HOW TO SET HEALTHY BOUNDARIES with "BOUNDARY BOSS" TERRI COLE
Update: 2022-04-19
Description
Last week, we featured one of the most powerful talks at the Women's Leadership Academy. Psychotherapist Terri Cole wrote the book "Boundary Boss" and shared ways that women leaders could be better boundary setters.
I'm going to call out one piece of counsel that really jumped out for me. We, as women, have an inclination to want to fix things.
- Something happens to our child at school. We jump in to try and fix it.
- Our partner or spouse has a challenge. We jump in to find a solution.
- Our best friend calls with a problem. We are immediately Googling the answer and saying, 'I know somebody in that industry, I'm going to call them right now.'
Cole asks us to understand what's at work. It's happening to our child/partner/spouse, but we feel like it's happening to us and we want to end the pain.
Things to consider:
- By jumping in to fix it, yes we are ending our own pain. But----we are robbing our child/spouse/best friend from doing the real work. Engaging in critical problem solving skills. What if you said instead, "Well, what do you think should happen here?"
- What is your level of urgency? Are we doing it/fixing it at the expense of our own time and energy. Possibly. "If you can't 'not do it,' that is a bar that you can look at if you can't step back."
- It is a covert or overt bid for control. At its very core, it is disordered boundaries. Because what are we talking about? We're overstepping, over-functioning, over-doing, auto fixing, instant advice giving. All of that stuff, those are boundary issues.
Cole concluded by saying that boundaries are teachable. But the student has to be willing to learn. "When you think about the way we were raised, most of us were raised to be good girls.... It was all about not making other people uncomfortable. Nobody taught us really to assert ourselves. We really start with a deficit in thinking that asserting our boundaries makes us not feminine. Makes us rude. There's so many myths around it. You have to be mean or bitchy to do it. You're rejecting people.
The reason it's so difficult to set boundaries is that we don't know how to do it. It's very much like speaking in language, you wouldn't feel bad about yourself if you weren't fluent in French, because nobody taught you how to speak it, right? "
This episode of our podcast teaches you some valuable "sentence starters" to use when setting your next boundary with that loved one or boss.
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