Healthy boundaries are essential for balancing our personal and professional lives. But what makes a boundary healthy and, more to the point, effective?
When one of my clients, Angela, hired me to help her grow her home-based web design business, she was exhausted. Her clients—small businesses and nonprofits—sometimes seemed as demanding and difficult as her two teenagers. They needed constant reassurance and were chronically late in supplying her with critical information, yet they expected her to deliver finished sites according to the original deadlines, seamlessly integrating a bewildering variety of changes.
Angela desperately wanted to get her life back in balance and still earn enough to support her family. It was clear that she needed to establish some boundaries, but how? She was just getting by as it was. How could she expect to grow her business without throwing her private life into a tailspin?
Reality check
Before she could work on healthy boundaries, Angela needed to establish what exactly she was trying to keep in and keep out. Her first coaching assignment with me was to complete a time inventory. I asked her to list all the activities she needed or wanted to do in a typical month (including sleeping and eating) and estimate the time required. She was to send me her inventory before our next coaching session.
Why did we begin here?
Clear boundaries require clear thinking, and it’s almost impossible to think clearly when you’re overwhelmed. By recording everything she did and wanted to do with her time, Angela was able to look at both where her time went and whether or not it served her.
When we reviewed her time inventory, Angela saw that she had been trying to get more done by ignoring basic needs, hoping that when she caught up, she would have time for family and for herself. Though this might work on a very temporary basis, as an ongoing strategy it was doomed to failure. Angela needed new boundaries so she could enjoy her family and care for herself while taking care of her clients.
Two kinds of boundaries
There are two kinds of boundaries that you can set, and the kind you choose has everything to do with work-life balance.
The first kind of boundary is defensive, like ramparts around a fortress. Designed to keep out craziness, worry and distraction, defensive boundaries also keep out support, resourcefulness and creativity.
The time inventory revealed that Angela typically set a defensive boundary when she absolutely, positively had to complete a project by a certain time. She would let calls go to voice mail, checked e-mail only to see if there were critical messages about the project at hand, and lived on energy bars and coffee. She’d break to have dinner with her daughters, then go back to work until the wee hours of the morning. Friends, exercise and even her much-loved hours volunteering with Animal Rescue were shoved aside.
The physical costs of this kind of boundary are obvious from the outside. But Angela paid even higher costs in terms of her mental and emotional well-being and her relationship with her children and business.
From inside a defensive boundary, everything that is not urgent is classified as an intrusion. That includes good-night kisses, walking the dog and comparing notes with a colleague. When we set defensive boundaries, we live and work under siege.
The second and vastly more effective type of boundary is a defining boundary. This boundary is like a fence around a pasture; it serves to focus, contain and protect while affording access according to what we need.
The space within
One of the key differences between the two kinds of boundaries is the space within. Defensive boundaries have a small perimeter because it is easier to protect a limited area. When a village is under attack, it makes sense for everyone to retreat to a confined area from which they can jointly defend themselves.
But, for instance, when the home-based professional retreats to a confined space, she is alone. No wonder our businesses can sometimes feel like traps. Yet this is exactly what we do when we react to pressure by shutting off distractions and narrowing our focus.
Defining boundaries, on the other hand, typically contain ample space and resources. There is room here to move, to breathe and to get much needed perspective on our toughest challenges.
The question is how to establish defining boundaries when we already feel under siege.
Building the fence
Angela began the shift from defensive to defining boundaries by building space into her schedule rather than trying to squeeze time out of it.
Rather than micro-planning, she looked at two- to four-hour blocks of time throughout the week and asked herself what activities were most suited for each. She reserved Thursday mornings for personal errands, because that was usually when school conferences took place, and she set aside Sunday evenings for planning the workweek. She settled on Friday mornings for bookkeeping and invoicing. These simple structures gave her a sense of flow and created much-needed breathing space.
Angela stopped making decisions on the spur of the moment and began telling clients and prospects that she would get back to them with answers about scheduling, fees and changes to projects. By taking more time to consider critical decisions, she spent less time in a panic trying to do the impossible.
Finally, Angela practiced saying no before she became overwhelmed. This became easier when she increased her rates and let go of the 20 percent of clients that caused 80 percent of her stress. By charging more and making fewer commitments, Angela was able to provide the kind of service she wanted to be known for, without fearing that her business would consume her private life.
True work-life balance is dynamic, not static. There is no one formula that works for all people at all times. Thinking of your boundaries in terms of what you want to define instead of what you want to defend will help you chart a course that is flexible, effective and sane.
