[Alicia Davis] Have you ever had a hard time setting a boundary with someone at work, at home? Doesn’t matter… If so, we’ve got a little formula for you that we think really works and we really love, don’t we, Stacie?
[Stacie Watson] Yes, and as is often the case, our inspiration comes from Brené Brown and…
[Alicia Davis] Love her!
[Stacie Watson] …I know, right? We were listening to one of her podcasts. It’s been a while ago now, maybe even a year or two ago, and she was talking about sort of, the challenge of setting boundaries. And I think setting boundaries for most of us really is difficult because sometimes we don’t feel like we have permission to set the boundary, or maybe we’re not quite sure how to set the boundary. And one of the things that Brene talked about was that many of us think about boundaries initially as what is not okay, so…
[Alicia Davis] Right.
[Stacie Watson] …I put a fence around my house to show that this is where my property ends and yours starts. So it’s not okay to come across unless I invite you, right? And that’s, I think, a really logical way to think about boundaries. And she brought a little nuance to it that I think is a really interesting way to make the boundaries feel a little bit more expansive and yet still steady or sturdy, right?
[Alicia Davis] That’s right. And here’s the formula. It’s “here’s what’s okay, and here’s what’s not okay.” So, let’s just share a couple of examples today. So we were, I was actually talking with a leadership team – or actually doing a coaching session with one of the managers – and she didn’t want to close her door because she always wanted to feel like she was available to her staff, right? So part of it was she needed to communicate that to her staff, so like a here’s, here’s, what’s okay. It’s okay if you want to come and have one-on-one time with me. Absolutely, perfectly okay. It’s not okay if I have my door closed and you knock on the door, and maybe have my sign on that says, “focus on,” right, unless it’s an emergency, it’s not okay for you to knock on the door and interrupt me. So, or it’s, you know, it is okay, you know, somebody’s mad, right? You’re in a meeting with somebody. Maybe it’s a peer, and somebody gets really mad, and they get very aggressive, like, maybe they’re shouting. So it can be used, like, okay, it is perfectly okay that you are frustrated and angry right now. It is not okay that you are yelling in my face.
[Stacie Watson] Right.
[Alicia Davis] Right? So it’s saying you are a human being. You have feelings and needs. I am a human being. I have feelings and needs. And we can still hold a boundary while acknowledging the other person.
[Stacie Watson] Yeah, you know, I was doing some work with the team recently, and the way this plays out, or played out for this particular team is, there were a lot of feelings about changes that had taken place, and it was really causing the team to be pretty stuck. And so, you know, we kind of explored the idea of, how do you kind of set a boundary to say it’s okay that we have big feelings about some of the changes that took place, and it’s not okay for us to be just stuck there, because we’re not effective, we’re not efficient. We have to find a way to move forward. So I think boundaries show up for us as people and individuals, as leaders, as team members and even on teams, how we think about the boundaries we put around the work that we do and how we do it, it’s really important.
[Alicia Davis] That’s right. And we have a session in our Learning Academy that is Creating Healthy Boundaries at Work, where we do a deeper dive into this. And that’s coming up on November 21st, so if you want to check that out, it’s Academy.TLStransforms.com. And I’m Alicia Davis…
[Stacie Watson] I’m Stacie Watson.
[Alicia Davis] Thanks so much for watching.
[Stacie Watson] Thank you.
