In any healthy relationship boundaries are really important not because we are seeking to hide or be secretive, quite the opposite in fact because unless we are honest with ourselves about our own needs and capabilities, we cannot be in a healthy relationship with anything or anybody.
And that’s the hard part – being willing to see and come into relationship with our own red lines. Hard because we may have a tendency to be a people pleaser or because we are driven and ambitious or don’t want to fail, the list goes on.
Noticing when we feel uncomfortable, unhappy or, worse, are doing ourselves harm and admitting that to ourselves is step one. These boundaries might be about the number of hours we are working, the amount of pressure we are taking on, the degree to which others rely on us to be the one who steps up, solves the problem or drives the project and of course many others.
We can blame others for disrespecting us or our time but at the end of the day, it’s our responsibility to know our own needs and priorities and to act on them. In this way, we make ourselves a reliable partner, a strong relationship builder (with ourselves and others) and a role model for doing the hard inner work to become and remain healthy.
As leaders we are working with boundaries all the time – the healthy and sometimes frustrating limits of organisational life, the interplay within team dynamics and relationships, the pressures for ‘more’ – profit, clients, quality, success. The natural born competitors want to push at any boundary that confronts them. It’s fair to say that most leaders have some level of competitive drive and that can be a good thing provided it’s built on a foundation of self-knowledge, self-awareness and conscious choices that weighs the impacts and consequences – personally and for others.
Boundaries, limits, confines can be very useful in helping us stop, think and choose – they offer us a safety net as well as the challenge to go further. So our perennial choice becomes is now the time to stay within the protection of the boundary or is now the time to push the limits?