3. 3 Tips for Setting Boundaries
Boundaries. This is a topic that is often misunderstood, so I can’t wait to dive into it on this episode to give you a new perspective. Most people believe that setting boundaries equates to rules and trying to control people, but I have a different definition that I know will shift how you think about it.
Whether you need boundaries in your work life or your personal life, I’ll bet that you most likely find implementing them a challenge. So to start, we have to understand why you might be struggling to set them up in the first place, and I’m unwinding all of this here so you can start feeling great, whether you choose to stay in your current job or leave and pursue something else.
Join me on the podcast this week as I highlight what a boundary is and why the way I define it can be so freeing. I know how difficult it can be to set boundaries in any area of your life, so I’m sharing three simple tips that will help you feel more comfortable doing so.
To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to be giving away 3 deep-dive strategy sessions with yours truly! These are 90-minute sessions where we come up with a plan to get you where you want to go.
To enter, leave a rating and review of the show on Apple Podcasts. You can find all the details on entering the giveaway here. I can’t wait to announce the winners!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
My definition of what a boundary is and what it isn’t.
How to identify if you’re in need of some boundaries.
Why setting boundaries is a way of taking care of yourself.
3 tips for how to set boundaries.
Why setting boundaries can be so challenging for many of us.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to be entered into my giveaway of 3 deep-dive strategy sessions!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we’re talking about boundaries and how you can use them to love the job you’re in and set yourself up for success in whatever you do next.
You are listening to Love Your Job (Before You Leave It), the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week, we’re talking about boundaries, and I’m super excited because I think it’s such an important topic and a misunderstood one as well. And it’s funny because I think most of the time, we’re not excited to talk about boundaries because we all anticipate it’s going to be an uncomfortable conversation.
So I’m really excited to switch that up and bring a different energy to a topic that I think is really fraught for many of us. But before we dive into that, I just want to also mention, you may hear my cat yowling in the background.
He is 16 years old and he has a lot of thoughts and feelings, mostly that I should be sitting on the couch with him at all times. And since that’s not where I am right now, he may come to voice his discontent. So you can just enjoy that little taste of Cowboy in the background. Cowboy is his name obviously.
Okay, so I have some questions for you. Do you work too many hours? Are you constantly checking your email after work? Is working from home during 2020 with the pandemic and everything else causing you to work way more than before?
If so, you may be in need of some boundaries. But before we get into how to set boundaries, I want to teach you what I think a boundary is because it’s different than the way a lot of other people teach it. So a lot of people teach that a boundary is kind of like a rule. And sometimes people even teach that it’s a way that we can control other people. I don’t think a boundary is a rule, and I don’t think it ever allows us to control other people because spoiler alert, they all have free will. And we can’t make them do anything, no matter what our boundaries are.
But I think what a boundary is is simply a choice that we make about what we’re going to do for our own wellbeing. And I love this definition and I love how simple it is because I think it really shifts how we think about how to set a boundary.
When I see a lot of my clients struggle to set boundaries, what I see is that they’re trying to control somebody else by saying they have a “boundary.” They’re like, well he just needs to not email me after 5pm. But we can never control when someone else emails us.
But what we can do is decide this is when I check my email. And we can let people know even if we want to. Hey, these are the hours I check my email, you can email me whenever you want to but I won’t be checking my email at these other times.
And I actually do this in my own business. I have unlimited Slack coaching for my clients. And I tell them, I’m like, you can Slack me literally whenever you want to, but I will only check the Slack during these hours.
And I love this because it gives my people the freedom. Sometimes I have clients in Europe and they might want to Slack me during their workday, when I am most certainly asleep because I live in Seattle. And I think that’s great. But I have the settings on my phone such that I will not know about it, and even when I wake up, my Slack is like - I have this setting on the iPhone where the Slack is asleep until a certain time. So I don’t look at my work Slacks before that time.
But I see that as this is my responsibility to set this up for myself for what I want my work life to be like. It’s not my clients’ responsibility to know when it’s okay to Slack me. It’s always okay to Slack me. So I think that’s a perfect example of the way I teach a boundary. It’s just a choice you make about what you’re going to do for your own wellbeing.
It’s never about controlling anyone else. It’s never about what’s okay even. It’s totally okay that my clients Slack me all the time at all hours of the day and night. It’s also okay for me to choose when I check those messages. And it’s so much easier for me to choose that when I think whatever they’re doing is fine. And then what do I want to do to create my wellbeing no matter what anyone else is doing.
But I find that even when you explain a boundary in this way, many people still struggle to set one. And I think there’s a really good reason for that. And so I want to talk to you and explain it so that you can understand and work around it.
And the reason for that is the social conditioning that we receive as womxn and girls. Social conditioning is the way we were taught to behave. It’s the way we were taught to believe. It’s the way we were taught to think about ourselves and our place in the world.
And as womxn, we’re socialized to take care of everyone else and to make sure no one else has any negative feelings at any time, which is not possible because we don’t control their feelings.
So we have all that and we have - womxn are socialized to do until there’s nothing left to do. We’re also socialized to judge whether or not we’re doing a good job by how other people respond, mainly whether they approve of us or not. And that doesn’t really work. And what it translates to is that we try to do everything for everyone all the time. We try to get our validation from outside sources. And it’s like we never feel like we’re doing enough. I see this all the time. I used to experience it myself a lot.
This pull, like we always need to be doing more. And if we’re doing everything on our to-do list, then we want to do it all better. And it’s this constant churn and struggle, and I think this leads to a lot of burnout. Because there’s never the end point where we’re like, yup, I’m good.
And so when you think about that, of course it’s hard for us to set boundaries because often when we would set a boundary, that would mean we’re not doing until there’s nothing left to do. We’re just doing a certain amount and then saying that’s okay. What if that’s okay?
And the other thing is trying to get our validation from outside sources and trying to get our validation by what we do doesn’t work. I see this again and again because I have all these high-achieving clients who are just crushing it. And from the outside, it looks like everything in their life is perfect.
People are like, wow, you have the job, you have the money, you have the house, you have the kids, but on the inside, they feel drained and resentful and terrible. And it’s because of the way that social conditioning is playing out.
A lot of this social conditioning is impossible. Some of it is even contradictory. We have different pieces of social conditioning that go against each other. So when we’re spending all of our time trying to live up to that, it’s really hard to then turn around and set a boundary and say like, okay, I’m just not going to check my work email after five because we have that voice inside our own heads saying like, what if that’s not okay? It’s not okay to stop checking at five because what if my boss emails? I want to be there right away in case my boss emails.
As womxn, that sense of responsibility that’s been conditioned into us kicks in. Not just for people we feel responsible for, like our direct reports, but somehow also other chain of command for our bosses and our boss’s bosses and even the whole company.
We will just decide interestingly that we’re kind of responsible for everything all the time. It’s interesting but it’s also obvious duh because that’s what our social conditioning said, but it doesn’t even make logical sense. Of course, if you’re one person in a business of 500, of course you’re not the only one who’s responsible for the business outcomes, but I know it can feel that way. And I’ve experienced it feeling that way myself as well.
So when we set and hold boundaries, those choices we make for our own wellbeing, it often goes against our social conditioning because that social conditioning says that we should always be doing for everyone else first. And when we go against our social conditioning, we feel discomfort.
So it’s not - I think a lot of us think that the reason we don’t set boundaries is external pressure, but it’s actually this internal pressure that really keeps us following our social conditioning. Social conditioning, it’s almost like we’re self-policing. So as kids, we upload all these ideas about how we need to be in the world, and then as adults, that social conditioning plays out to keep us kind of stay in our lane, to keep us in our lane around how it’s okay to act and not act.
But then the problem is as adult womxn, a lot of times that social conditioning directly contradicts our chosen beliefs. But the social conditioning is older and it’s habitual thinking that we’ve had since we were kids. It’s often subconscious at this point.
So it’s almost like we don’t really even sometimes understand why it’s so hard for us to set boundaries. We just know that when we even think about setting a boundary, when we even think about making a choice for our own wellbeing, we just feel this deep discomfort.
And that discomfort can keep us from doing anything. But what I want you to know is that the discomfort isn’t a problem and it doesn’t mean anything bad about you. It just means that we’re pushing back against something you learned about how the world is, but you learned it a really long time ago and it doesn’t have to be true or important for you now. And you get to choose whether it is.
And if it’s creating burnout and if it’s making you hate your job, then I would argue some of that social conditioning isn’t working for you anymore, and it’s okay for you to ditch it. But this is why the person who needs to really be on board with your boundaries is you. Because you’re going to feel that discomfort and understanding why it’s happening and what it means is going to change your capacity to do the boundary anyway. So think about it, if you want to log off at 5pm but you haven’t gotten good with yourself on that, you’re not going to be willing to do it, or you’re going to feel like shit when you try.
It’s not because of what your boss thinks, it’s not because you’re still getting email. It’s because you yourself are questioning whether or not it’s truly okay. And the reason you’re questioning is because it doesn’t comply with that social conditioning to always make sure everything’s taken care of.
And like I was saying, even if we disagree with our social conditioning, it often so runs our lives in this way. The reason for this is that most of our social conditioning now exists as subconscious thoughts.
When the brain learns something new, it stays in the conscious mind until it becomes habitual. Once it becomes habitual though, it moves to the subconscious mind. Like when you learn to drive a car, at first you had to think really hard about it.
I remember going 25 miles an hour on a small street in Marietta, Ohio, and feeling like oh my god, this is crazy. And I wanted to pass out with fear. And now I can drive 70 on the interstate and it feels fine. The driving didn’t change. My thoughts about the driving changed, my comfort with the driving changed, and the driving became habitual. And my brain was like, oh, this is fine, we always do this. And even now, it’s like, not only does my subconscious mind know how to drive, but it also knows how to get to my favorite grocery store without me even having to give it any conscious thought. I get in the car and I just go there. Sometimes I even go there or in that direction when I didn’t even mean to because that’s how strong our habitual thoughts and patterns are.
They just push us to do the same stuff we’ve always done. But if the same stuff you’ve always done is overworking and never setting boundaries, then we want to learn to push back against that, and that’s going to be uncomfortable but that’s okay and you can still do it.
So let’s recap. A boundary is just a decision you make about something you’re going to do for your own wellbeing. A boundary is not something we do for anyone else, to control anyone else, to show them that what they’re doing isn’t okay, none of that shit. It’s just for you.
And how do we actually do that when our brain is trying to block us with our social conditioning? I’ve got three tips that are going to help you do it. And the number one tip is just that knowledge is power. Just the awareness of what’s going on is going to help immensely.
When you find yourself wanting to log off at 5pm but not doing it, now you know why. It’s not about you. It’s not about your capability to follow through on what you decided. I see this all the time. My clients are like, well, I decided to do this thing and I didn’t do it, so I must not have the capacity to follow through.
And I’m like, no, you totally have the capacity to follow through. You just have resistance and that’s okay. It’s okay to have resistance. It doesn’t mean anything about you. You can learn how to feel that discomfort of pushing back against your social conditioning and still take the action you’ve chosen to take.
I know discomfort’s not our favorite feeling, but it’s fine. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just a feeling in your body. It’s not going to hurt you. I do think it’s worth it to ask yourself like, do I like my reasons for choosing the discomfort? But if you’re setting a boundary that you want to set, then I’m going to guess you do like your reasons.
Not all discomfort is created equally, so choosing the discomfort we want can really help us create the life and the job and the career that we’ve been dreaming of. That being said, it’s also really important to unlearn those old rules, to unlearn that social conditioning.
Awareness is great and it will help you get started, but deprogramming the social conditioning is also super important. And the more you deprogram the social conditioning, the less you’re going to have that discomfort that happens when you set a boundary.
The way a lot of us try to deprogram our social conditioning is by simply telling ourselves we’re badass womxn who should log off at 5pm and not worry about it. And that sounds good, but it doesn’t work. And sometimes it makes us feel worse because let’s be real y’all, we do worry about it.
And then we take that worry and we make it mean something bad about us like, I must not actually be as feminist as I thought I was, or I must not be a badass. But we don’t have to make our own discomfort mean anything bad about us. It’s just the cognitive dissonance between your desired action and your social conditioning.
And when we want to change social conditioning, it’s not helpful to try to take these big steps, from I feel super uncomfortable to I’m a badass with no discomfort. That’s too big of a step.
Instead, I want you to think about taking a tiny baby step and going from I want to log off at 5pm but I feel uncomfortable, to I want to log off at 5pm and it’s okay if I feel uncomfortable. I can still do it.
Giving ourselves permission to feel uncomfortable actually makes it so much easier to set and hold boundaries. When we expect that it may be uncomfortable and when we let that be okay, then we have much more freedom to try what we want to try and see what actually works, and that will change everything.
Because the more you try and the more you see what works, the more you can keep trying, and you’re going to hone your skills and you’re going to get better and better at this, and you’re going to get clearer and clearer on what boundaries you actually care about and what boundaries you just thought you “should” have.
And that’s super important because the third tip I have for you is that your boundaries are for you. I know I’ve said this like, six times in this podcast, but it’s so important. I’m just going to keep saying it. Your boundaries are for you.
Boundaries are how you create more of what you want. Like I’ve said 11 times, they’re not a way to control anyone else’s behavior. And they’re not a way to do what we think we should be doing because what we think we should be doing is usually just more bullshit social conditioning.
They’re a way that we take care of ourselves, no matter what others are doing. And sometimes your boundaries might look different than what other people’s look like. So a boundary is not just about everyone should log off at 5pm.
If you don’t want to log off at 5pm and you’d actually rather log off at 6pm, then logging off at 5pm wouldn’t probably be the right boundary for you. You might have a different thing you want to do. Maybe you’d rather log in an hour later and not take emails before a certain time, or maybe you want to have a boundary around your lunch break. It’s not just about picking the things we think we should be doing or picking the boundaries that we think balanced workers have. Boundaries aren’t about taking cultural ideas and then trying to force ourselves to do them. That’s what social conditioning is about. Instead, a boundary is how do I take care of my own wellbeing in a way that feels good to me?
It’s about figuring out what it is we actually want and then starting to put things in place to make that happen. And it can look all kinds of different ways, but the most important thing I want you to take away is that it’s for you and that you can decide what it is.
Different people are going to find that different boundaries really work for them, and there’s no one right way to do this. That’s the good news and the bad news. I think so often, we’re trying to cookie cutter ourselves into whatever the good way to work is, and that’s just another version of social conditioning and trying to conform to ideas outside of ourselves.
Instead, I want you to think about what do I actually want and how can I put things in place to make sure I get it, and to take the responsibility really for being the one to make sure it happens. I think a lot of us want someone else to put the boundaries in place for us.
We want a work culture where people just don’t answer emails after five, and listen, I think that work culture sounds like a great idea. I know that work culture is really valuable. I’m here to influence work culture and help people, and especially womxn, realize that they can do awesome work in shorter amounts of time. I think that’s totally true and totally doable.
But you are the one who is responsible for figuring out your boundaries and setting them because as long as you expect someone else to do it, then you’re at the mercy of what someone else does, and that is not how you create a job you love. You create a job you love; you love the job you’re in, you go into another job you love when you’re willing to get clear on what you want, and to go to bat to make it happen.
So that was some real talk for y’all, but I think it’s so important because when we want to leave our jobs, then it’s the perfect time to develop our boundary setting skills because why not just try it if you want to leave this job anyway?
And if you want to stay in your current job, you’re going to be there for a while maybe then, so why not try and set some boundaries and see if you can set yourself up to have a work life that you love. And if you actually want to stay in your current job, then learning to set boundaries now and learning how to do that will help you do amazing work without depleting your own wellbeing and without winding up in burnout. Really, it’s a win-win. Any time you learn how to set a boundary and feel the discomfort and do it anyway and create that wellbeing for yourself, you’re becoming more empowered.
And this is a podcast about work, but I promise you, this works in personal lives too. I coach my clients on work, but if they show up with a personal issue or any kind of thing, I coach them on all of it. And I have seen this work in the personal realm as well.
So any place where you are feeling dissatisfied, I really invite you to think about like, how could I set a boundary, which is just making a choice for my own wellbeing, and how would that change the situation? How would it change my experience of this situation if I were willing to make a choice for my own wellbeing and stick to it even when I feel uncomfortable?
And I think you’ll find that if you’re willing to try that, you’re going to have a lot to celebrate at work and you’re going to be so delighted by what you can do and you’re going to feel so empowered to continue to make changes that you want to make and keep going building a work life that you can totally fall in love with and continue to be in love with for the long haul.
And speaking of celebrating, I’m celebrating too. I’m celebrating the launch of the podcast, and part of that is, guess what, I’m giving away a few deep dive strategy sessions with yours truly. I want to be very clear that these are not consult calls or even coaching calls.
These are 90-minute sessions where we unpack exactly what’s going on with you and your career, and then we come up with a point-by-point plan for how to get you to where you want to go. I know exactly what it’s like to leave an amazing job and want to leave it.
I also know what it’s like to actually leave it and launch a six-figure business, and I can walk you through whatever your career dreams are, whether that’s leaving and launching a business, whether it’s staying and learning to just go all in on loving this job. No matter what you want to do, I can walk you through it and we’re going to create that point-by-point plan and it’s going to give you everything you need to get started on your journey.
I’m going to be giving away just three of these sessions. In order to be eligible, all you need to do is subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It doesn’t even have to be a five-star review, although I of course hope you love the show. What I really want is your honest feedback so I can create a show that will blow your mind and help you change your life every week.
Visit korilinn.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I will be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode and you know you want to be one of them because who doesn’t want to love their work y’all? Alright, have a great week. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilynn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job (Before You Leave It), the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week, we’re talking about boundaries, and I’m super excited because I think it’s such an important topic and a misunderstood one as well. And it’s funny because I think most of the time, we’re not excited to talk about boundaries because we all anticipate it’s going to be an uncomfortable conversation.
So I’m really excited to switch that up and bring a different energy to a topic that I think is really fraught for many of us. But before we dive into that, I just want to also mention, you may hear my cat yowling in the background.
He is 16 years old and he has a lot of thoughts and feelings, mostly that I should be sitting on the couch with him at all times. And since that’s not where I am right now, he may come to voice his discontent. So you can just enjoy that little taste of Cowboy in the background. Cowboy is his name obviously.
Okay, so I have some questions for you. Do you work too many hours? Are you constantly checking your email after work? Is working from home during 2020 with the pandemic and everything else causing you to work way more than before?
If so, you may be in need of some boundaries. But before we get into how to set boundaries, I want to teach you what I think a boundary is because it’s different than the way a lot of other people teach it. So a lot of people teach that a boundary is kind of like a rule. And sometimes people even teach that it’s a way that we can control other people. I don’t think a boundary is a rule, and I don’t think it ever allows us to control other people because spoiler alert, they all have free will. And we can’t make them do anything, no matter what our boundaries are.
But I think what a boundary is is simply a choice that we make about what we’re going to do for our own wellbeing. And I love this definition and I love how simple it is because I think it really shifts how we think about how to set a boundary.
When I see a lot of my clients struggle to set boundaries, what I see is that they’re trying to control somebody else by saying they have a “boundary.” They’re like, well he just needs to not email me after 5pm. But we can never control when someone else emails us.
But what we can do is decide this is when I check my email. And we can let people know even if we want to. Hey, these are the hours I check my email, you can email me whenever you want to but I won’t be checking my email at these other times.
And I actually do this in my own business. I have unlimited Slack coaching for my clients. And I tell them, I’m like, you can Slack me literally whenever you want to, but I will only check the Slack during these hours.
And I love this because it gives my people the freedom. Sometimes I have clients in Europe and they might want to Slack me during their workday, when I am most certainly asleep because I live in Seattle. And I think that’s great. But I have the settings on my phone such that I will not know about it, and even when I wake up, my Slack is like - I have this setting on the iPhone where the Slack is asleep until a certain time. So I don’t look at my work Slacks before that time.
But I see that as this is my responsibility to set this up for myself for what I want my work life to be like. It’s not my clients’ responsibility to know when it’s okay to Slack me. It’s always okay to Slack me. So I think that’s a perfect example of the way I teach a boundary. It’s just a choice you make about what you’re going to do for your own wellbeing.
It’s never about controlling anyone else. It’s never about what’s okay even. It’s totally okay that my clients Slack me all the time at all hours of the day and night. It’s also okay for me to choose when I check those messages. And it’s so much easier for me to choose that when I think whatever they’re doing is fine. And then what do I want to do to create my wellbeing no matter what anyone else is doing.
But I find that even when you explain a boundary in this way, many people still struggle to set one. And I think there’s a really good reason for that. And so I want to talk to you and explain it so that you can understand and work around it.
And the reason for that is the social conditioning that we receive as womxn and girls. Social conditioning is the way we were taught to behave. It’s the way we were taught to believe. It’s the way we were taught to think about ourselves and our place in the world.
And as womxn, we’re socialized to take care of everyone else and to make sure no one else has any negative feelings at any time, which is not possible because we don’t control their feelings.
So we have all that and we have - womxn are socialized to do until there’s nothing left to do. We’re also socialized to judge whether or not we’re doing a good job by how other people respond, mainly whether they approve of us or not. And that doesn’t really work. And what it translates to is that we try to do everything for everyone all the time. We try to get our validation from outside sources. And it’s like we never feel like we’re doing enough. I see this all the time. I used to experience it myself a lot.
This pull, like we always need to be doing more. And if we’re doing everything on our to-do list, then we want to do it all better. And it’s this constant churn and struggle, and I think this leads to a lot of burnout. Because there’s never the end point where we’re like, yup, I’m good.
And so when you think about that, of course it’s hard for us to set boundaries because often when we would set a boundary, that would mean we’re not doing until there’s nothing left to do. We’re just doing a certain amount and then saying that’s okay. What if that’s okay?
And the other thing is trying to get our validation from outside sources and trying to get our validation by what we do doesn’t work. I see this again and again because I have all these high-achieving clients who are just crushing it. And from the outside, it looks like everything in their life is perfect.
People are like, wow, you have the job, you have the money, you have the house, you have the kids, but on the inside, they feel drained and resentful and terrible. And it’s because of the way that social conditioning is playing out.
A lot of this social conditioning is impossible. Some of it is even contradictory. We have different pieces of social conditioning that go against each other. So when we’re spending all of our time trying to live up to that, it’s really hard to then turn around and set a boundary and say like, okay, I’m just not going to check my work email after five because we have that voice inside our own heads saying like, what if that’s not okay? It’s not okay to stop checking at five because what if my boss emails? I want to be there right away in case my boss emails.
As womxn, that sense of responsibility that’s been conditioned into us kicks in. Not just for people we feel responsible for, like our direct reports, but somehow also other chain of command for our bosses and our boss’s bosses and even the whole company.
We will just decide interestingly that we’re kind of responsible for everything all the time. It’s interesting but it’s also obvious duh because that’s what our social conditioning said, but it doesn’t even make logical sense. Of course, if you’re one person in a business of 500, of course you’re not the only one who’s responsible for the business outcomes, but I know it can feel that way. And I’ve experienced it feeling that way myself as well.
So when we set and hold boundaries, those choices we make for our own wellbeing, it often goes against our social conditioning because that social conditioning says that we should always be doing for everyone else first. And when we go against our social conditioning, we feel discomfort.
So it’s not - I think a lot of us think that the reason we don’t set boundaries is external pressure, but it’s actually this internal pressure that really keeps us following our social conditioning. Social conditioning, it’s almost like we’re self-policing. So as kids, we upload all these ideas about how we need to be in the world, and then as adults, that social conditioning plays out to keep us kind of stay in our lane, to keep us in our lane around how it’s okay to act and not act.
But then the problem is as adult womxn, a lot of times that social conditioning directly contradicts our chosen beliefs. But the social conditioning is older and it’s habitual thinking that we’ve had since we were kids. It’s often subconscious at this point.
So it’s almost like we don’t really even sometimes understand why it’s so hard for us to set boundaries. We just know that when we even think about setting a boundary, when we even think about making a choice for our own wellbeing, we just feel this deep discomfort.
And that discomfort can keep us from doing anything. But what I want you to know is that the discomfort isn’t a problem and it doesn’t mean anything bad about you. It just means that we’re pushing back against something you learned about how the world is, but you learned it a really long time ago and it doesn’t have to be true or important for you now. And you get to choose whether it is.
And if it’s creating burnout and if it’s making you hate your job, then I would argue some of that social conditioning isn’t working for you anymore, and it’s okay for you to ditch it. But this is why the person who needs to really be on board with your boundaries is you. Because you’re going to feel that discomfort and understanding why it’s happening and what it means is going to change your capacity to do the boundary anyway. So think about it, if you want to log off at 5pm but you haven’t gotten good with yourself on that, you’re not going to be willing to do it, or you’re going to feel like shit when you try.
It’s not because of what your boss thinks, it’s not because you’re still getting email. It’s because you yourself are questioning whether or not it’s truly okay. And the reason you’re questioning is because it doesn’t comply with that social conditioning to always make sure everything’s taken care of.
And like I was saying, even if we disagree with our social conditioning, it often so runs our lives in this way. The reason for this is that most of our social conditioning now exists as subconscious thoughts.
When the brain learns something new, it stays in the conscious mind until it becomes habitual. Once it becomes habitual though, it moves to the subconscious mind. Like when you learn to drive a car, at first you had to think really hard about it.
I remember going 25 miles an hour on a small street in Marietta, Ohio, and feeling like oh my god, this is crazy. And I wanted to pass out with fear. And now I can drive 70 on the interstate and it feels fine. The driving didn’t change. My thoughts about the driving changed, my comfort with the driving changed, and the driving became habitual. And my brain was like, oh, this is fine, we always do this. And even now, it’s like, not only does my subconscious mind know how to drive, but it also knows how to get to my favorite grocery store without me even having to give it any conscious thought. I get in the car and I just go there. Sometimes I even go there or in that direction when I didn’t even mean to because that’s how strong our habitual thoughts and patterns are.
They just push us to do the same stuff we’ve always done. But if the same stuff you’ve always done is overworking and never setting boundaries, then we want to learn to push back against that, and that’s going to be uncomfortable but that’s okay and you can still do it.
So let’s recap. A boundary is just a decision you make about something you’re going to do for your own wellbeing. A boundary is not something we do for anyone else, to control anyone else, to show them that what they’re doing isn’t okay, none of that shit. It’s just for you.
And how do we actually do that when our brain is trying to block us with our social conditioning? I’ve got three tips that are going to help you do it. And the number one tip is just that knowledge is power. Just the awareness of what’s going on is going to help immensely.
When you find yourself wanting to log off at 5pm but not doing it, now you know why. It’s not about you. It’s not about your capability to follow through on what you decided. I see this all the time. My clients are like, well, I decided to do this thing and I didn’t do it, so I must not have the capacity to follow through.
And I’m like, no, you totally have the capacity to follow through. You just have resistance and that’s okay. It’s okay to have resistance. It doesn’t mean anything about you. You can learn how to feel that discomfort of pushing back against your social conditioning and still take the action you’ve chosen to take.
I know discomfort’s not our favorite feeling, but it’s fine. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just a feeling in your body. It’s not going to hurt you. I do think it’s worth it to ask yourself like, do I like my reasons for choosing the discomfort? But if you’re setting a boundary that you want to set, then I’m going to guess you do like your reasons.
Not all discomfort is created equally, so choosing the discomfort we want can really help us create the life and the job and the career that we’ve been dreaming of. That being said, it’s also really important to unlearn those old rules, to unlearn that social conditioning.
Awareness is great and it will help you get started, but deprogramming the social conditioning is also super important. And the more you deprogram the social conditioning, the less you’re going to have that discomfort that happens when you set a boundary.
The way a lot of us try to deprogram our social conditioning is by simply telling ourselves we’re badass womxn who should log off at 5pm and not worry about it. And that sounds good, but it doesn’t work. And sometimes it makes us feel worse because let’s be real y’all, we do worry about it.
And then we take that worry and we make it mean something bad about us like, I must not actually be as feminist as I thought I was, or I must not be a badass. But we don’t have to make our own discomfort mean anything bad about us. It’s just the cognitive dissonance between your desired action and your social conditioning.
And when we want to change social conditioning, it’s not helpful to try to take these big steps, from I feel super uncomfortable to I’m a badass with no discomfort. That’s too big of a step.
Instead, I want you to think about taking a tiny baby step and going from I want to log off at 5pm but I feel uncomfortable, to I want to log off at 5pm and it’s okay if I feel uncomfortable. I can still do it.
Giving ourselves permission to feel uncomfortable actually makes it so much easier to set and hold boundaries. When we expect that it may be uncomfortable and when we let that be okay, then we have much more freedom to try what we want to try and see what actually works, and that will change everything.
Because the more you try and the more you see what works, the more you can keep trying, and you’re going to hone your skills and you’re going to get better and better at this, and you’re going to get clearer and clearer on what boundaries you actually care about and what boundaries you just thought you “should” have.
And that’s super important because the third tip I have for you is that your boundaries are for you. I know I’ve said this like, six times in this podcast, but it’s so important. I’m just going to keep saying it. Your boundaries are for you.
Boundaries are how you create more of what you want. Like I’ve said 11 times, they’re not a way to control anyone else’s behavior. And they’re not a way to do what we think we should be doing because what we think we should be doing is usually just more bullshit social conditioning.
They’re a way that we take care of ourselves, no matter what others are doing. And sometimes your boundaries might look different than what other people’s look like. So a boundary is not just about everyone should log off at 5pm.
If you don’t want to log off at 5pm and you’d actually rather log off at 6pm, then logging off at 5pm wouldn’t probably be the right boundary for you. You might have a different thing you want to do. Maybe you’d rather log in an hour later and not take emails before a certain time, or maybe you want to have a boundary around your lunch break. It’s not just about picking the things we think we should be doing or picking the boundaries that we think balanced workers have. Boundaries aren’t about taking cultural ideas and then trying to force ourselves to do them. That’s what social conditioning is about. Instead, a boundary is how do I take care of my own wellbeing in a way that feels good to me?
It’s about figuring out what it is we actually want and then starting to put things in place to make that happen. And it can look all kinds of different ways, but the most important thing I want you to take away is that it’s for you and that you can decide what it is.
Different people are going to find that different boundaries really work for them, and there’s no one right way to do this. That’s the good news and the bad news. I think so often, we’re trying to cookie cutter ourselves into whatever the good way to work is, and that’s just another version of social conditioning and trying to conform to ideas outside of ourselves.
Instead, I want you to think about what do I actually want and how can I put things in place to make sure I get it, and to take the responsibility really for being the one to make sure it happens. I think a lot of us want someone else to put the boundaries in place for us.
We want a work culture where people just don’t answer emails after five, and listen, I think that work culture sounds like a great idea. I know that work culture is really valuable. I’m here to influence work culture and help people, and especially womxn, realize that they can do awesome work in shorter amounts of time. I think that’s totally true and totally doable.
But you are the one who is responsible for figuring out your boundaries and setting them because as long as you expect someone else to do it, then you’re at the mercy of what someone else does, and that is not how you create a job you love. You create a job you love; you love the job you’re in, you go into another job you love when you’re willing to get clear on what you want, and to go to bat to make it happen.
So that was some real talk for y’all, but I think it’s so important because when we want to leave our jobs, then it’s the perfect time to develop our boundary setting skills because why not just try it if you want to leave this job anyway?
And if you want to stay in your current job, you’re going to be there for a while maybe then, so why not try and set some boundaries and see if you can set yourself up to have a work life that you love. And if you actually want to stay in your current job, then learning to set boundaries now and learning how to do that will help you do amazing work without depleting your own wellbeing and without winding up in burnout. Really, it’s a win-win. Any time you learn how to set a boundary and feel the discomfort and do it anyway and create that wellbeing for yourself, you’re becoming more empowered.
And this is a podcast about work, but I promise you, this works in personal lives too. I coach my clients on work, but if they show up with a personal issue or any kind of thing, I coach them on all of it. And I have seen this work in the personal realm as well.
So any place where you are feeling dissatisfied, I really invite you to think about like, how could I set a boundary, which is just making a choice for my own wellbeing, and how would that change the situation? How would it change my experience of this situation if I were willing to make a choice for my own wellbeing and stick to it even when I feel uncomfortable?
And I think you’ll find that if you’re willing to try that, you’re going to have a lot to celebrate at work and you’re going to be so delighted by what you can do and you’re going to feel so empowered to continue to make changes that you want to make and keep going building a work life that you can totally fall in love with and continue to be in love with for the long haul.
And speaking of celebrating, I’m celebrating too. I’m celebrating the launch of the podcast, and part of that is, guess what, I’m giving away a few deep dive strategy sessions with yours truly. I want to be very clear that these are not consult calls or even coaching calls.
These are 90-minute sessions where we unpack exactly what’s going on with you and your career, and then we come up with a point-by-point plan for how to get you to where you want to go. I know exactly what it’s like to leave an amazing job and want to leave it.
I also know what it’s like to actually leave it and launch a six-figure business, and I can walk you through whatever your career dreams are, whether that’s leaving and launching a business, whether it’s staying and learning to just go all in on loving this job. No matter what you want to do, I can walk you through it and we’re going to create that point-by-point plan and it’s going to give you everything you need to get started on your journey.
I’m going to be giving away just three of these sessions. In order to be eligible, all you need to do is subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It doesn’t even have to be a five-star review, although I of course hope you love the show. What I really want is your honest feedback so I can create a show that will blow your mind and help you change your life every week.
Visit korilinn.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I will be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode and you know you want to be one of them because who doesn’t want to love their work y’all? Alright, have a great week. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilynn.com for more guidance and resources.
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