Setting boundaries is one of the most important life skills that you can learn. That’s because without boundaries, you can’t live a life that meets your needs and desires. Instead, you’ll live a life in which you exhaust yourself meeting the needs and desires of others.
Now, if setting boundaries is hard for you, don’t feel badly! That simply means that you’re a good person who likes to help other people. But in order to live a happy life, you have to learn how to occasionally set boundaries.
Realize that setting boundaries isn’t selfish. After all, we each deserve to spend our time and resources in ways that make us as happy as possible.
For example, in the past, I had a great deal of difficulty setting boundaries. I’m someone who prefers to have peaceful relationships. So, if someone kicked up a fuss because they wanted me to do something, I often said to myself, “Well, it isn’t worth arguing about.” And then I would cave in to other people’s needs and wants – at the expense of my own. As a result, I ended up spending many years with my time hijacked by other people.
Then one day, I realized that because I wasn’t setting my boundaries, I had allowed other people to effectively waste my time. I also realized that time was ticking away. After all, you only get one chance at life, and you don’t get to live past years over again. Once you really let that sink in – that you don’t get to be 36 or 42 or 50 again – you start setting your boundaries pretty quickly!
Below are ways to become adept at setting your boundaries. Start setting your boundaries, and empower yourself to live the life that you desire!
Identify Your Priorities
To set your boundaries, you first have to figure out what’s important to you. Otherwise, you’ll continually give up your time and resources to others because their needs will seem more important than your own.
For instance, you may have financial priorities. You may have a goal of saving money for retirement. If so, then if your adult children come to you with a request for a down payment on a house, you’ll need to set a financial boundary and say “no.” It isn’t that you don’t want to help your children. But if your priority is to grow your retirement savings, then you have to set a financial boundary with your kids once they are adults.
Or, let’s say that between work, child care and housework, you are exhausted by the end of the week. As a result, your priority is to make your weekends a sacred time to relax and read a book. If so, when people ask you to do activities on the weekend, set a boundary and say “no.” Otherwise, you’ll end up exhausting yourself seven days a week for no good reason!
So, if you want to become better at setting your boundaries, first decide what your priorities are. And then set your boundaries, so that you can accomplish those priorities. Otherwise, you’ll do a lot of things for other people at the sacrifice of your own needs. And while those other folks may be happy, you’ll be miserable, and that isn’t how life is supposed to work.
Communicate Your Boundaries Clearly
Some people are highly emotionally intelligent, and as a result, they are very sensitive to the boundaries of others. So, if you express even the slightest concern or negativity, they pick up on that, and they won’t push you to do anything that you don’t feel like doing or that makes you uncomfortable.
And then there are the folks with limited emotional intelligence. If you aren’t very brutally clear with them as to your boundaries, they’ll walk right over them. Frankly, even if you are clear about your boundaries, they may try to walk over them anyway. They are the people who go through life solely concerned with Me, Myself and I.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world solely inhabited by highly emotionally intelligent people. So, you have to become adept at clearly communicating your boundaries. If you are dealing with someone with limited emotional intelligence, you have to be blunt. You may feel like you are being rude, but people with limited emotional intelligence don’t grasp anything but very clear, direct communication. They perceive anything other than blunt communication as your being unsure of your boundaries.
Over the years, I’ve learned to be very direct. If someone is trying to cross my boundaries, I’m nice but very clear as to what is and is not acceptable to me. I’ll admit that being direct has not come easily to me. But these days, I’ve become good at it. If being direct is hard for you, give it some practice. I promise that soon it will come quite naturally to you.
Now, the larger problem is that even if you express your boundaries clearly, some people will choose to not respect your boundaries anyway. That puts you in a very tough place.
We’ve all dealt with people like that, and sadly, the only thing that you can do is to either drastically limit your time with them or cut them out of your life altogether. Realize that you simply are not obliged to deal with anyone who doesn’t respect your boundaries, whether that person is your spouse, a family member or a friend. And frankly, if people truly want to be part of your life, they’ll respect your boundaries without issue.
Learn To Say No
Unfortunately, there are people in this world who go through life throwing temper tantrums, giving people the silent treatment, and otherwise behaving in a difficult and dramatic manner in order to get their way. And, no, I’m not just talking about small children. There are adults who behave in such a manner, and they’ll cross your boundaries, unless you learn to firmly say “no” to them.
Saying “no” to problematic people is hard. So often, we just want to acquiesce so they’ll be quiet and pleasant. But if you make it a habit of letting people make unreasonable demands on your time and life, you’ll wake up one day, and half your life will have been spent doing things you didn’t want to do! And that’s a waste of a life.
The challenge is that when we care about other people, we want them to be happy. And we want to do whatever we can to help them. But you have to realize that you really can’t make anyone happy. You certainly can make people miserable by being difficult. But you can’t make anyone happy.
People are either happy or not based on how they view themselves and their place in the world. And some people are simply unhappy with who they are. You can try to help them, and you can say “yes” to every one of their requests, and they will still be unhappy. Some people are fundamentally dissatisfied with themselves and with life, and that is the place where they live.
So, realize that there’s nothing wrong with saying “no” and setting your boundaries. Your saying “yes” isn’t going to make others happy in a meaningful way. And failing to set your boundaries and say “no” when necessary is simply a recipe to make yourself miserable.
Take Care of Yourself
If you have trouble with setting boundaries, try viewing boundaries as a form of self-care. When we engage in self-care, we do what is necessary for our physical, emotional and mental health. We also do what is needed to improve our finances and careers. And we can’t care for those aspects of our lives, if we don’t set clear boundaries.
Realize that if you don’t set boundaries regarding how much people can take up your time, then you won’t have time to exercise, read or relax. You also won’t be able to focus on your career if people make excessive demands on your time. And if you don’t set boundaries with how people use your money, you won’t have enough savings for retirement or a rainy day.
So, it’s critical to set your boundaries so that you can take care of yourself. For example, there was a period of my life during which I was truly exhausted from my job, caring for my daughter and housework, and I really needed my weekends to rest and relax. But instead, I used to run myself ragged with social obligations. And as a result, there wasn’t a single day in the week that I could just relax.
However, at a certain point, I decided that my self-care was more important than social obligations or the desires of others. So, I began setting boundaries with my free time so that I could take care of myself. Once I started engaging in self-care during my free time, I was so much happier. Setting boundaries allowed me to take care of my mental, physical and emotional health, as I hadn’t been able to do before.
If you are having trouble setting boundaries, consider using the approaches above. Realize that by setting boundaries, you are empowering yourself to create a great life! (To read about how to live authentically, click here.)
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