Why your boundaries keep failing you
I read all the books. I listened, took notes, and re-listened to everything Brene Brown said. And like most challenges, when I didn’t notice a significant change in my experience, I figured it was me. Hi. I’m Maika and I am crap at boundaries.
But what if it’s not me? Or, what if it’s not just me? In all my hunting for the solution of how to create boundaries, I kept finding strategies for keeping and maintaining them. At the risk of sounding like Seinfeld in the car reservation episode, I knew how to do the opposite–I could keep the boundary. I just didn’t know how to build it in the first place.
Like putting together a puzzle without knowing what the picture is supposed to be, I had been studying a tool for maintaining a healthy energy without ever cultivating one to maintain. You can blame capitalism, the patriarchy, my generational inability to take a break from work, or simply the fact that I’ve always been a good student who knew how to crush a grading rubric. Meeting the parameters in which you’ve been placed is not a bad skill to have. In fact, it’s critical for surviving most schools, workplaces, and family reunions. But it doesn’t teach you how to place them yourself.
It doesn’t matter where we went wrong. We can always get closer to right.
Boundaries are useless if you don’t believe in and engage with what they are protecting. The overwhelming majority of my clients are overwhelmed. I find myself pulling out coaching strategies like “Declare a State of Emergency” to help passionate, intelligent leaders clear the clutter and do nothing else until they can be in a headspace more pliable than the adrenaline of fight or flight. (That, according to the Stress/Cognitive Performance Curve, 2018, is the limited survival instincts we are working with during times of anxiety, panic, fear, and eventually burnout).
Wendy was a high-level executive at a small-but-mighty engineering firm. She was brought in by the CEO to create order and set the team on a path toward sustainable growth. Previously, she had demonstrated excellent leadership in a similar role on a well-established team. But she showed up in my office confused and ashamed, unable to protect her health or her sense of wellbeing. Wendy was burned out and getting worse. She insisted she needed to work on “boundaries,” and that if we could just get that going, she would be better.
Wendy was hustling for better boundaries. But first, we had to care for her margins.
The problem she faced was leading a team with so many blurred lines of expectations, that voids in leadership popped up like potholes during the Spring thaw. Always someone to keep her eye on outstanding commitments, Wendy would see a problem and fill it herself. Part of our professional relationship was to help her transition from being another pair of hands into a coach and facilitator of talent. But before we could get there, we had to make sure she was operating with something different (and perhaps more foundational) than boundaries. We had to fatten up her margins.
Margin: The minimum circumstance that creates a healthy environment for your talent to thrive.
Here’s what we worked on with Wendy, and how you can explore your own margins:
Identify the value worth protecting.
Wendy, like many of us, was a natural at taking on the emotion and responsibility of others. Especially when she knew something needed done, she did it. A talented quick thinker, even at half of her best quality, she outperformed most others. We had to get explicit about what she offered when she was at her highest and healthiest contribution. This wasn’t easy, because there was a research-based truth at play: We undervalue our own strengths. We naturally tend to think people even like us less than they actually do. We lose sight of the unique things that come easily for us, our opportunities to be truly courageous and contribute in life-changing ways, because of two main reasons: 1. We are too busy doing it all. 2. We fail to understand how unique our talents really are.
To help Wendy value her contribution, I asked her to explore where her credibility comes from. This was an easy baby-step for her to start to see her own value, because it took no more than reviewing her LinkedIn profile.
Once she had words for credibility, I asked her to investigate what she believed made her reliable. She now had a mixture of fact and behavior she was starting to use to build her own internal trust equation (Thanks to David Maister, The Trusted Advisor and my friend Lisa Feldman, who taught me how this can be helpful in real client scenarios).
Finally, we looked for times she had invited vulnerability within psychological safety. Maister might call this “intimacy.” You might just say, “When did you help someone feel comfortable letting down their guard?”
As we were building muscle on the bones of her stick-figure self-image, we could begin to explore not just who she was at her best, but what environment she needed in order to show up that way. As I learned last summer, chickens really love to eat watermelon. But cats who share their yard won’t touch it. Failing to identify your own margins is like feeding every animal the same treat, expecting them to love it equally. Failing to identify the fact that you need margins at all is like expecting the barnyard to thrive on whatever they brought with them when they moved in, not even offering feed, let alone the treat of a melon every once in a while.
Additional ways to help your client understand their value include peer interviews, reflection on personal and professional growth, or extreme powerful questions that isolate what she can do that no one else can.
2. Name the times you’ve felt most able to offer that value.
With Wendy, we had to take things down to the difference between her weekdays. I encourage you to begin at that simple and specific level. I asked where she was when she was most able to live out her contribution. I asked who she was with, what her morning had been like that day, and how she carried that energy with her throughout the next day.
Wendy started by naming general good hygiene–not committing to more than she could reasonably do, staying hydrated, and having clear goals. But as we continued, she discovered some specific environmental factors that built her healthiest margins. Specifically, she needed daily interaction with a close friend and advisor. She had to have room mid-day to check in on a specific variable that helped her measure an important project. She needed to silence her social media to anything that took her focus too far into the future.
These aren’t just good habits. And they may not be permanent. But in addition to giving Wendy the space, time, and health she needs in order to meet her demanding responsibilities, they’re the ingredients for value she needs right now–her margins that we start from, not additional bonuses we hope to get to after her calendar is full.
3. Tell someone who cares.
Just like boundaries (something you say “no” to after learning your limits), margins are best when said out loud. Tell someone who cares about your wellbeing more than they care about your output or performance toward a specific goal. These building blocks of minimum expectations will not only have an effect on you, but a splash-over on those who care for you. Consider writing your margins as a promise to someone else, one that you know will lessen the contribution you have to offer if you break it.
Wendy has begun to use “margins” as shorthand for self-evaluation of capacity. After several months of carefully paying attention to her margins, she realize the truths of them:
Margins will not thicken themselves. Without intentional work, most of us give more than we say we have capacity to offer at our very best.
Our need for margins changes as we go through different life experiences. It’s okay to need “thicker margins” when you are facing a stressful challenge, or healing from one.
A good friend might offer you the margin you need to get by, but it is up to you to create the margin you truly deserve. Your employer, partner, client, or family will not define your margins for you, nor will they ask you to fatten them up.
I didn’t come up with this on my own. I had an incredible coach who made a mindful and significant change in her career wellbeing a year ago, and told me “actually, life is really good. I don’t feel overwhelmed.” And I thought she was either lying or delusional. Then I realized THAT was not good. And we don’t have to untangle how it got there, we just have to start today to make it better.
