45: Why Setting Boundaries is More Than Mindset Work

Do you roll your eyes when someone says “You just need to learn how to say no”?  Me too.  Because if you could, you would, right?  

Setting boundaries is something that many women struggle with.  We've been socialised to be accommodating, helpful, and selfless and healthy boundaries can feel like a direct contrast of that. For high achievers this struggle  could even be worse when your internal boundaries are overridden by your internal drive.

Boundaries are core to how safe you feel being yourself.  And we all know that reactive boundaries aren’t sustainable.  

In this week’s episode I get into why setting boundaries is definitely not mindset work, and how creating internal safety is the first step to setting embodied boundaries. 

Get the full show notes, transcript and more information here: 

https://tertiariegler.com/setting-effective-boundaries/

📩 Join the conversation:

• DM me your biggest insight! https://www.instagram.com/tertia_riegler_embodiment/
• Email me via my website https://tertiariegler.com/contact/

➡️Watch Free Training Your Burnout Exit Strategy: The 5 Step Path to More Energy, More Money & More Self-Expression - Without Burning It All Down

🎙️ Follow Beyond Burnout for Driven Women so you never miss an episode!

🎧 Loved this episode? Please leave a rating and review and share it with a friend who needs to hear it.

Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
Welcome. I'm Tertia and you are listening to the Beyond Burnout for Driven Woman podcast where we end the cycle of burnout so you can feel more balanced, clear, and in control of your life. If you are a high achiever, ready to move past overwhelm, overthinking and overdrive, and instead drop down into your body so you can start living full out, you are in the right spot. Let's dive in. Oh, I have such a juicy episode for you today. And we are talking. Boundaries can be very, very tricky for many of us. And I got into this in episode number 44. I'll put the link for you in the show notes so that you can also listen to that episode. I get so furious when I hear this. Well, meaning, sure, but not always so supportive advice. Just learn how to say no. You just need to learn how to say no. Because I always go, well, if I could, I would. Boundaries are something that I struggled with for as long as I can remember. Even as a child, I never had strong boundaries. Boundaries were never demonstrated in our house. So I think that's a big thing of where we learn boundaries is we see it modeled by the people around us. And often the boundaries that I saw were reactive kind of boundaries where as children, as we do, you push, you push, you push and then you, you hit that boundary and there's a lash out, there's a consequence. All right. So that's the kind of boundaries that I saw being modeled in my life when I was growing up. And I know that I'm not unique in that. I think so many of us know this kind of reactive boundary. And we also think that this is what boundaries are. It's this perimeter fence, this wall that you have up, and when people cross the line, they get into trouble. And if we think of boundaries on a subconscious level like this, it makes sense that it's so difficult, A, for us to hold boundaries and B, we feel guilty once we have set our boundary. We wonder by ourselves, oh, didn't I overreact? Or maybe I shouldn't be so hard or whatever the self talk is that's going on. So boundaries has to do with our identity, it has to do with our sense of safety, it has to do with our conditioning and it has to do with our self worth. And I, I imagine, I believe this is my lived experience. That's why high achieving women especially struggle with boundaries. And it's funny because you think if you are a high achiever because you achieve so much, you get so much done, it must mean that you have good boundaries and the opposite is often true. And that's what leads to burnout. It's about who you believe yourself to be and the permission or the agreements that you have in place with yourself. In the previous episode, I spoke about embodied boundaries. And this is why I believe that embodied boundaries is the most effective way to hold strong boundaries. You need to be in contact with your deep truth so that you can live that out in the world. Many high achieving women struggle with boundaries because of really deep conditioning around being a good goal. All women have been programmed and socialized to be helpful and accommodating and agreeable and to be nice and not to be selfish and don't be difficult, you know, put others first. And we hear this over and over. We see this modeled in our world. And by the time we grown up, this messaging is so deeply ingrained that when we say no, when we want to put our own needs first, it makes us feel that we're doing something wrong. Nobody wants to be called selfish and we don't like feeling selfish. And yet this is so deeply conditioned in us that when we honor our boundaries, we feel like we're disappointing someone. We don't feel safe, we don't feel accepted, we feeling like we are being difficult, those very things that we've been socialized not to be. So you're fighting with your yourself, you're experiencing this internal conflict. Our identity and our self worth as high achieving women are often tied into over functioning, right? The more we do, the more praise we get, the more we achieve, the better our successes, the more acknowledgment we get. And what this tends to do is we begin to tie our own sense of self worth against how we perform, how much we do, how well we deliver and how supportive we are. So we end up holding all of these things together. We're juggling all of the balls. We try to be that superwoman that's a super mom and a super haus frau and a super entrepreneur and a super wife. And when we fall flat on our faces in any of these areas, it feels like we are not enough. And to feel like you, not enough, it's painful. So you are going to do whatever you can to get away from that feeling. We often tend, as high achieving women, we tend to feel responsible for everything. Not only our own work, but also the work of others, the output of others, the emotions and the experiences of everyone. This can lead to a sense of over responsibility. Right, I'll just do this because I can do it quickly and I'll do it better than anyone else. And it's easier to do it myself than just to explain it. And I'm putting my hand up here, very guilty of this, where it is often a lot quicker just to do it myself than to try and explain it. And that's okay. But if this is the default behavior where we keep on piling things on our to do list and we keep on taking tasks on because of this underlying responsibility, feeling that we have this leads to burnout. The other side of the coin is just as harmful. And this is when we don't want other people to struggle. So we step in. We essentially take their experience away from them by rescuing them, by enabling them, by helping them. I even saw this myself yesterday where I was helping our son with his math homework. He wrote something down in pencil. He made. He wrote something wrong. So he was trying to rub it out with an eraser and he was scrunching the paper and he wasn't getting it all out. And I just had this overwhelming urge to take the erasure from him and to do it for him, you know, to do it to do it better so that he doesn't have to struggle like that. And this is such a simple example. But I bet you if you go and look in your life, you'll find so many instances where you have this desire to step in so that other people don't struggle. And you know, even if it comes from the bestest place, the thing is, it's not a sustainable way to live. Oftentimes when we imagine holding a boundary, it creates a lot of discomfort and we want to avoid discomfort. Our nervous systems get activated whenever it perceives something that might be putting us in danger. Like if we say no, then someone is going to get mad, or if we say no, then they won't love us anymore. Or if we say no, then we're going to be abandoned. And that is why it is so important to create safety within. You need to create that internal safety first. If you want to live fully, self expressed. If you want to have a life and a business where you don't burn out, if you want to thrive and live fully, you need to have that internal safety in place. Our childhood experiences often may have taught us that when we say no, it leads to punishment, or it leads to rejection, or it leads to withdrawal where it feels like you're not loved anymore. And we've learned that we have to say yes in order to stay safe. And I think it's important for us to know that about ourselves so that we can begin to engage in any poorest boundaries, any poor boundaries with compassion and curiosity, instead of just trying to from the mind set. A no, because that is not going to work, right? It's not sustainable. The truth is, when we start setting boundaries, it does mean that we are going to disappoint people. It does mean that you're going to get some pushback. And it does mean that people won't like you as much if all of a sudden you are not available for the things that you were available before. But if you fill yourself with your boundary, which is your deepest truth from the inside out, then you also have the courage and the capacity to deal with the ripples in the world, to deal with the after effects of what it looks like when you embody your strong boundaries. And that's why you will never get the answers you're looking for. If you are simply looking for a list of ways to say no or a list of ways to respond in certain situations, yes, those can be helpful as a starting point. But you cannot mentally learn your way through boundary responses. It has to be a felt experience for it to have any legs in the world. As high achieving women, we have a big inner drive and I feel for us especially, it is super important to make sure that this drive is not in charge of us, but that we use that drive to make our impact in the world in a way that is sustainable and in a way that doesn't burn us out. And I believe the best way to do this is by engaging in healthy boundaries, healthy internal boundaries to know what you are available for so that your drive doesn't run away with you. I hope I gave you some food for thought. I'd love to know what landed for you in this episode. You can reach out to me on Instagram, send me a DM or send me an email. I really love to hear all of your feedback. I'm going to put the links for you in the show notes. And then finally, if you want to hop on a free discovery call with me to chat about how I can support you with my different programs, please go ahead and book that call. It is not as such sales call. I won't be selling you anything. That's not my style. You can chat with me, I can give you some actionable steps that you can take out into the world and apply to your life. And then you can decide if you want to continue to work with me in the different programs and opportunities that I have for you. That's a wrap for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will speak to you in the next one. Bye now.