Boundary Setting

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Fact: Setting boundaries is hard, but broken boundaries are even harder

Look to any working parent anywhere, and boundary setting is a subject they are sure to have come across and struggled with. We all know how critical boundaries are to our sanity and wellbeing, but we are masters of forgetting them, breaking them, and not communicating them—because old habits are hard to kick.

Why do we struggle with boundaries?

Much of why it’s hard to keep to our boundaries lives in our early conditioning.

If you look at some of the reasons why we break our own boundaries, all the clues are there. Some of the common reasons are:

• Fear: You may be afraid of conflict, rejection, or being disliked.
• People-pleasing: You may want to please others and seek their approval, making it hard to set boundaries.
• Perfection: You may set very high standards for yourself, meaning you often tread on your own boundaries.
• Lack of assertiveness: You may have difficulty communicating your needs and limits in an assertive way.
• Lack of self-awareness: You may not understand how you come across to others or what your needs and limits are.
• Inconsistent boundaries: If your boundaries aren’t consistent, people may disregard or challenge them.
• Low self-esteem: You may struggle to set and maintain boundaries if you have low self-esteem and find it hard to prioritise yourself.

All these barriers have one thing in common: they are trying to meet some fundamental needs. The unhelpful bit is that they are doing that in ‘outdated ways’. Often our old ways of being may serve us well in the short term—e.g. pleasing others—but in the long term take us towards exhaustion and burnout.

There isn’t really much point in setting boundaries until these underlying drivers have been worked with. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in a vicious cycle: ‘setting, not keeping, feeling bad about not keeping, setting some more,’ and so on.

In our coaching, we start by addressing the barriers to boundaries first.

The role of psychological drivers

We work to bring awareness to our core psychological drivers. These are based on the work of Eric Berne from Transactional Analysis theory. Once we are aware of our drivers, they provide a lot of information about the way we see the world.

Drivers are behaviours we learned as children to stay safe and survive. In adult life, they can be a double-edged sword. While they are often useful, they come at a cost—we pay with stress or anxiety when we are unable to fulfil the driver behaviour we are programmed with.

Our key psychological drivers tend to fall into one or more of the following categories:

• Be Perfect
• Hurry Up
• Try Hard
• Please Others
• Be Strong

Identifying your drivers

It’s quite easy to identify our drivers, though we do use psychometric tools to unearth them in coaching. But even without that, maybe you have already recognised yourself?

• Perhaps you are one of those people who feels the need to do everything fast? —rushing about here and there, talking quickly, squeezing more and more in?
  Well, that is Hurry Up.
• Maybe you are someone who needs everything to be perfect and cannot settle unless the things you do are exactly right?
  That’s Be Perfect at play.
• … and so on.

We all exhibit driver behaviour, and are likely to have one or two drivers that stand out for us more than others. The difficulty with drivers is that we tend to feel “not OK” when we step out of the behaviour.

This is what makes sticking to boundaries so hard. For instance, a Please Others individual who has behaved in a way that displeases others by stating a boundary around their time, will have to tolerate all of the familiar negative feelings –perhaps of fear or sadness– when they attempt to keep to their time boundary.

Establishing and maintaining boundaries

Once you’re aware of your driver behaviour, the real work of establishing boundaries can begin. You can start to imagine yourself as someone with boundaries that are clear and consistently kept.

“We help our clients to fall in love with the new ‘clear boundary’ version of themselves in such a way that this drives motivation to be more of that version of themselves every day.”

This new version of self learns new ways to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings associated with the driver behaviour and positive change starts to happen. Each of the five core drivers has an antidote, and together with your coach, you can begin to develop ways of working around your your own antidote.

Clear, consistent and workable boundaries then become within reach.

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