More and more people are learning about the value of setting limits around what they tolerate from the people in their lives, and what kinds of things they are willing to commit to, and when to say no. These are called boundaries. This can be very healthy, but for many of us, setting boundaries is not nearly as easy as it sounds. Other people often don’t like our boundaries much, and they don’t honor them. Sometimes, we don’t even like our own boundaries, or don’t feel strong enough to enforce them, so we let them go. Still at other times, we might follow through, and they don’t really get us where we wanted to go, leaving us to feel like a jerk, or insecure about trying to make any new ones. While boundaries can be great, and setting them can be very helpful, we should use them carefully. Doing this means we need to understand some things about them.

Part of what it means to be human is to have ideas, goals and dreams. From the time we are young children, through our whole lives, we have ways we think things should be, and we try to get things to be that way. We have needs to meet, such as eating and drinking, staying warm and being loved. We try to avoid unpleasant things like being too cold or getting injured or sick. We get ideas about how the world works, what families are about, how to succeed in relationships, and opinions about ourselves. These ideas shape us deeply, and can take us in many different directions in our lives. And as we take these different directions, we try out the different ideas and rules we come up with, and see how they work, or how they don’t. These form our values, our principles and our boundaries. These three things play pinball with each other our whole lives, bouncing off one another, and have a huge influence on how successful we become in many of our efforts. Let’s look at these three things for a moment and see how important they are to our survival.

Here are three topics we discuss in this episode:

Values - What’s Important

Principles - Rules or Guidelines (Personal)

Boundaries - Personal Limits and Framework