th thing you write, the answer you have to really dig for is likely much more valuable than the first few things you come up with. 


Alright working moms see you next week!

Rebecca Olson