How To Create Healthy Boundaries in Personal and Professional Relationships [Episode #692]

This week’s topic is: How To Create Healthy Boundaries in Personal and Professional Relationships

This topic falls into our emotional wellbeing and mental health cornerstone and it’s so important because when we’re able to set healthy boundaries, it keeps us from our energy being drained. It keeps us in a state where we can stay open and loving, and stay really protected with firm boundaries that allow our relationships to flourish and to be healthier.

We aren’t really taught about boundaries growing up necessarily. It’s not something that we’re taught in school. And so as adults, this is a tool that we really have to acquire. It’s something that I’ve really been focusing on myself over the past few years. And I can say that with a little bit of focus, healthy boundaries, makes a huge difference in your life.

Sometimes we don’t realize how a little bit of intrusiveness from a friend, a family member, or a colleague can infiltrate our personal space, our time and our energy. And before we know it we’re depleted or we’re anxious, or we just don’t enjoy life as much. And it really doesn’t have to be that way. We can create healthy boundaries and these can vastly improve the quality of your life. This is something that we can all learn to do. And on today’s show, I’m going to give you some very practical tips and tools on how to do just that.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question sent in by a Beauty just like you, listen now to find out!

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Question Answered]

Mary – Florida (Emotional Wellbeing Cornerstone)

Kimberly, I have a close friend who I love, but always seems to draw me into her drama and problems. I want to be a good friend and help but sometimes it just feels like too much. I don’t want to lose her as a friend but also don’t want to lose my own mind. Any advice?

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:01 Namaste beauty and welcome to our Thursday Q&A podcast where our topic this week is creating How To Create Healthy Boundaries in Personal and Professional Relationships. So this falls into our emotional wellbeing and mental health cornerstone this week as our focus and this topic is so, so important because when we are able to set healthy boundaries, it keeps us from our energy being drained. It keeps us in a state where we can stay open and loving, but stay really protected with firm boundaries that allow our relationships instead to flourish and to be healthier. We aren’t really taught about boundaries growing up necessarily. It’s not something that we’re taught in school. And so as adults, this is a skill, a tool that we really have to acquire. It’s something that I’ve really been focusing on myself over the past few years. And I can say that with a little bit of focus, healthy boundaries, make a huge, huge difference in your life.

Kimberly: 00:01 They can vastly improve the quality of your life because sometimes we don’t realize how a little bit intrusiveness here and there from a friend or from a family member or a colleague or whatever it is. It just keeps infiltrating on our personal space and on our time and our energy. And before we know it we’re depleted or we’re anxious, or we just don’t enjoy life as much. And it really doesn’t have to be that way. We can create healthy boundaries. This is something that we can all learn to do. And so on today’s show, I’m gonna give you some very practical tips and tools on how to do just that.

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Kimberly: 01:08  And before we dive in little reminder to please leave us a review on iTunes, which is free and easy, and it is an amazing way to support the show. So thank you so much in advance.

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Kimberly: 02:58 The name of our podcast. Isn’t just, you know, forced optimism or happiness feeling good means. I feel grounded in myself. I feel connected. I have more tools and more wisdom on how to best care from my whole self, from a food body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth perspective. So again, passing along the show is just a great way to spread the love and to create more expansion and generosity in your own heart. Our new book is out, You Are More More Than You Think You Are – Practical Enlightenment For Everyday Life, including journaling prompts and very specific ways of, um, doing breathwork practices and meditations in order to shift your energy when something’s in the physical form. It’s because it’s the precursor is the energy behind it and the thoughts and the intentions.

Question around the topic of: How To Create Healthy Boundaries in Personal and Professional Relationships: Kimberly, I have a close friend who I love, but always seems to draw me into her drama and problems. I want to be a good friend and help but sometimes it just feels like too much. I don’t want to lose her as a friend but also don’t want to lose my own mind. Any advice?

Kimberly: 04:00 And so we wanna work with that level of energy first in order to create the life that you want, the vitality that you want, the confidence and the peace and so on. So please check out the new book, wherever books are sold. All right, so let’s get right into our show today. Our question comes from Mary, who lives in Florida. Thank you so much, Mary, for submitting your question, sending you so much love down there to a state. I love very much beautiful Florida quest to full Florida. Your question is Kimberly. I have a close friend who I love, but I always seem to draw into her drama and problems. I want to be a good friend and help, but sometimes it just feels like too much. I don’t wanna lose her as a friend, but I also don’t wanna lose my own mind. And the advice, yes, Mary, I have felt this exact same thing, which is the beauty of our community.

Kimberly: 05:00 Our questions resonate throughout because we all have these experiences in life. They may look a little different, but they bring up similar emotions where there’s this in this case, this conflict of, I love this person and I want to be loving, but I’m also feeling intuitively this isn’t healthy and I’m feeling drained. And it’s really important that we don’t try to push that down. And we don’t try to pretend it’s not there. We wanna meet this with light, so to speak. So this means that we can create a more healthy situation, but we do it from a place of more awareness and compassion and love. So it is possible to be loving, but to be firm and to create firm healthy boundaries at the same time. And this will actually over the long term, preserve

Kimberly: 05:57 The friendship. It will keep it from getting stagnant. It will keep resentment from building and all sorts of energies that we just don’t want into our life. So first, before we get into the practicalities of how to do the boundaries, I just wanna give a little bit more information about boundaries. We, we want to live life in this state of freedom and joy and connection, right? So that’s why we’re here. We wanna flow along and we wanna expand. We wanna connect with ourselves. We wanna connect with other people. Boundaries are a key part of living this life in that way of compassion and love and freedom, because it allows you to be more assertive about your own needs and fulfill them on a regular basis. If you don’t set healthy boundaries, what it is is means that other people can sort of trample all over you and this contributes to lower self-worth feelings of lower self-esteem and just overall less happiness in contrast, when you actually set boundaries, which again, we’ll talk about in just a moment, it establishes a really open, beautiful flow of communication and increases the chances of them being met.

Kimberly: 07:23 You can expect other people to honor your boundaries or what you would like the relationship to be like, if you don’t set them yourself or you don’t communicate effectively. Another huge benefit of boundaries is that it allows you to feel empowered and to feel safe. Emotional freedom comes from setting boundaries. And if we don’t, then we feel like, Hmm, a lot of questioning, a lot of second guessing. Also just the doubt creeps in the shame and anger. It can start to turn into more fiery energy. If we feel like we’re just not being respected. And then we start to feel confused. And then we start to feel like, oh, I don’t know what to do. And it just builds and builds. And this energy is not healthy inside of your body, contributes to ailments like increased inflammation and IBS and bloating and all sorts of dysbiosis inside of your physical body. So it’s important that we look across our lives. We do a little scan, just like we scan our bodies and we see areas of tightness and tension. And we work to stretch those out, to release them, to be aware of them. And so in the same, way’s a great idea to do a scan of the relationships in your life. Now, in Mary’s case, there is a clear relationship. There is a clear friend

Kimberly: 08:54 That stands out, but even if there’s one that stands out, I encourage you to look across the board because if we aren’t used to setting boundaries and one person is creating excessive drama, probably there’s other leakages happening. There’s other relationships that could be better boundary, boundary read. And what happens is, again, it just creates this open communication where your energy stays intact. And most importantly, your heart can stay open. If we don’t create healthy boundaries, what happens is the heart can start to close. We start to feel that darkness or resentment creeping in, and we don’t want that in our lives. We want to feel this expansive love. That is so powerful and so magnetic in our own lives and so healing, but we can keep our hearts open and not have healthy boundaries. So it really has to go together. Otherwise we may close our heart to try to protect ourself, and that hurts us because we don’t wanna walk around life with a closed heart.

Kimberly: 09:59 So what are some of the things that we do? So number one, it’s really important to be consistent in your boundaries. So we have to create that really clear intention to create consistency. So let’s say the boundary that you would like to create is I don’t want you, um, or I prefer someone not texting past 8:00 PM, right? So we have to be consistent and say, this is a boundary that I am going to keep. I need my evening to relax. And so please don’t text me after 8:00 PM. And so we, we stated very simply and we’re consistent. So that consistency means, you know, whether it’s putting your phone in airplane mode or silent. And if that person continues to text you and even more and more and more, you do not respond, right. You’ve created that boundary. So the consistency isn’t, oh, sometimes you engage and you start chatting and then you’re up late.

Kimberly: 11:03 And then you feel resentful. You don’t get time to meditate or you feel tired the next day. So we want to be consistent. We do not wanna send mixed signals. And another part of setting boundaries is that we have to give some sort of consequence. So in this case, it could be, you know, if you, if you text me and try to give me this information past 8:00 PM, I won’t respond until the next morning, or let’s say in the way that someone is, um, speaking to you, you could say, you know, I don’t really want you to speak to me about this topic, or I don’t want you to speak to me in this way. Otherwise I’m going to have to leave the conversation. Otherwise

Kimberly: 11:53 I’m gonna have to leave the room and we say it with firmness, but we say it with love, right? The love stays in our voice. We’re not closing our heart, but we are communicating with firmness because this is the preservation of self love as well. So let’s give another example of the friend that is getting so involved in emotional drama, right? Like, Mary’s question, we say something like, you know, I love you, but I feel a lot of anxiety you can share. You could be vulnerable. I feel a lot of anxiety. When you tell me about all of these problems, let’s I, you know, I really just wanna keep our conversations positive, or I just wanna talk about X, Y, Z. I just wanna talk about, you know, I’m just making this up, our kids and our knitting club and the books that we’re reading, or, you know, just clear.

Kimberly: 12:51 And then you say, but if, you know, you keep bringing up this drama, I’m just gonna have to leave the conversation or, you know, whatever it is for me, I’ve had friends that always wanna hang out and I become busi and busier in my life. Some of these friends don’t have kids, or they perhaps don’t have as busy of a work life. And so they try to, um, in the past there’s been this guilt of like, oh, why aren’t you hanging out more like what’s going on da, da, da, da, da. And so the clarity of coming from our heart and even writing your boundaries down in your journal is what creates the sturdiness. When you talk to someone they can feel when you are clear. So we have to create that clarity inside of ourself. And we need to realize that we stay calm.

Kimberly: 13:42 So when we bring up boundaries, we wanna meditate first, or we definitely wanna be in a common non-reactive place, which will also be registered by that person. So what I would say to that person is, Hey, you know, I love you so much. There’s so much going on with my life. So I’m only gonna be able to hang out, you know, once in every, in a while, you know, specific or not, I’m only gonna be, I’m gonna be gonna be able to hang out sometimes, you know, when the schedule opens up, so this isn’t, this isn’t, you know, something personal on you. It’s just that I’m so busy with the kids and with work. And then here comes the consequence. So if you keep bringing up, hanging out with me all the time, I’m just not gonna be able to, so we’re addressing it. And so the notice how much better this feels because you’re open and you’re really sharing, Hey, I’m just so busy. And it’s not that I don’t love you. We come with love, but I just can’t do it right now. And so there’s this clearness. And so we

Kimberly: 14:50 Never have to feel guilty or bad if we’ve communicated that and that other person, if they keep hammering you or they keep going and pushing that’s on them, that’s their behavior. You’ve already communicated your needs. So what’s really important for you to do is to stay steady and, and to stay consistent. And sometimes you do need to repeat your boundary again. Oh, again, like I said, if you text me past eight, I’m just not gonna reply until the morning. I really honor my evenings. I need that time to unwind. It’s really important for my mental health. You don’t have to explain yourself too much, but you can say a bit and then just firm consistent, clear. I will not be able to text you until the morning.

Kimberly: 15:38 And so it’s re you know, there’s research around boundaries. It shows that people that have less effective limits or boundaries are more likely to violate the boundaries of others. So if someone is gaslighting you and saying, oh, there’s something wrong with you. Why are you acting like this? You can be sure, probably that they have some sort of boundary issue within themselves. And so that firmness in this love, maybe it will teach them or inspire them to create their own healthy boundaries down the road. Or maybe it won’t <laugh>. And it’s not our job to do that for people. Okay. We just need to really protect our own energy. Your unique energy is so important in the world to be here and it’s fullness, and to reach your potential and to feel good in your life. You absolutely deserve that. So just establish what you want.

Kimberly: 16:31 Do the little scan, look in your life. Where is there some messiness? Where are some of my boundaries, not really tight and bound up. And then when you look across your life and you identify that, then you stay clear, consistent, simple, you communicate it when you’re not reactive. So not after a fight or not after a charged conversation, but just when you’re really feeling calm and hopefully you’ve meditated that day. And then you come to this person and you communicate, and then you set a, a consequence that’s not threatening, but just, Hey, if this happens, then I’m not gonna be able to do this or this. So hope this is helpful. And I also recommend that you go back and listen to my conversation with psychologist, Joelle Prevost, who would the conversation guide, and she has other tips and tools around healthy conversations and boundaries. So we’ll link to that in the show notes as well. We’ll be back here Monday for our next interview podcast to then take great care of your amazing, beautiful self. Keep your questions coming. See we over on the, see you over on the website, mysolluna.com and also on social at _KimberlySnyder, sending you so much love Namaste.