EP 27 | Internal And External Boundaries For Busy Moms Who Want More Peace

If the word “boundaries” instantly brings up guilt, fear of disappointing people, or the worry that you’ll sound harsh, this all to common for women and I’m reframing boundaries as something far more empowering. 

🧡 Boundaries are limits that protect your energy, time, and values. 

When we don’t prioritize our own life someone else will, and that’s how high-achieving moms end up living by everyone else’s expectations while feeling disconnected, drained, and resentful.

We dig into the difference between internal boundaries and external boundaries, because the boundary work that actually lasts starts with you.

Internal boundaries are the agreements you keep with yourself, like shutting down email at night, not opening the laptop after work, pausing before you say yes, and honoring rest without negotiating with your to-do list. While external boundaries are the limits you communicate with others at work, at home, and in relationships. 

✨ Reflection questions to help you protect your energy and practice a small boundary this week. ✨

I am no longer available for... 

Where am I most drained right now? 

What boundary would protect my energy here? 

What is one small version of that boundary that I can practice this week? 

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Transcript

Rockstar Mom Intro And Promise

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You are listening to the Rockstar Mom, a podcast for high achievers who are ready to get off of autopilot and live a life with more intention, peace of mind, and happiness. This is a space to expand, dig deep, get clear, and take action towards living your most authentic, aligned life. I'm Megan Caldwell. As a mom of three, two-time burnout survivor, and empowerment coach and speaker, I've cracked the code on what it actually takes to thrive at work and home. Ditch perfectionism and people pleasing. Get your schedule under control, and live with more ease. So you've got more time and energy to do the things you love without the mom guilt. It's time to get out of your head and into action. Now is the time to live your most rockstar life. Let's go. Welcome back, my friends, to the Rockstar Mom. Today I want to be talking with you about something that I personally love, but makes a lot of women kind of cringe. Today we're going to be talking all about boundaries and hopefully starting to shift and reframe how you view boundaries and what they are. So, one of my favorite quotes, which is where boundaries come into play here, is if you don't prioritize your own life, someone else will. Let me say that again. If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. This is exactly where this whole concept of boundaries comes into place. When we have both internal and external boundaries in place, which we're going to get into this today, you are able to really take care of yourself, to prioritize your needs, to really tune into what your desires are. Without boundaries, we oftentimes get succumbed into other people's priorities, expectations, and it feels really disconnected for us. So I want to start by just actually asking you what comes up for you when you hear the word boundary? I know for many women that I've worked with, you often might come up with guilt or maybe fear of disappointing or letting people down. Maybe you think of boundaries in terms of conflict and that create conflict between people. Or maybe you're even thinking to yourself, you know, I'm just really bad at setting or keeping boundaries. And those are two separate things: setting and then keeping. Sometimes we set the boundary, but then we don't stick to it. We'll get into that as well. I invite you as we engage in this conversation today about boundaries to start to actually think about reframing your relationship with that word. Again, our life is made up of the words and stories that we tell ourselves. So if we are constantly living in a space of boundaries make me feel guilty or boundaries are so hard, again, your brain is looking for evidence to actually support that, to make it so boundaries are hard. So I'm gonna invite you right now to just kind of reframe boundaries that boundaries are not about controlling other people. Boundaries actually have nothing to do with other people. They're not about being harsh or even necessarily being selfish, though I would encourage you to be a little bit selfish and boundaries can help there, but that's not what this is about. They're not walls to put up distance between you and others. A boundary, rather, is a limit that protects your energy, your time, and your values. And this is really key here because boundaries are actually for you. They are not for other people, they are for you, and they are a beautiful act of self-leadership. There are they are a way that you, as a highly successful, driven woman, can start to take back your power and really tune your time, your energy, your values into yourself again. So, you know, one of my favorite authors, you may have taught heard me talk about her in the past, Dr. Pooja Lakshman. She's the author of a book called Real Self-Care. And in my opinion, boundaries come down to the self-care concept. Again, many of us were kind of conditioned to like self-care is bubble baths and manicures and doing all these fun kind of surface level things. In Dr. Pooja Lakshman's book, boundaries is actually what she calls one of the four pillars of real self-care, which again, real self-care is taking care of yourselves on those deeper internal levels. And that's how important and I think imperative boundaries are and can be in your life and how transformational they really can be when you begin to practice them and when they become become just a routine piece of who you are. So I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about the difference between internal and external boundaries because these are two very specific things. And oftentimes when people think of boundaries, they think about those external boundaries between, say, yourself and another person, putting up the boundary to say, nope, I am not gonna have you speak to me that way. All right, that's external. I actually want to start with internal because internal are actually, believe it or not, the most important type of boundary that you can focus on with yourself. And again, internal boundaries are truthfully the limits that we set with ourselves. Some examples are I'm not checking my email after 7 p.m., or I'm not opening up my laptop once I get home from work. It could be, you know, lights are out at 10 p.m. That's an internal boundary. It's a boundary that you have with yourself. Or another boundary that I absolutely love because this goes in line with the Rockstar Mom framework and the Rockstar Mom practices, is when I get an invitation to something, a boundary I have is I don't say yes immediately. I actually pause and I take a moment to ask myself, like, is this something I actually want to say yes to or engage in? Oftentimes, though, these internal boundaries are harder because no one is forcing us to do them. In fact, unless you're working with a coach or a therapist or another support system, most time people don't even know what your internal boundaries are. So it's with you and yourself. And you can either be with you and yourself in terms of internal boundaries, or you can be against you and yourself. Which one feels better to you? They're often hard because oftentimes we break them ourselves, right? We talked a little bit about the difference between setting and keeping boundaries. If we are just working to hold ourselves accountable, sometimes we break them more often. And oftentimes boundaries require us to have emotional and nervous system regulation. When we are operating out of the space of either, you know, heightened nervous system or being completely whacked out and stressed, or, you know, we're kind of at a short fuse in terms of our emotional version, it makes it so much harder to set and keep boundaries. And that's why actually within the Rockstar Mom framework, our lessons and our practices and our exercises we have when it comes to boundary setting are actually found within the piece of our framework that deals with nervous system regulation and resiliency. So a quick kind of food for thought as you are processing and starting to process what internal boundaries look like in your own life is are there areas, people, places, specific tasks, internal boundaries that you have where you constantly override yourself? It could be, you know, in a specific situation, it could be that these internal boundaries are hard for you across the board. And if you're in that space, know that you're not alone because this takes practice to develop. But the first step, as you've heard me say before, of change is bringing awareness to it. So just identifying like where and how do you currently override yourself and let yourself down when it comes to internal boundaries. This question alone can be really, really powerful to just again start to bring awareness to it. So then you can start to create change. Let's talk for a second now about external boundaries. So external boundaries are the limits that we then communicate with others. So, for example, I'm not available for meetings after four. That is a boundary that I'm telling, say, my boss, my workplace. I guess it could be a boundary with yourself if you are self-employed or an entrepreneur like myself. But again, that's a boundary oftentimes with others, is I'm not actually available for meetings after four, or I'm not available for, you know, night or weekend appointments. Another example is I can't volunteer in this season. This is one that I found myself really gaining some clarity on over the last many years as I've been on my own wellness and personal development journey, is just because we can do something doesn't mean we should or need to. It comes back to the whole conversation of capacity versus capability. I am capable of volunteering at all of my kids' sporting events, school events, extracurricular events, but it doesn't mean that I have the capacity for it, or maybe even better yet, that I want to do it. So, again, a boundary I might set up when somebody says, Hey, Megan, can you help us out at this event on Saturday? Nope, I can't volunteer this season. Sorry. Other boundaries could be with how you interpreting things coming at you. So, for example, please don't speak to me that way. That is putting up a boundary with that other person to say, I'm not accepting that anymore. And I know a lot of the work I do within our YRL, your Rockstar Life community, and with my private coaching clients has to do with how we communicate and interpret relationships. And this is boundary setting. It's why it's one of the foundational pillars, again, of Pooja Lakshman's work when it comes to real self-care. And it's an integral part when it comes to nervous system regulation and resiliency. But here's the thing: again, oftentimes we put our focus on these external boundaries, but actually, external boundaries most often fail when our internal boundaries are weak, which is why we often have to turn the lens back on ourselves and start the practice with those internal boundaries. For example, if a woman doesn't believe that she deserves rest, how is she gonna set the boundary to say, hey, like no phone calls after 10 p.m. or whatever it might be? If she doesn't trust her own no, no, that doesn't serve me. No, I don't want that. How is she gonna be able to say no to the person who asks for the 15th time if she can volunteer on Saturday? Oftentimes we get stuck, and this is again where this is not any fault of our own, my friends. This is our upbringing, our conditioning, our culture, is that we have been conditioned to put other people's needs first and feel responsible for everyone else's feelings and success and and and happiness, is if you feel responsible for someone else's feelings, it's hard to set that boundary, internal and external. And we often won't hold the line. I often think that, you know, holding external boundaries, which again starts with the internal boundary, really comes down to being fully confident and in tune with yourself. It comes down to self-integrity, right? Oftentimes when we have resistance to internal boundaries, it means that there's some inner work or something that we need to bring to light and work through ourselves so we can move through it. All right. It allows us to shift expectations of self, which really brings the focus back into what is actually within our control here. Again, when this is why boundaries are not about the other person, because we can set a boundary, but it doesn't mean the other person is gonna stick to it. The only thing within our control is actually setting and maintaining these internal boundaries we have for self. We can then go ahead and set those external boundaries, and people are gonna choose to react or respond in the way that we do. But if we are able to hold our internal boundaries, that nope, I don't, I'm not gonna let people speak to me that way. We can then make choices to either have a conversation about it, to step away from that relationship, to take some space to process. It allows us the space to do so when we hold true to our internal boundaries. Now, I'm sure you may have already had some kind of unlock, unlocks or key like aha's or golden nuggets to pull away so far from what I've been sharing. But I do want to kind of loop back to like why boundaries do feel so hard, especially for high-achieving, high-capacity moms. It's been because for decades we have been rewarded for overfunctioning, for saying yes, for filling our calendars, for doing the thing even when we know we don't want it, or like maybe it doesn't best serve us. We oftentimes sometimes can confuse being needed with being valuable, right? And how are we gonna ultimately show up as our best and live our most rock star life? It's when we recognize our own worth and our own value. But again, if we're turning that outward to get validation from others, that's the people pleaser in us, the perfectionist in us. It makes boundaries feel hard and it makes them feel uncomfortable. And we oftentimes mistake guilt for doing something, quote, wrong. So setting that boundary, if it's something that you're not used to doing, can feel wrong and feelings of guilt can come up. And I've actually got a future podcast episode coming out all about this whole concept of guilt. But guilt doesn't mean that you're wrong, it just often means that you're challenging yourself, you're moving into resistance, you're trying something different. And one other key point here, in terms of boundaries feeling hard, that I want to make is that people often benefit from your lack of boundaries. And when you start to set those boundaries, especially with regular people in your life, and maybe those people who are closest to you who you haven't held these boundaries, they may resist your new ones. But in time, as you take yourself seriously, as you hold true to those internal boundaries, those around you will actually say, Oh, okay, this is the new version as to how Megan shows up. And that's okay. It is okay to normalize the discomfort, the guilt. Again, we can learn to move through that in setting new boundaries and holding new boundaries because this is change. And we know change can be uncomfortable, and that is okay. But the key is being so in tune with what it is that you want, what it is that you need, really having that foundational, your Rockstar Mom Essentials clear. So you can then hold these internal and external boundaries. Next, I want to share with you just a quick quick kind of three-step boundary framework that I've come up with and I've you I've used with my clients to help you move through actually working through and setting these boundaries. So the first is to notice any resentment. Because oftentimes when we talk about boundaries, like some type of resentment comes up. And resentment can often be a boundary along alarm. So rather than let it throw you off or spiral you back into old ways, ask yourself where do you feel the resentment or the guilt or the exhaustion or that quiet anger internally? Listen for it. Again, oftentimes we as women have just been taught to suppress, suppress, suppress. I'm inviting you to actually listen to those signals because when we listen and allow ourselves to feel, we then take back our power to actually move through them and release them. Second is to decide the limit. And again, this starts with your internal limit, your internal boundary. Asking yourself, what do I actually want here? What am I available for? What's my capacity? What am I no longer available for? And know as we grow and change, these will shift. So it becomes this practice of you checking in with self to decide your limit, your internal boundaries in that moment, in that season of life. You can practice journaling on this just by reflecting on different, you know, areas in your life where you are putting your time and energy is really brainstorming. Like I am no longer available for dot dot dot. What things in your life have you maybe thought about consciously or subconsciously, setting some type of boundary for or stepping back from that you haven't? Now is a great time to just kind of bring that to the forefront and decide what are your limits. And step three, this especially comes to external boundaries, is to communicate it briefly, no over-explaining. So saying something simple such as, you know, that actually doesn't work for me, or I'm not able to commit to that. I'll need to pass this time. The power of pause. Let me get back to you. Keeping it clear, concise is easiest, both for you as well as the other party that you are communicating with. Oftentimes when we start to ramble and we try to we we try to perfect the words, what we are doing is we're trying to make it so the other person doesn't feel bad. Just be direct and say, you know what? I can't do that for you this weekend. And that is okay. Clear is kind and overexplaining oftentimes taps into, again, our anxiety, our people pleasing. And it's it's okay to just be direct. It actually works in favor for both parties. So I'm gonna share with you just a couple kind of if you want to take this to the next level, quick reflection questions. We'll put these in the show notes as well, that you can take a couple minutes to journal on. Again, I already shared with you one of them, which is just starting to identify, I am no longer available for dot, dot, dot. And start creating and acknowledging what you want some of those internal boundaries to be so you can clearly articulate the external. Another great question to ask yourself is where am I most drained right now? What boundary would protect my energy here? Again, we have power over our energy. And if something or someone, again, external or even internal, our thought patterns and progress are draining our energy? What is a boundary that you could put in place to protect your energy there? Start by just getting curious about it. I I love this next question as well. Is what is one small version of that boundary that I can practice this week? I often talk about this thing called MVA, minimal viable action. It's like, what is the smallest step that you can take to start to implement this new boundary? It doesn't necessarily have to be this big overhaul. It can just be practicing it in smaller situations. So when bigger situations come up, it's become more of a normalized practice. So, my friend, as we wrap up here, we've talked a lot today about internal and external boundaries, how to actually set some of those boundaries for yourself, set those with others by being clear and concise. A friendly reminder, just like any type of change that we are working on to better ourselves, it is a practice. So I invite you to give yourself some grace, to be reflective, to lean into support, and to know that you're not alone if you are one who is looking to set better boundaries. So if you've got any questions or thoughts, feel free to go ahead and find me over on Instagram, Megan Caldwell PDX. I'd love to hear what boundaries that you're working on. And until next time, know that you are worthy of setting these boundaries. And it is time, my friend, for you to take back your power and live your best, most rock star life. I'm here for it. Cheering you on. See you next time. Thank you so much for tuning into the Rockstar Mom podcast. If today's episode resonated with you, here's how we can keep this momentum going. First, be sure to subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode. Next, I'd be so grateful if you took a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Your feedback helps us reach even more women who are ready to live more intentional, fun filled lives. Lastly, please share your insights on social media and be sure to tag me at Megan Caldwell PDX so we can connect and inspire other rock stars to live their best lives too. Again, I am so glad that you are here, and I'll see you next time.