Welcome to The Inbox Coach, a monthly email to bring you a little bit of coaching to your inbox and help you to make time for your personal development. So many people have been working from home for over a year, their work and home life blurring into one, and with changes to work likely to happen as the world starts to open up, I thought now would be a good time to explore boundaries.

Welcome to April and a new topic for The Inbox Coach. 

If you are in the UK, I hope you are enjoying the bank holiday weekend and if you are reading this email today that you are doing so intentionally and not breaking a boundary about not working when you are on holiday. 

This month I’m going to look at boundaries at work. I am a huge fan of setting and enforcing boundaries in the workplace, it is something I’ve had a lot of practice at over the last 10 years and have seen how beneficial it can be. I’ve also seen how challenging people can find it and I think a lot of dissatisfaction that people experience at work comes from other people not respecting boundaries. I think that in some instances we don’t enforce our own boundaries to our detriment, and we could be doing more to help ourselves to feel good at work. As the world starts to open up and our relationship with work shifts again, I want to think about what we can control to feel good at work. 

Why do we have boundaries?

Boundaries are all about how we want to show up in the world, and how we expect other people to treat us. They are the line between what we find acceptable and what we don’t, and if we are to be happy at work, we need to work out what those boundaries are. 

Work is a contract; we agree the tasks we will do and the hours we will spend doing them in exchange for a salary and benefits. There is so much more that we get out of work, but fundamentally these are the rules we sign up to. The boundaries of our job are established when we sign our contract and then it is up to both sides to honour the agreement. Boundaries can also be about our expectations about how people treat us and our values when it comes to how we do our jobs. When we are working within these boundaries, whether they are the formal agreements we make with our employer or the social contracts we have with our colleagues, then we can be happy and productive at work. When our boundaries are pushed, disrespected or broken, then we can start to feel exploited, unhappy, stressed or even burnt out.

Having boundaries makes you selfish

I often hear people refer to having boundaries or maintaining them as selfish. Putting a boundary in place is putting yourself first, and this isn’t selfish because the reason you are doing it is so that you can be your best self. Particularly at work, but also in life, if you aren’t showing up as your most energised and engaged self, the quality of your work will decline. You won’t feel great, and you won’t be able to be there for other people, your team, your employer, if you aren’t getting what you need. In the short term you might be able to cope, but longer term it can lead to burnout and unhappiness. But even if you enforce your boundaries for selfish reasons, why is that not ok? Why should you suffer because other people can’t respect what you need? 

The hardest thing about having boundaries is that you have to enforce them. Most people will respect the boundaries that you put in place but not everyone will know what yours are or remember to think about them. You have to be firm about what your boundaries are, gently remind other people and stick to what you need to work for you. That doesn’t mean being rude or unhelpful, but it does mean that you push back. 9 times out of 10, if you respond with a helpful no, the other person will be fine, and if they aren’t that probably says more about them. Rather than just saying no, try to offer a solution:

I can’t do that now, but I could do it next week

I can do that, but I’d need to put this other thing on hold, which would you prefer?

I don’t work on Thursday’s, does Monday work for the meeting?

That isn’t something my team looks after, but I can sign post you to who does

What is the worst that will happen?

I often think that the fear of pushing back on someone is worse than the actual response you get, which is why people are so reluctant to do it. They don’t want to be seen in a bad light, even if the request was an unreasonable one or down to someone else’s poor time management. I can’t stress enough how important it is to be firm with your boundaries. In almost every company I have worked for I have seen people who haven’t been firm about boundaries around work, and in every case the person with no boundaries was the one who suffered. Other employees who had firm boundaries didn’t suffer, the company got their targets met and the person without boundaries worked so hard that they burnt out or got fed up and left. Extra work, working late, doing something they didn’t want to do never got rewarded and if you absorb a problem, rather than putting a boundary in place it will never be resolved by anyone but you. And yes, I speak from personal experience as I am an example of the person with no boundaries before I learnt to put them in place.

The worst that will happen if you put boundaries in place is that the other person will be a bit put out, but the consequences for you if you don’t put boundaries in place is that you won’t achieve your goals. You will either end up doing work that doesn’t fit with your career plans or miss out on your home life by working late, being stressed and tired. You will essentially take on the burden of someone else’s problems rather than support them to find the right solution. 

Reflection

*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar

Putting boundaries in place is putting you first so you can feel good at work. Because when you feel good at work you will get better results and achieve your goals. You will feel energised and motivated to be creative with your work and be best placed to make the most of the situations you are in. It can be tough to put a boundary in place, but the feeling you get from pushing back and having the time and energy to work on what is most important for you feels great.

If you are struggling with a particular boundary at the moment, then ask yourself these questions:

What is the boundary that I want to put in place?

Why is this boundary important to me?

What will enforcing this boundary enable me to do?

What are the consequences of me not being firm with this boundary?

Who is going to try to push this boundary?

How will I respond if they do that?

Writing these answers down in your journal and giving yourself time to reflect on the situation will help you to find a new approach to putting a boundary in place. 

Action

I’m currently taking a course on neuroscience in coaching and can tell you that there is scientific evidence that practice makes perfect (in case you needed convincing.) When it comes to being firm with your boundaries, the more you practice doing it the easier it gets. Whilst we can’t know exactly when someone might disrespect our boundaries, if you think about where you aren’t good at being firm with your boundaries you should be able to have a good guess at when an opportunity to enforce them might come up and be prepared for it. This is a little bit easier if the person not enforcing your boundaries is you when it comes to working hours or switching off/not checking your emails when you are not at work.  

Task

Think about a situation that might come up in the next few weeks where your boundaries will be challenged. Think about how you want to react so that you can be firm with your boundary. If it is another person who might ask you to do something, practice saying out loud what your response might be. If it is down to you (with working hours for example) think about what you are going to do to break the pattern. 

If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add the prompts in this email to your calendar.

Inspiration 

“Don't think about making women fit the world—‪think about making the world fit women.” - Gloria Steinem

I think one of the reasons why women in particular can find it hard to be firm with their boundaries is because we are told so many times to bend and accommodate other people, that it becomes the default option. We have also been fed the message that women can have it all when it comes to careers, family life, social life, houses, travel… so is it any wonder that we have a hard time saying no. Whilst we might be living in a time where women have more choice and freedom than they have done in the past (in the UK at least) there is still an expectation in our culture and wider society about how we behave. There is still a lot of work to be done around the expectations we have for women, that differ to men, and we can all contribute to that in our own small way by being firm with our own boundaries.

I’ve seen first-hand how rewarding and affirming it can be to put boundaries in place with confidence and intention. I’ve been able to protect my energy levels when my chronic illness leaves me fatigued and feel ok about resting and getting well. I’ve pushed back about workloads to my manager and been able to secure more resource rather than me absorbing the problem. I rarely feel resentment towards colleagues and other people for doing things I feel I shouldn’t be doing, and most of the time saying no is met with little more than an “oh, ok”. 

I hope that you have found this week’s email to be thought provoking. I know that if you aren’t confident about enforcing your own boundaries it can feel very hard to do it. Know that you, your time and your energy are valuable and saying no or pushing back so that you can be your best self is always ok. I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on how to create and maintain boundaries at work.

See you then

Laura