What do time, money, and energy have in common? They are all protected by healthy boundaries.
Here are some examples:
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- PROTECTING MONEY: If you buy a charging cable from Amazon and it doesn’t work, return it.
- PROTECTING TIME: If a friend asks you to meet for lunch Friday and you have a super busy week already, postpone it to another week.
- PROTECTING ENERGY: Take the time to find a movie both you and your partner or friend want to watch. Don’t be willing to watch a scary movie that’s going to keep you up or give you bad dreams.
So if you don’t have enough time, money or energy, it’s probably because there’s some area of your life where you could use healthier boundaries.
Healthy boundaries can be difficult, especially if you were raised in a household where you weren’t allowed to fully have them.
As a child, you learned to choose attachment over authenticity in order to maintain the relationship with your primary caregivers or parents.
So say you don’t want to go to visit your aunt because she’s always kind of mean to you BUT your parents or caregivers get mad at you when you say you don’t want to go? You have to overrule your healthy boundaries to stay in a connected loving relationship with the grown ups who are taking care of you.
At 5 years old you can’t move out, so you have to find a way to stay connected and that means overruling your boundaries.
THE GOOD NEWS IS: It’s not your fault that you didn’t learn how to have healthy boundaries.
AND MORE GOOD NEWS IS: If you want to develop healthy boundaries, you can change these old habits.
To start to change you can take baby steps:
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- Postpone the coffee with a friend on a day that you’re sick.
- Or send the burnt food back at the restaurant.
Each time you do this, you’re slowly building the muscle of healthy boundaries and the more you practice the bigger they’ll grow.
And yes – sometimes you’ll make mistakes, you’ll create a boundary that’s too big or too small and actually, that’s a good thing. When you make that mistake, you learn better about what a healthy boundary looks like for you and you can do it better next time!
So you got this, start creating healthier boundaries one baby step at time today.
Start growing those boundary muscles!
Bryn
P.S. If this resonates with you, you ABSOLUTELY have to join the FREE Boundaries Training Camp which is all about building even healthier boundaries so you can get better and better at protecting your TIME, ENERGY and MONEY. It starts MONDAY, join here.
