How to Set and Implement Healthy Boundaries (& Why Boundaries Will Help You Make More Money)

Emily Merrell and Lexie Smith review how to set and implement boundaries as a coach. They discuss both the business and personal benefits of setting boundaries with clients early on, how to do such, and how systems can make the process both seamless and feasible. 

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• What boundaries are key for protecting 
• How to take an inventory of what tasks drain your energy and what boundaries to implement in effect
• The business importance of setting and implementing boundaries as a coach
• What systems can support the implementation of boundaries
• What Em & Lex do personally to set and implement boundaries in their own practices and at Ready Set Coach
• The importance of setting and managing client expectations as a coach
• Takeaway homework on how to go about setting and implementing boundaries in your own coaching practice

Follow Em & Lex on Instagram at @readysetcoachprogram

Learn more about the Ready Set Coach Program at Readysetcoachprogram.com

Snag 5 Numbers to Know to Launch a Coaching Business here.

Learn more about Six Degrees Society and THEPRBAR inc.

Transcript

 SPEAKERS

Lexie Smith, Emily Merrell

Emily Merrell 

, you your trip is almost here. I'm so excited.

Lexie Smith 

Calendar check. How was it all? I'm kind of mind blown. We're recording this late July meaning June July is almost over and it's almost August and I will be coming to Denver. Me and Ashley, my baby girl and I'm gonna hug you Jackson person. And I'm so excited.

Emily Merrell 

I am so excited. It's kind of wild to think that we've only met once in person but probably spent 500 hours.

Lexie Smith 

I see you more than I see my husband's right. Yes, I'm so so excited. It's been a long time coming. really pumped? What are you? I'm a little afraid of how much you're gonna make me do. Great. I'm already mentally preparing. Like, are you a coffee person?

Emily Merrell 

Do I have you? Do I just caffeinate you the whole time? You're

Lexie Smith 

all Hey, I'll just be exhausted after No, I'm good. I can I'm cool.

Emily Merrell 

OPERS in your coffee, like brushing my coffee.

Lexie Smith 

I'll be I'll be great. It'll be fine. I'm down for all the things. I'm your emotional support extrovert? Oh, yes, I found this. Whatever you call them real real on Instagram. The other day I sent it to Emily and to paraphrase it and I'm gonna butcher it. Like, I really need an emotional support extrovert, who will just be there for me to invite me places and I can tag along with him to parties. I'll put the puppy in the corner. But really they'll do the talking. I was like Emily, that's you. You're, you're my emotional support extrovert.

Emily Merrell 

Like my sister would probably say the same thing. She's like, I, I we were sitting on the plane going to Mexico. Usually you'll appreciate this. And I was sitting on the island. We did southwest which I have a love hate relationship for because you can't pick your seats. But Ali was sitting in the middle. And then there was this girl sitting on the window. And this girl was so annoying. And I love talking to everyone. So for me saying that someone's annoying is a lot. But she she kept asking or just talking in our direction. But I had the luxury of being on the aisle and just kind of being like, sorry, I can't hear you. I'm so far away. From she was like, Oh, I'm so sorry. I look so tired. I just been on a plane for four hours before this. My Cool. What do you want to say? And then she's like, I this is the first time I'm seeing my boyfriend in two years. We're like, cool. Wait, what? We were curious. But we didn't want to rush. It was just a talker. He was one of those moments where we both looked at each other. And we're like, I have so many questions, but I just really don't have the energy to ask this person questions. But when we got off the plane, my sister got so mad at me. She was like you were so annoying. You weren't talking? She I was hoping that she would you know get the gist to talk more towards you.

Lexie Smith 

Or not me? Yeah. Well, okay, everyone, if you're a regular subscriber, you've been waiting for how we're going to transition this one. So speaking of Energy, and speaking of saving up energy, we're talking about boundaries today. So I am someone who definitely can be easily depleted. So the reason I love doing fun things I am auto immune compromised fun fact and doing too many fun things gets my immune system down. I'm then sick. So I have to be really really intentional with energy and really respond I posted an Instagram yesterday I had a couple girlfriends over she's like you're being social my guess I'm totally down to do one thing during the week, I can do that. That is He came to your house and they came to my house. So today we're going to be talking about boundaries which are so important to life and especially to coaching because in coaching, you are holding space for other human beings. And that's a lot. So

Emily Merrell 

you have friends who make fun of you when you say you're holding space for people.

Lexie Smith 

I don't this is where we're different. It doesn't get brought up in like conversations for people because I don't have other entrepreneur friends like locally around me. So those are like topics that get brought up.

Emily Merrell 

All I'll say it'd be like, Oh, I'm exhausted from holding space today. Like holding space. That's funny. Yeah,

Lexie Smith 

it is funny, I guess Well, I just went to a doctor's appointment this morning. And they, it was a new doctor. So they're doing intake and they're like, What are you doing? Like self employed? What kind of companies do you have? And I always like PR company and a business coaching company, and they always get confused, like, just just just PR company. Like I have to simplify it. If you're not in this space, you know, more traditionally, sometimes it can be hard for people.

Emily Merrell 

It is very weird. Anyways, okay, so boundaries, so you need a naturopath? Definitely, definitely

Lexie Smith 

struggling.

Emily Merrell 

Okay, so let's talk about it's also July, it's late July. How do you hold boundaries and go on vacation?

Lexie Smith 

Hmm, you're great at this. So Emily, I want to tee you up to one of the things that you have all the gals in our program do first thing, literally, we do this week one, and that involves the calendar, what do you haven't do

Emily Merrell 

have them block out their calendar for summer Fridays, all year long all year round. So if they are doing summer, Fridays, half day or full day, I got to go back to my corporate world where you have the choice of doing a half day or four full days of summer Fridays in blocking it off. And then the second thing I have them do is block out all of the holidays that corporate employees would take. Even the ones that like a very generous company would give like Columbus Day, or what are the what are the other holidays, Veterans Day, I don't think you get off all of those ones, because I think nothing is worse than being an entrepreneur. I have realizing you have a call scheduled on Labor Day. Yeah.

Lexie Smith 

And so literally, what blocking that off means is going to your Google Calendar and making yourself unavailable. So if you have a Calendly link or acuity, whatever you use for booking calls, like don't let people book on those days, make them unavailable, do not all of a sudden look at your calendar. And memorial day is Monday and it was coming up and crap, you have two sales calls, because you forgot to physically block off your calendar. So a lot of the things we talked about boundary wise, such as taking holidays, taking vacations, we can do that by implementing systems to support that and doing things on the back end. So that's one really, really great example.

Emily Merrell 

Yeah, and also at the same time last thing to block off, block off your birthday. Block off your birthday and block off vacations that you think you're going to take. A lot of times you know, you have a family vacation or you know you're going to take a fall vacation or you know, you're going to take something, block it off now, because future you is going to be so thankful that it was off the calendar.

Lexie Smith 

Yeah. And that's to your initial question, how do you take off the cations, I want to talk a little bit to in coaching, how you go about taking a vacation when you're working with people. So I have a couple of tips here. For example, I, one thing I do is I actually write this into my contracts. So in my contracts, I say let's say I'm working with someone one on one for four months. In my contracts, it says for any vacations that I take, this is what like how we will proceed. And how I have it is if I take a two week vacation, for example, then I tack on two weeks at the end of the four months. And that's something that I bring up with them in the contract, I bring it up at signing, and we talk about it on onboarding. So I will go hey, just to let you know, I have a two week vacation in May. What this means for you is I will be offline but don't worry, this is if you're not like getting gypped of time with me, I'm going to tap on tack on two extra weeks at the end of our engagement. Vice versa. If you have a week vacation, you know I'm more than happy to honor and do the same. So the point being I haven't contractually protected. But it's also something I'm setting an expectation from day dot and letting them know what's going to happen to them and their service when I am taking vacation.

Emily Merrell 

I think that's a wonderful thing that everyone should make into their their contract. I think same thing goes we both navigated having babies and having clients. Yeah, that was a really interesting thing about managing expectations and letting client I remember having a client and being like, I could be due any day now. And we didn't end up finishing our time together. But when I was back from maternity leave, I told her same thing what you just said that when I'm done with my maternity leave, we will resume we will resume where we were.

Lexie Smith 

Yeah. So I think really it's communicating upfront. You know, if someone pushes back when in all honesty, do you really want to work with that person? That's probably not the only thing that they're going to push back on. This also translates into ours. So that's something that Emily and I we've mentioned this in one of our Other episodes, but we believe in setting boundaries around hours and when people can be in contact with you. So, for ReadySet coach, there's a few things we do. First, we say because we offer slack support to our cohort, we've actually changed this a little bit over the cohorts, but we're doing something this round called Office Hours. So what this means is every week, we're going to have a designated time that we are committed to being online for live chat support. If someone wants to communicate with us beyond that, then they need to expect that they have 24 hours, we say, you know, give us a 24 hours response window in between business hours, systems wise, we also use Slack because that's the system we use to chat with our clients. We schedule messages, you can schedule through that. And you can also put away messages. So again, just showing you guys an example of how we set a boundary, we set an expectation and we also support that with a system. And you're way better at visuals than me. So why don't you kick this off. Okay,

Emily Merrell 

so guys, close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Now imagine that you're living on an island sipping spicy margaritas in between coaching calls effortlessly signing 10k months.

Lexie Smith 

Well, doesn't that sound like every other Facebook and Instagram ad you've seen from coaches? The reality for most new coaches, you find yourself spending countless hours searching for your ideal clients doing all the free trainings and working tirelessly as you attempt to differentiate yourself in a saturated market way to be a

Emily Merrell 

buzzkill lacks, but yes, that's way more accurate. However, what if? What if what what is the magic formula to building a profitable and sustainable coaching business didn't have to be so complicated? What if attaining your version of a dream life didn't have to remain on your faraway someday list? What if someone took the time to sift through all the crap that's out there and finally created a program built specifically and only for well intentioned and qualified coaches and coaches to be just like you?

Lexie Smith 

Hey, we did that. That's what I'm getting at LAX. It's time for you guys to meet Mr. NYes. Business baby ready site coach.

Emily Merrell 

It's a turnkey program built by coaches for coaches that focuses on teaching coaches how to build a profitable business that supports their lifestyle.

Lexie Smith 

Learn more at ReadySet. Coach program.com

Emily Merrell 

Now enrolling? Yeah, I think that's a really important thing to know. And then we mentioned also, if for whatever reason you are a night owl, or you just had a baby, and you get most of your work done in very peculiar hours when a child is sleeping, that you can respond to things and you can you can pre schedule them. Yeah, so if you are working, maybe your sweet hour of working is like 8pm till two in the morning. You don't want your clients to think that that's the time that you work so you can schedule your responses to to automate and show up during the working hour.

Lexie Smith 

Yeah, and same with emails, right. A great tool you can use. One I use is called swarming. Oh, yeah, I use boomerang What do you use?

Emily Merrell 

I was gonna say use streak to write

Lexie Smith 

drink. I don't use for scheduling boring I use for schedule. Yes,

Emily Merrell 

yes. Yeah, yeah, Boomerang is great for that. I love sending out an email at like two in the morning. And then it goes out at like, 676 72. That's not a number. It's it's almost Friday, my brain right now, at like 632. And it just is automatic. I'm trying to think of some other great ones that we use for for boundaries. And for scheduling. I think a good thing to think about with your business is just automate automation, and what can be automated. So for example, I used to spend so much time just scheduling calls with people and being like, does this time work now this time doesn't know does this time and before you know it, you've wasted about two hours just going back and forth. And then I got a tool like Calendly or you could use acuity or there's million other tools out there where you can buffer when your hours work best for you and you carve out the times that work for for your clients through this present potential intro call to work but on your schedule.

Lexie Smith 

Yeah, and you know, we're giving you a lot of examples of what we do the whole intention of boundaries is to protect your energy right? So do an energy on it like what to you is important. What do you need to do what system what boundaries do you need to Protect your energy one for me. Something that overwhelms me is when people are communicating with me on a bunch of different platforms for me to avoid overwhelm, I want my clients to be on slack period like Period and Period that means not on email, that means not texting me, that means not sliding into my DMs, of course, once in a while on Instagram, it's like they're responding to me, or I'm responding to them. That's different. But again, I keep my client communication on slack because a boundary for me to avoid overwhelm is such. So how do I implement that that is something that is communicated from day.if, a client goes outside of bounds, which they often do a popular one is email, I will kindly direct them back to Slack. So an example, I will have clients forwarded me an email, and I will respond and say, awesome, I'm going to respond to you on Slack. So you don't have to be mean about it, right? But kindly redirect them back. Because the second you break that boundary, you're setting a precedent that you can have boundaries to be broken. And

Emily Merrell 

I think this is an amazing tip for a future episode, where we talk about delegating, and communication with our virtual assistants. Because it reminds me of when I first started with my virtual assistant, everything you just told me when I lacked boundaries, and I would email them, and then I would slack them. And then I would do I hit them off every single place, you could be hit up, basically and be like, did you get the thing? And they're like, what, where am I supposed to be looking? It wasn't clear to where the communication was supposed

Lexie Smith 

to be? Yeah, I think you just pointed out another really great reason or pro for boundaries is it actually is to the clients benefit as well, because it makes it very clear how and where and when they're going to work with you. If you start breaking boundaries, then it's actually really confusing for them to and it might be frustrating, because they sent you an email, and they're expecting you to get back but you're only monitoring Slack. So it's actually to both parties benefits. Also, one thing I like to point out for clients that struggle with setting boundaries, to the point of energy, especially in coaching, it is your if people are paying you money, okay to be a coach, you want to show up for them 110%, if you are burned out, if you don't have your energy, if you are breaking boundaries, you can't show up for them. So it is to everyone's benefit, it is to your services benefit to protect your energy. So when you are coaching them, they're getting all of you and all of your brain.

Emily Merrell 

Yeah, I think that's a great reminder. And I was going to also say that in terms of sending them all over the place. Oh, I hear this all the time with people who are new coaches, they're like, Okay, so I have four sessions, all just, you know, they can use it in the next two years. Basically, you're like, Oh, well, that's not going to work for anyone, because what's going to happen is, they're going to use it and you're going to raise your prices, and you'll get more organized, you'll come back and be very, very resentful. When two years later there, they want that, that thing that you offered years before. So in your program, I think it's important to have cadence and boundaries, right out of the gate of how things are structured. So for example, like when I work with one on one with, with clients, I'll do three weeks on one week off. Mind you vacations happen, life happens. But it's that cadence of like, we know, there's a certain rhythm to be expected. If I was like, Okay, you get all of these sessions, like you pick when you use them, they might pick to use it five days in a row or three in one day. And that doesn't serve me, nor does it serve them. And it doesn't give them the transformation that they signed up for.

Lexie Smith 

Yeah, and you just highlighted boundaries help you scale. Because if there's no sense of predictability to your point of if they go five days in a row, then you don't have the physical bandwidth to serve as other clients through those five days. So boundaries can help you keep track of your workflow and your bandwidth and allow you to know how many clients you can take on No, you know, how the scalability potential of your business, right so just there's so many reasons that are for for boundaries, no boundaries for

Emily Merrell 

President Pro boundaries, you get the gist? Yes. What so what do we want our homework to be

Lexie Smith 

tonight? So I think that a great exercise is to do an energy audit, meaning right, take a journal and a pen out and think about the things that drain your energy. For example, for me, when people are hitting me up on five different platforms, it overwhelms me. What are the things that you need to put Hector energy. Are you someone who really just wants to be an aid to fiber? Okay, so maybe it's work hours. What are some other examples of things that might be draining?

Emily Merrell 

Oh, over committing being a part of multiple boards or communities? Saying yes to a lot of events,

Lexie Smith 

people hitting you up on texting you clients texting, like that's something that would overwhelm me you

Emily Merrell 

texting you back to back calls. I'm Lex and I it's funny because I think we both have different systems in this but I like to power through and then I'll breathe. It's kind of like running this sprint or lacks would rather have a 30 minute call and then like a 15 minute break. And then a 30 minute call. Well for me what happens it becomes a 45 minute call and then I run into the next 30 minute call so but you know looking at like your call cadence. Do you want to put a boundary on how many calls you have in a day? That's one of my favorite things about Calendly it like is the bad guy for you. It's like, okay, you can have Max 44 calls in a day and the longest one, you can only have one one hour call

Lexie Smith 

a day. Yeah. So brilliant, right? Again, that's getting back to this homework of what are things that protect your energy for me, because as you guys are learning, I have fluctuating energy, I need the 15 minutes to rebound to get my energy back up so I can show up where my little Energizer Bunny friend over here doesn't need that. So the step one of your homework is to write down things that protect your energy. And then part two is to articulate what's a boundary you can implement in your business that supports protecting of that energy.

Emily Merrell 

And step three is you're going to go through and block out your calendar now.

Lexie Smith 

Yep, so you have three steps. Okay, so step number one, get really honest with yourself journal, what are the things that drain your energy? Step two, based on that what boundaries can you implement to protect set energy, we've given you tons of examples throughout this episode, feel free to tap back, listen to it again. Step three, block out the vacation days, the holidays, the days that you are

Emily Merrell 

not available. Great homework, great to dues. So as always, thank you all so much for tuning in and for listening to us to chat with one another. This is literally what are our sessions look like? Just so you know, just as hard conversations, very real conversation here. And we will see you the next time on the ReadySet. Coach podcast boundaries for President. If you're enjoying the ReadySet coach podcast, please leave a review wherever you are listening. For more information about ReadySet coach, visit ReadySet coach program.com