Boundaries: How-To Guide for Our Health and Happiness

We've spent the last few weeks digging in to what it really means to reframe selfish. We’ve not only learned what “reframing selfish” means but most importantly how we can put it into action in our daily lives. Now it’s time to share my spoiler-alert. None of this change can happen without one key component - boundaries. Boundaries are a key part of our lives, but we can tend to view think of them in a negative light, or shy away from them entirely. Starting today, let's commit to a change, and choose to think of boundaries as a foundation of support for our health and happiness.

To help this sink in, and feel doable in real life, I’ll share with you 3 areas that boundaries support, so we can start thinking of boundaries as a positive and empowering tool. Read on to learn my top 3 ways boundaries support our wellbeing.

Establish Respect

At a basic level, boundaries establish self-respect. They demonstrate in an concrete way that you are comfortable and confident standing up for what’s important to you. If we shy away from setting boundaries, what message do you think that conveys? To me, that tells me that the person is unsure and unclear. But if we set boundaries at a level that feels good to us, and sets ourselves up for success and empowerment, now that’s respect! All too often I see people shying away from setting the boundaries they crave because they aren’t sure how that’ll make someone else feel. Respect yourself enough to put the boundaries in place that set you up for success and know that others will pay you more respect for doing so.

Protect Your Resources

I believe time is our most precious and scarce resource. We can’t generate more time, despite our deepest desires to do so. For this reason, it’s important to create boundaries that protect our most valuable resources. Consider what your most precious resources are, and how establishing boundaries could support you. I’ll share an example from my real life.

Time is precious to me, and can feel scarce in our busy world. To protect the time I have, I work to put boundaries in place to protect & prioritize my work versus family time. To add to this, I’ve worked from a home office for nearly 13 years, so my home is shared between family and work time, all the more reason it necessitated boundaries! I do the best I can to switch from work-mode to mom-mode when my kids get home, so we can spend the next 4 hours together. This is our biggest amount of time together, and I try to protect this time to connect with my daughters. I work hard to put my phone away during this time and let messages and social media wait until they head to bed. I’m admittedly not perfect, but I try my hardest to have this separation of roles. This protects my time and resources and when I’m true to this goal I feel more successful in each area of my life. Alternately when I try to multi-task, and juggle email replies while playing with my kids, I feel like everyone loses. No one gets full attention, everything takes longer to get done and overall I walk away feeling defeated. For all these reasons I strive to be present to the part of the day I’m in, give it my all and full attention, and save my sanity.

Prioritize You

Last, but certainly not least is how boundaries support and encourage you to prioritize your unique needs! Boundaries show that we care enough to stand up for ourselves. This is by far my favorite way to think about boundaries, as a support system for ourself. I love this because as soon as we realize this shift and start implementing it in our daily lives, the rest of our family inherently learns this beautiful lesson. What an incredible lesson for our kids to learn and observe. As Mom’s we hold the key to establishing healthy habits for our children. Prioritizing your needs by setting in place healthy boundaries is an incredible way to build up your own health, and also demonstrate first hand for your kids how it’s done.

I hope this message has left you feeling empowered to prioritize your needs by establishing healthy boundaries. I created an amazing guide that will help support this message. 5 Steps to Reverse Burnout is a game changer to inspire you to prioritize yourself. Get your free copy today!