Kristina:
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Respecting other people's boundaries is just as important as setting your own boundaries and the consequences of not doing either, of not setting our own boundaries and then not respecting other people's boundaries are huge. Their relationship, ending their progress, stopping their goal. Killing. Hey guys, this is Coach K, and you're listening to the Making Changes, breaking Barriers podcast, where we talk about you. This is about you, your mind, and your path. So thank you again for being here with me today before we jump into today's topic, which is gonna be all about boundaries, but we're gonna be taking a little bit of a different spin that I have in the past when I've talked about boundaries. But before we get to that today, I do wanna ask you guys a favor if you've been listening to this podcast. And you enjoy it. You're here week in and week out, or maybe even you're a new listener, but you have been enjoying listening to me and my guests as well. I have a favor to ask. Could you please go on to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, whichever you listen to, which it seems like most of you. Listen on those two platforms. Scroll down to the bottom and leave a rating and a review. So the rating, you know you're gonna give. Out of five stars, whatever you think I deserve. Hopefully five stars. If you're gonna leave that rating and then write a quick little review that could be just a couple sentences of what this podcast means to you, how you enjoy it and whatnot. I really, really appreciate that. Not only is that cool for me to see who's listening In how it's impacting you. It also really pushes those platforms to push my podcast out to more and more listeners, which allows this podcast to grow, which will eventually allow me to keep doing it. Okay. Last thing, before we just jump into today's topic, I did want to give a shout out to the New York Liberty and really just the W N B A. In general. I'm a huge N B A fan, but I'm also really actually recently in the last few years becoming. A huge W N B A fan as well, and their season is underway. I think they're in week two right now, and I've watched a few games already. It's been super fun to watch. So if you haven't yet, go and check out a W N B A game. I am actually gonna be in New York this fall, and I'm really hoping to catch a New York Liberty game, cuz that's my favorite team. So I'm really, really pumped about that. But that's where the Jersey inspiration came from. Today. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into today's topic, which is all about boundaries. But like I said, we're gonna take a little bit of a different twist on boundaries today than what I've done in the past. In the past, we've mostly talked about not only how to set boundaries, like I did a whole episode on the holidays and how to set boundaries for yourself over the holidays, but we've also talked about like how to recognize that we may even need to set boundaries in the first place because sometimes. We don't recognize this if we're not taking the time to really sit and reflect on how someone's making us feel. How we just feel after leaving a certain situation. Sometimes we don't even know that boundaries are the answer. Okay so if you want to go down one of those rabbit holes, I would highly recommend listening to those episodes. But we're gonna take a little bit of a different spin today, like I mentioned, and we're gonna be talking about the consequences of a not setting boundaries. And these consequences are big. I can tell you that for certain. Boundaries are so important when it comes to making progress in our lives, and I think that's why this is a topic that keeps coming up for me and why I keep wanting to talk about it in this podcast because no matter what goals you're trying to achieve or no matter what, Progress in your life you're trying to make, or what changes in your life you're trying to make, whether that's in your career or with your health and fitness or within your family, or just personal goals, whatever it is, the support that we have around us and how we interact with. The other people around us, the relationships that we have, whether that be friends, family, our significant others, our kids, our, boss, our coworkers, no matter who it is, those relationships have a huge impact on us. And I don't think you even need to hear me say that to believe it. I think we all know that the people that we surround ourselves with have a huge impact on us. So having these boundaries in place can really make or break our progress. They can really make or break our ability to our achieve our goals. Okay. So that's why this is so important to me because we talk about that's what this podcast is all about, right? This podcast is all about making progress, making changes, doing with with our life what we want to. That's why I interview people who have done really cool things. They've started their own businesses or. They've achieved a big milestone in their fitness journeys or something along those lines. That's what this is all about. And so the support that we have is so crucial in having those boundaries in place makes the, that support exactly what we need to reach our goals. I'll be honest as a coach, and I've been a coach for, hmm, let's see, I always say 10 plus years, but it, yeah, it's, it's more than 10 years at this point. I, I know my strengths and weaknesses, right? I have some strengths as a coach, and I also have some weaknesses as a coach, and I would say that a weakness of mind that I've. Recognize and I'm, I'm working on, but I think just recognizing it in the first place is important is that sometimes it's really hard for me to just give the honest truth, right? Like sometimes someone just needs to hear the brutal truth. Not only just the honest truth, but the brutal truth. Sometimes someone needs to hear that and I have found that difficult at times to have that tough conversation. But I bring that up because I feel like that is what this episode is. This episode is the brutal truth. This episode is like, Hey, you can take my advice or not, but if you don't recognize your need for boundaries, if you don't set boundaries in your life when you need them, and also if you don't respect other people's boundaries, I. Let me just be brutally honest with you about what is going to happen, and I hope this isn't a spoiler alert too much, but what is gonna happen is not gonna be fun. It's not gonna be the outcome that we want if we don't do those things for anyone really involved in the situation. You. And the other people. Okay. Boundaries are in place to help us feel safe there. There really maybe isn't anything better than having a close relationship with someone and feeling safe within that relationship. Feeling safe when you are physically in the same room or in the same space with that person. Feeling safe emotionally and mentally and physically. Okay. When I think about boundaries, that's really the most important thing it allows you to have that safe feeling so that you can move forward in that relationship in a productive way, in a way that's gonna be really beneficial for both people involved or, or the multiple people involved. Okay, and last thing before we jump into what truly happens when we don't. Set boundaries, and I just wanna point this out because I think it's important. A lot of the times we think about boundaries in kind of only one singular way. All right? For example, physical boundaries. This is one that we're all familiar with. We're all very. Aware of the feeling when, for example, someone gets too close to us. Maybe we're in like a public space and someone is too close to us, or even you're like having a conversation with someone and that other person is like uncomfortably close to you while they're talking. We all know that kind of eerie feeling we get. When this is the case, this is someone not respecting or, or even not knowing our physical boundary. So that would be one kind of boundary, but there's more. All right, so just to give you a few other examples, there's sexual boundaries and this could include like limiting, inappropriate conversations, limiting sexually charged jokes and other behaviors that we're not willing to put up with. So we all have our own sexual boundaries, and these are most likely, in some ways, at least, gonna look different for a lot of different people. There's also intellectual and emotional boundaries, so having our opinions and feelings respected by others, even if they disagree with us. We probably all know the feeling of having a conversation. Maybe for example, it's a political conversation with someone and things start to turn south when one person in that conversation starts to not respect the other person's, opinion, I guess, or feelings. Even if they disagree with them. Okay, so there's these intellectual and emotional boundaries. There's also material boundaries. So, This is how others use our possessions, so we can all think back to, you know, if you had siblings growing up, the boundaries we had to draw with our siblings like, Hey, you cannot borrow my clothes unless you ask. And then I get to decide if you borrow my clothes, you don't get to just go into my closet and grab something. That would be an example of a material boundary. These things obviously also go into our adulthood. Specifically with our significant other as well, like what things do we share? What things do we not Actually, this is funny that I'm talking about this because, uh, just recently I feel like the conversation of do you share a toothbrush or not? Has gotten brought up in a few conversation with friends cora and I do not share toothbrushes, but if for some reason we go on a trip or something like that, and one of us were to forget a toothbrush and we're, it's the evening we're in for the night and we're about to brush our teeth, like maybe we'll let the other person use our toothbrush for one night and then, you know, we're going to the store to get another toothbrush. But you know, again, that would be another example of a material boundary. And then lastly, time boundaries. Ensuring our time is valued. So this comes into play a lot of the time with work, right? We talk about work life balance a lot, and how do we maintain those boundaries with our work life? How are we productive enough during our regular scheduled work hours so that we can set that boundary and shut off, Hey, we've got our work done, we can shut off and enjoy that balance of our non-work time. Okay? So keep that in mind there when I'm talking about. What happens when we don't set boundaries, or even when I'm talking about what happens when we don't respect other people's boundaries. I'm not just talking about emotional boundaries or I'm not just talking about physical boundaries. There's a lot of different kinds of boundaries that come into play here. And I think one more important thing to point out is that some boundaries, out of all those different kind of boundaries I was just talking about, are coded into our culture. They're kind of just known and assuming someone follows. General cultural norms, they're gonna be following these boundaries. It's not something that necessarily like needs to be said, and I'll give an example of this in a second. Whereas there's other boundaries that are more individual and actually do need to be stated so that the people around us understand, hey, this is the case. Okay. So, um, I'll, I'll just give an example. Let's say you walk into a restaurant and you see that at the front of the restaurant, there's like a little stand with a person standing behind it. Okay. Cultural norm. We all understand that in this situation, we don't just get to walk into the restaurant and pick whatever table that we want, right? If someone were to all of a sudden go and do that, it would come across as either Them not understanding what was going on or maybe even seen as rude and entitled. Entitled, right. We understand that this means, hey, we gotta wait and we have to be seated by this person working at the restaurant as another example, maybe a norm that isn't the same for every person. I'm gonna take you back to my. Teenage years, specifically high school and even into my college years as well. I can't tell you why. I don't know the exact, I don't know, emotional. I don't even wanna say trauma cuz it wasn't trauma, but I don't know the emotional feelings that caused this. But for so long I felt really uncomfortable giving people hugs. I, like I said, I really actually don't know why I don't feel that way at all. So for anyone who is like truly in my life right now, don't be weird. The next time we give each other a hug. I actually really enjoy hugs now, but for some reason, when I was a teenager, this was a very uncomfortable thing I was, Just kind of like an uncomfortable, awkward teenager to start. So I'm sure that's where that stems from. But, I really didn't wanna give people hugs. I would've rather if I was meeting someone or, you know, seeing someone for the first time, like giving them a handshake, right? So I had to, I actually started to learn that, I would say something I, I don't remember what I would say, but I would state my boundary. Okay. Some people wouldn't necessarily respect it, and that's a whole nother story. But I would state my boundary. And actually a funny story with that. I was on a job interview right out of grad school, so I was a little bit older at this point. Maybe moving on a bit from needing this boundary, was feeling a little bit more comfortable, giving hugs, but not totally comfortable. And I want went on a job interview with actually Pamela, who's now one of my really great friends, but she was the head coach of the Lewis and Clark women's basketball team at. The time, and I was interviewing for the assistant coaching job at Lewis and Clark, which I did end up getting. But on this interview we were actually meeting up in a totally different state. Um, I won't go into that, but we met up at a Starbucks. The interview went great. We chatted for quite a long time. I felt like it went really well. I, I thought that she was feeling like it went really well. We walk outside and I don't really like know what came over me because in any other situation I would've given a handshake there, especially because it was like the first time we were meeting it was a professional setting. I. But something came over me and I went in for a hug as she was going in for a handshake, and it ended up just being this like terribly awkward situation that we laughed about for years later. But the funny thing was, was that she's not really a hugger and I'm not really, or I wasn't really a hugger and yet somehow I wanted to like, Force that situation. Again, not sure where that came from, but again, there are some boundaries that are coded into our culture and there are others that, as an individual, we need to state and let other people know. Okay, so with that being said, I now really want to jump into what happens when we don't set boundaries. Okay. Hey, this is the brutal truth. If you don't set the your boundaries, this is the brutal truth on what's gonna happen. All right. Number one, we get frustrated and we get resentful. We start feeling like, Hey, this relationship isn't fair. This relationship feels one-sided. I'm doing all of these things and running all of these errands and doing all of these favors for this person. And it's not being reciprocated. This isn't fair. This isn't what I deserve, and we feel like we're not getting the thanks that we earned. Okay? We start to feel resentful for the other person's needs. So like for example, if all of a sudden the other person, Has some sort of need. They ask you of a favor or they're feeling emotionally down and they're kind of asking you to be there for them and, and support them. We start feeling resentful of this and like, you know, well, they're not doing that for me. Then like, why should I be doing it for them? Okay. We get frustrated and we get resentful and all of those things I know that you know, are not gonna be healthy for a relationship okay. Number two, what happens when we don't set our boundaries? We get taken advantage of, when we don't set our boundaries, we get taken advantage of. The weird thing about this one is that sometimes the other person might not even really know that they're taking advantage because we're not setting our boundaries. Now, there might be some situations where the other person does know that they're taking advantage of you, but a lot of the times, I'm gonna be honest, If we are not setting our boundaries, we may feel like we're getting taken advantage of and the other person might not even really know that. They might not understand that here we're thinking that the other person is like helping us out, yet they think they're being taken advantage of. Like, Ugh, this is not a good situation. Let's say for example, you ask a friend to borrow their car, okay? And there's two stories. I'm not saying this has to be the case, but this could be the case. If these boundaries aren't set, there could be two stories happening here, as the person who is asking to borrow the car, right? You believe that this is a relationship where you can ask for favors, all right? And maybe it is. So you ask for that favor. Hey, can I borrow your car? And they say, yes. Okay, so you think this is great? Like you ask for a favor, they feel comfortable letting you borrow their car, and you borrow their car. All right, all feels good on one side. Now on the other side, that person has a material. Boundary of not really wanting other people to borrow their car yet you didn't know that. They never said it. So now they say yes, they let you borrow their car, and guess what? That's where that resentfulness comes in. And that's where that feeling of like, Hey, I'm getting taken advantage of. Doesn't this person understand that like borrowing someone else's car is. not something that I like to do. Well, hey, how are they able to understand that? If you never set that boundary, there is nothing wrong in that situation to say like, Hey, I actually don't let other people borrow my car. It makes me feel very uncomfortable. Okay. Yeah, no, no worries. You know, I'm not saying that's easy to say, right? This is a friend. You probably do wanna help them out, and guess what? You can help them out in other ways. But if that is your boundary, set the boundary. All right. Say it. Number three. The third thing that happens when we don't set boundaries is this snowball effect of passive aggressiveness. This passive aggressiveness starts slow. There's just a little bit of it here and there and it just grows and it grows and it grows and a lot of times the relationship just starts to become based on passive aggressiveness. This one just makes me cringe. There's like, to me, almost nothing worse than passive aggressiveness. I think sometimes I get a little bit like laughed at in a funny way by friends, because sometimes I'll just be like, so straightforward. It comes. It almost is like funny. But I think that's just because I like cringe so much at passive aggressiveness. Passive aggressiveness is one of those things that's kind of hard to give examples of, but we all know and what it looks like. We all know what it sounds like and we all know what it feels like. But just to give a couple examples. Maybe this happens after a tough conversation or after a situation happens that doesn't really go like you want it to, and you start to sulk, you start to kind of go into your shell. You start to act grumpy or sad or uninterested When the reality is you have a lot to say. You have boundaries to set, and you're not doing that right. Soaking is a form of passive aggressiveness. Another form of passive aggressiveness is ghosting, to just stop talking to someone. Maybe this isn't a dating situation, but maybe it's in some other sort of situation as well, a friend or or whatnot, to just stop talking to someone instead of, especially when they continue to reach out instead of having a hard conversation or setting your boundary, whatever that boundary may need to be set. Is a form of passive aggressiveness. Another form is putting off doing things for others as a way of punishment. Hey, you had committed to watching this person's dog for them for a week, and now something all you know happens and you're not setting your boundaries about it. And you're all of a sudden angry or annoyed, and you bail on that obligation. You no longer maybe even make up some excuse. You forgot you had X, Y, and Z, or, Hey, I just can't do this anymore, whatever it is. But you put off doing this favor for someone that you already committed to as a form of punishment instead of setting this boundary or having this hard conversation. And lastly, another form of passive aggressiveness is using sarcasm instead of engaging in productive conversation. Again, I won't like go into specific examples. I think we can all picture what that looks like, but all of a sudden the conversation just turns to tons of sarcasm instead of, you know, Actually being productive and getting down to like what the issue is, or again, setting these boundaries. Okay, so passive aggressiveness. This is what happens in a relationship when we don't set our boundaries. Number four. The fourth thing that happens, guys, when we don't set our boundaries is we start to have very little energy to no energy and no time or joy for ourselves. How terrible does that sound? We have no energy, no time, and no joy for ourself. I can't say this loud enough, and this is me trying to be really brutally honest. Again, it is not possible to pour from an empty cup. I have seen the most giving people turn cold. I've seen it. I've seen it in my life. Okay. These people at one point may have had a ton of energy, a ton of time, a ton of joy, not only for themselves, but actually for other people as well, because they were giving it to themselves. They actually also had it for other people. But then over time, as that balance starts to shift and they start to give all of their energy and all of their time and all of their joy to other people and allowing other people to control it versus giving it to themselves as much as they need so they can. Do it for other people after they do this over, over long periods of time. What happens here is this balance turns to basically just having no energy, time, or joy, period. Okay. It is so important that we take care of ourselves even before we take care of others. I say this to my clients a lot. If we're not taking care of ourselves, if we're not setting our boundaries so we can make sure that our health, our mental health, our physical health, all these things are in a good place. How are we supposed to help others? We might be able to do it and we might be able to do it for just like a short period of time, but at some point that energy is gonna be drained. So this is something that happens when we don't set boundaries. And the last one I'm gonna get into today, the last thing that happens when we don't set boundaries is the people around us. And this one is huge. Okay, and you, you maybe have an example of this in your life, but the people around us actually become less responsible people when we do not set our boundaries and when we do not let other people sometimes fight their own battles or when we do not let other people sometimes figure out their own problems, or when we do not let other people do things for themselves at times. We actually create less responsible people around us. And like, it's not fun to have people around us who are not responsible, sometimes it is possible that we love too much, okay? And we do this by tolerating things that should not be tolerated. There are some things that should be tolerated, and believe me, s supporting other people is so important. So in no way, shape, or form am I saying like, Hey, when someone needs a helping hand, there are plenty of times where like we can lend that helping hand and we can like be that person for, for other people. But there's a line, and I'm not saying this line is easy to know, especially when it comes to family. This line can be like very hard to know where it is, right. But there is a line and there is always a line. And when we start to tolerate things that should not be tolerated, when we do not set our limits, and when we sometimes view other people as more deserving of forgiveness or even more deserving of help, then they should be, we create less responsible people around us. Okay? So this is a huge consequence of not setting boundaries. And again, A lot of times this can happen with the people who are closest to us because it can feel like these people are all deserving and these people, like we need to tolerate everything that happens with these people. So what happens when we don't set boundaries? God, hopefully, you know, I'm, I'm hoping I'm being convincing here and I'm hoping you wanna take my advice on this to actually set your boundaries and, and take the time to figure out what boundaries that need to be set, because it's, nothing is good, nothing is good. When we don't set our boundaries, okay, we get frustrated and we get resentful, we get taken advantage of, Ugh, right? There's all this passive aggressiveness that happens. We start to lose our energy. We start to lose our time and our joy. And lastly, we start to be surrounded with people who are like not responsible. Ugh, that does not sound fun. Okay? So. Again, hopefully that is convincing enough to say, okay, like what boundaries do I need to set in my life with the people I have around me? Last thing I want to touch on before I let you guys go from this episode, and I'm gonna kind of keep this quick, I think this could be a whole episode in and of itself, so maybe one day I'll do that, but I'll keep it quick for today is what happens when we don't respect other people's boundaries. When we step on other people's boundaries, think about a boundary as being like some sort of fence. It doesn't necessarily need to be a concrete fence. Maybe it's a fence that you can see through, we can visualize all these different kind of fences as different kinds of boundaries that are being set around us, but when we just go ahead and step on those boundaries and we don't respect them, just like when we don't set our own boundaries, the consequences of this are huge. A lot of the times it is relationship ending, right? Or relationship killing. Meaning even if it doesn't end, the relationship is not gonna be in a good place. So just to be like really crystal clear on this though, like what happens when we don't respect other people's boundaries, number one, which I. I mentioned this at the beginning, is we make them feel unsafe. And like I said at the beginning, I think that's one of the most important things of setting boundaries, is setting boundaries with other people, assuming they get respected, allows us to feel safe, that it allows us to have this safe relationship with other people, which is an amazing feeling. If you have a relationship with someone that you feel safe in, you know what I'm talking about. You know that that feels so great, but when we. Don't respect other people's boundaries. We make them feel unsafe. And guess what? When someone doesn't feel safe in a relationship, guess what happens? All of a sudden that person gets further and further away from being their authentic self. Don't we wanna see people around us just be who they are? And I say that kind of with a question mark, because I know that there's actually people in this world with a lot that's going on right now. Not to get too political because I don't even feel like these should be political issues, but there are a lot of people in this world who actually don't want other people to be their authentic self, which, ugh, I hate that. Like makes me wanna be sick. But I would assume most people who are listening to this podcast, you would say like, yeah, I want the people around me to be their authentic selves. I want these people to be who they are. Whether that's super goofy, whether that's super smart, whether that's super. Determined, whatever it is. Like I want them just to be who they are, but if we're making someone feel unsafe in our relationship, they are not gonna do that. They're gonna start to either be who they think you want them to be, right, or they're gonna be who they think they need to be to not cause any conflict within that relationship, et cetera. Right? They're gonna be everything. Basically, except for themselves, if they feel unsafe, or maybe they're even gonna be more explosive because they feel unsafe, which again, that is not a fun scenario. When we don't respect other people's boundaries, the quality of of the relationship will inevitably decline. Okay? If we don't honor other people's boundaries, we don't give them much reason to respect ours either, right? So all of a sudden, there's like one side of the equation that's not being respected. We're not respecting someone else's boundaries. Well then most likely what's gonna happen is that person's gonna stop respecting your boundaries as well. And again, just a recipe for disaster. And lastly, probably what's gonna happen is if we stop respecting someone else's boundaries, they're gonna stop coming around. And maybe this doesn't happen for years because I think that this is a concept that is hard. To grasp, hard to come around with that if like someone doesn't respect our boundaries, that sometimes maybe we just need to stop coming around. It's a hard thing to come to terms with, but I do find that a lot of the times it, it, it will happen. It will happen at some point. And so if you just continue to not respect someone, boundaries, they're gonna stop coming around and maybe this was a relationship you really want and they're not gonna be there anymore. Okay. Respecting other people's boundaries is just as important as setting your own boundaries and the consequences of not doing either, of not setting our own boundaries and then not respecting other people's boundaries are huge. Their relationship, ending their progress, stopping their goal. Killing. Okay. I hope I convinced you of that today. If not, like, let's have a conversation about it. Seriously, I'm, I'm, I'm not joking about that. Reach out to me. I would love to talk more about this. I'm finding more and more of that boundaries is something that I'm super passionate about, and I think because I just see the importance of it, I see how much it can have an impact on our livelihood. Literally everything that we're doing on a day-to-day basis. So that's what I'm gonna leave you guys with today. But like always, I have one more thing to say and that is that changing your path will not be easy. It will be challenging. And setting your boundaries is one part of that equation. And like I said, many times already, it is not easy to do. Okay? It is gonna be challenging, but that is part of changing your path. I will say it over and over again how challenging this will be, but I promise you this, it will be worth it. So I ask you, do a self-check today. Are you on your path of your mountain? And if not, what path are you on?
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Respecting other people's boundaries is just as important as setting your own boundaries and the consequences of not doing either, of not setting our own boundaries and then not respecting other people's boundaries are huge. Their relationship, ending their progress, stopping their goal. Killing. Hey guys, this is Coach K, and you're listening to the Making Changes, breaking Barriers podcast, where we talk about you. This is about you, your mind, and your path. So thank you again for being here with me today before we jump into today's topic, which is gonna be all about boundaries, but we're gonna be taking a little bit of a different spin that I have in the past when I've talked about boundaries. But before we get to that today, I do wanna ask you guys a favor if you've been listening to this podcast. And you enjoy it. You're here week in and week out, or maybe even you're a new listener, but you have been enjoying listening to me and my guests as well. I have a favor to ask. Could you please go on to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, whichever you listen to, which it seems like most of you. Listen on those two platforms. Scroll down to the bottom and leave a rating and a review. So the rating, you know you're gonna give. Out of five stars, whatever you think I deserve. Hopefully five stars. If you're gonna leave that rating and then write a quick little review that could be just a couple sentences of what this podcast means to you, how you enjoy it and whatnot. I really, really appreciate that. Not only is that cool for me to see who's listening In how it's impacting you. It also really pushes those platforms to push my podcast out to more and more listeners, which allows this podcast to grow, which will eventually allow me to keep doing it. Okay. Last thing, before we just jump into today's topic, I did want to give a shout out to the New York Liberty and really just the W N B A. In general. I'm a huge N B A fan, but I'm also really actually recently in the last few years becoming. A huge W N B A fan as well, and their season is underway. I think they're in week two right now, and I've watched a few games already. It's been super fun to watch. So if you haven't yet, go and check out a W N B A game. I am actually gonna be in New York this fall, and I'm really hoping to catch a New York Liberty game, cuz that's my favorite team. So I'm really, really pumped about that. But that's where the Jersey inspiration came from. Today. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into today's topic, which is all about boundaries. But like I said, we're gonna take a little bit of a different twist on boundaries today than what I've done in the past. In the past, we've mostly talked about not only how to set boundaries, like I did a whole episode on the holidays and how to set boundaries for yourself over the holidays, but we've also talked about like how to recognize that we may even need to set boundaries in the first place because sometimes. We don't recognize this if we're not taking the time to really sit and reflect on how someone's making us feel. How we just feel after leaving a certain situation. Sometimes we don't even know that boundaries are the answer. Okay so if you want to go down one of those rabbit holes, I would highly recommend listening to those episodes. But we're gonna take a little bit of a different spin today, like I mentioned, and we're gonna be talking about the consequences of a not setting boundaries. And these consequences are big. I can tell you that for certain. Boundaries are so important when it comes to making progress in our lives, and I think that's why this is a topic that keeps coming up for me and why I keep wanting to talk about it in this podcast because no matter what goals you're trying to achieve or no matter what, Progress in your life you're trying to make, or what changes in your life you're trying to make, whether that's in your career or with your health and fitness or within your family, or just personal goals, whatever it is, the support that we have around us and how we interact with. The other people around us, the relationships that we have, whether that be friends, family, our significant others, our kids, our, boss, our coworkers, no matter who it is, those relationships have a huge impact on us. And I don't think you even need to hear me say that to believe it. I think we all know that the people that we surround ourselves with have a huge impact on us. So having these boundaries in place can really make or break our progress. They can really make or break our ability to our achieve our goals. Okay. So that's why this is so important to me because we talk about that's what this podcast is all about, right? This podcast is all about making progress, making changes, doing with with our life what we want to. That's why I interview people who have done really cool things. They've started their own businesses or. They've achieved a big milestone in their fitness journeys or something along those lines. That's what this is all about. And so the support that we have is so crucial in having those boundaries in place makes the, that support exactly what we need to reach our goals. I'll be honest as a coach, and I've been a coach for, hmm, let's see, I always say 10 plus years, but it, yeah, it's, it's more than 10 years at this point. I, I know my strengths and weaknesses, right? I have some strengths as a coach, and I also have some weaknesses as a coach, and I would say that a weakness of mind that I've. Recognize and I'm, I'm working on, but I think just recognizing it in the first place is important is that sometimes it's really hard for me to just give the honest truth, right? Like sometimes someone just needs to hear the brutal truth. Not only just the honest truth, but the brutal truth. Sometimes someone needs to hear that and I have found that difficult at times to have that tough conversation. But I bring that up because I feel like that is what this episode is. This episode is the brutal truth. This episode is like, Hey, you can take my advice or not, but if you don't recognize your need for boundaries, if you don't set boundaries in your life when you need them, and also if you don't respect other people's boundaries, I. Let me just be brutally honest with you about what is going to happen, and I hope this isn't a spoiler alert too much, but what is gonna happen is not gonna be fun. It's not gonna be the outcome that we want if we don't do those things for anyone really involved in the situation. You. And the other people. Okay. Boundaries are in place to help us feel safe there. There really maybe isn't anything better than having a close relationship with someone and feeling safe within that relationship. Feeling safe when you are physically in the same room or in the same space with that person. Feeling safe emotionally and mentally and physically. Okay. When I think about boundaries, that's really the most important thing it allows you to have that safe feeling so that you can move forward in that relationship in a productive way, in a way that's gonna be really beneficial for both people involved or, or the multiple people involved. Okay, and last thing before we jump into what truly happens when we don't. Set boundaries, and I just wanna point this out because I think it's important. A lot of the times we think about boundaries in kind of only one singular way. All right? For example, physical boundaries. This is one that we're all familiar with. We're all very. Aware of the feeling when, for example, someone gets too close to us. Maybe we're in like a public space and someone is too close to us, or even you're like having a conversation with someone and that other person is like uncomfortably close to you while they're talking. We all know that kind of eerie feeling we get. When this is the case, this is someone not respecting or, or even not knowing our physical boundary. So that would be one kind of boundary, but there's more. All right, so just to give you a few other examples, there's sexual boundaries and this could include like limiting, inappropriate conversations, limiting sexually charged jokes and other behaviors that we're not willing to put up with. So we all have our own sexual boundaries, and these are most likely, in some ways, at least, gonna look different for a lot of different people. There's also intellectual and emotional boundaries, so having our opinions and feelings respected by others, even if they disagree with us. We probably all know the feeling of having a conversation. Maybe for example, it's a political conversation with someone and things start to turn south when one person in that conversation starts to not respect the other person's, opinion, I guess, or feelings. Even if they disagree with them. Okay, so there's these intellectual and emotional boundaries. There's also material boundaries. So, This is how others use our possessions, so we can all think back to, you know, if you had siblings growing up, the boundaries we had to draw with our siblings like, Hey, you cannot borrow my clothes unless you ask. And then I get to decide if you borrow my clothes, you don't get to just go into my closet and grab something. That would be an example of a material boundary. These things obviously also go into our adulthood. Specifically with our significant other as well, like what things do we share? What things do we not Actually, this is funny that I'm talking about this because, uh, just recently I feel like the conversation of do you share a toothbrush or not? Has gotten brought up in a few conversation with friends cora and I do not share toothbrushes, but if for some reason we go on a trip or something like that, and one of us were to forget a toothbrush and we're, it's the evening we're in for the night and we're about to brush our teeth, like maybe we'll let the other person use our toothbrush for one night and then, you know, we're going to the store to get another toothbrush. But you know, again, that would be another example of a material boundary. And then lastly, time boundaries. Ensuring our time is valued. So this comes into play a lot of the time with work, right? We talk about work life balance a lot, and how do we maintain those boundaries with our work life? How are we productive enough during our regular scheduled work hours so that we can set that boundary and shut off, Hey, we've got our work done, we can shut off and enjoy that balance of our non-work time. Okay? So keep that in mind there when I'm talking about. What happens when we don't set boundaries, or even when I'm talking about what happens when we don't respect other people's boundaries. I'm not just talking about emotional boundaries or I'm not just talking about physical boundaries. There's a lot of different kinds of boundaries that come into play here. And I think one more important thing to point out is that some boundaries, out of all those different kind of boundaries I was just talking about, are coded into our culture. They're kind of just known and assuming someone follows. General cultural norms, they're gonna be following these boundaries. It's not something that necessarily like needs to be said, and I'll give an example of this in a second. Whereas there's other boundaries that are more individual and actually do need to be stated so that the people around us understand, hey, this is the case. Okay. So, um, I'll, I'll just give an example. Let's say you walk into a restaurant and you see that at the front of the restaurant, there's like a little stand with a person standing behind it. Okay. Cultural norm. We all understand that in this situation, we don't just get to walk into the restaurant and pick whatever table that we want, right? If someone were to all of a sudden go and do that, it would come across as either Them not understanding what was going on or maybe even seen as rude and entitled. Entitled, right. We understand that this means, hey, we gotta wait and we have to be seated by this person working at the restaurant as another example, maybe a norm that isn't the same for every person. I'm gonna take you back to my. Teenage years, specifically high school and even into my college years as well. I can't tell you why. I don't know the exact, I don't know, emotional. I don't even wanna say trauma cuz it wasn't trauma, but I don't know the emotional feelings that caused this. But for so long I felt really uncomfortable giving people hugs. I, like I said, I really actually don't know why I don't feel that way at all. So for anyone who is like truly in my life right now, don't be weird. The next time we give each other a hug. I actually really enjoy hugs now, but for some reason, when I was a teenager, this was a very uncomfortable thing I was, Just kind of like an uncomfortable, awkward teenager to start. So I'm sure that's where that stems from. But, I really didn't wanna give people hugs. I would've rather if I was meeting someone or, you know, seeing someone for the first time, like giving them a handshake, right? So I had to, I actually started to learn that, I would say something I, I don't remember what I would say, but I would state my boundary. Okay. Some people wouldn't necessarily respect it, and that's a whole nother story. But I would state my boundary. And actually a funny story with that. I was on a job interview right out of grad school, so I was a little bit older at this point. Maybe moving on a bit from needing this boundary, was feeling a little bit more comfortable, giving hugs, but not totally comfortable. And I want went on a job interview with actually Pamela, who's now one of my really great friends, but she was the head coach of the Lewis and Clark women's basketball team at. The time, and I was interviewing for the assistant coaching job at Lewis and Clark, which I did end up getting. But on this interview we were actually meeting up in a totally different state. Um, I won't go into that, but we met up at a Starbucks. The interview went great. We chatted for quite a long time. I felt like it went really well. I, I thought that she was feeling like it went really well. We walk outside and I don't really like know what came over me because in any other situation I would've given a handshake there, especially because it was like the first time we were meeting it was a professional setting. I. But something came over me and I went in for a hug as she was going in for a handshake, and it ended up just being this like terribly awkward situation that we laughed about for years later. But the funny thing was, was that she's not really a hugger and I'm not really, or I wasn't really a hugger and yet somehow I wanted to like, Force that situation. Again, not sure where that came from, but again, there are some boundaries that are coded into our culture and there are others that, as an individual, we need to state and let other people know. Okay, so with that being said, I now really want to jump into what happens when we don't set boundaries. Okay. Hey, this is the brutal truth. If you don't set the your boundaries, this is the brutal truth on what's gonna happen. All right. Number one, we get frustrated and we get resentful. We start feeling like, Hey, this relationship isn't fair. This relationship feels one-sided. I'm doing all of these things and running all of these errands and doing all of these favors for this person. And it's not being reciprocated. This isn't fair. This isn't what I deserve, and we feel like we're not getting the thanks that we earned. Okay? We start to feel resentful for the other person's needs. So like for example, if all of a sudden the other person, Has some sort of need. They ask you of a favor or they're feeling emotionally down and they're kind of asking you to be there for them and, and support them. We start feeling resentful of this and like, you know, well, they're not doing that for me. Then like, why should I be doing it for them? Okay. We get frustrated and we get resentful and all of those things I know that you know, are not gonna be healthy for a relationship okay. Number two, what happens when we don't set our boundaries? We get taken advantage of, when we don't set our boundaries, we get taken advantage of. The weird thing about this one is that sometimes the other person might not even really know that they're taking advantage because we're not setting our boundaries. Now, there might be some situations where the other person does know that they're taking advantage of you, but a lot of the times, I'm gonna be honest, If we are not setting our boundaries, we may feel like we're getting taken advantage of and the other person might not even really know that. They might not understand that here we're thinking that the other person is like helping us out, yet they think they're being taken advantage of. Like, Ugh, this is not a good situation. Let's say for example, you ask a friend to borrow their car, okay? And there's two stories. I'm not saying this has to be the case, but this could be the case. If these boundaries aren't set, there could be two stories happening here, as the person who is asking to borrow the car, right? You believe that this is a relationship where you can ask for favors, all right? And maybe it is. So you ask for that favor. Hey, can I borrow your car? And they say, yes. Okay, so you think this is great? Like you ask for a favor, they feel comfortable letting you borrow their car, and you borrow their car. All right, all feels good on one side. Now on the other side, that person has a material. Boundary of not really wanting other people to borrow their car yet you didn't know that. They never said it. So now they say yes, they let you borrow their car, and guess what? That's where that resentfulness comes in. And that's where that feeling of like, Hey, I'm getting taken advantage of. Doesn't this person understand that like borrowing someone else's car is. not something that I like to do. Well, hey, how are they able to understand that? If you never set that boundary, there is nothing wrong in that situation to say like, Hey, I actually don't let other people borrow my car. It makes me feel very uncomfortable. Okay. Yeah, no, no worries. You know, I'm not saying that's easy to say, right? This is a friend. You probably do wanna help them out, and guess what? You can help them out in other ways. But if that is your boundary, set the boundary. All right. Say it. Number three. The third thing that happens when we don't set boundaries is this snowball effect of passive aggressiveness. This passive aggressiveness starts slow. There's just a little bit of it here and there and it just grows and it grows and it grows and a lot of times the relationship just starts to become based on passive aggressiveness. This one just makes me cringe. There's like, to me, almost nothing worse than passive aggressiveness. I think sometimes I get a little bit like laughed at in a funny way by friends, because sometimes I'll just be like, so straightforward. It comes. It almost is like funny. But I think that's just because I like cringe so much at passive aggressiveness. Passive aggressiveness is one of those things that's kind of hard to give examples of, but we all know and what it looks like. We all know what it sounds like and we all know what it feels like. But just to give a couple examples. Maybe this happens after a tough conversation or after a situation happens that doesn't really go like you want it to, and you start to sulk, you start to kind of go into your shell. You start to act grumpy or sad or uninterested When the reality is you have a lot to say. You have boundaries to set, and you're not doing that right. Soaking is a form of passive aggressiveness. Another form of passive aggressiveness is ghosting, to just stop talking to someone. Maybe this isn't a dating situation, but maybe it's in some other sort of situation as well, a friend or or whatnot, to just stop talking to someone instead of, especially when they continue to reach out instead of having a hard conversation or setting your boundary, whatever that boundary may need to be set. Is a form of passive aggressiveness. Another form is putting off doing things for others as a way of punishment. Hey, you had committed to watching this person's dog for them for a week, and now something all you know happens and you're not setting your boundaries about it. And you're all of a sudden angry or annoyed, and you bail on that obligation. You no longer maybe even make up some excuse. You forgot you had X, Y, and Z, or, Hey, I just can't do this anymore, whatever it is. But you put off doing this favor for someone that you already committed to as a form of punishment instead of setting this boundary or having this hard conversation. And lastly, another form of passive aggressiveness is using sarcasm instead of engaging in productive conversation. Again, I won't like go into specific examples. I think we can all picture what that looks like, but all of a sudden the conversation just turns to tons of sarcasm instead of, you know, Actually being productive and getting down to like what the issue is, or again, setting these boundaries. Okay, so passive aggressiveness. This is what happens in a relationship when we don't set our boundaries. Number four. The fourth thing that happens, guys, when we don't set our boundaries is we start to have very little energy to no energy and no time or joy for ourselves. How terrible does that sound? We have no energy, no time, and no joy for ourself. I can't say this loud enough, and this is me trying to be really brutally honest. Again, it is not possible to pour from an empty cup. I have seen the most giving people turn cold. I've seen it. I've seen it in my life. Okay. These people at one point may have had a ton of energy, a ton of time, a ton of joy, not only for themselves, but actually for other people as well, because they were giving it to themselves. They actually also had it for other people. But then over time, as that balance starts to shift and they start to give all of their energy and all of their time and all of their joy to other people and allowing other people to control it versus giving it to themselves as much as they need so they can. Do it for other people after they do this over, over long periods of time. What happens here is this balance turns to basically just having no energy, time, or joy, period. Okay. It is so important that we take care of ourselves even before we take care of others. I say this to my clients a lot. If we're not taking care of ourselves, if we're not setting our boundaries so we can make sure that our health, our mental health, our physical health, all these things are in a good place. How are we supposed to help others? We might be able to do it and we might be able to do it for just like a short period of time, but at some point that energy is gonna be drained. So this is something that happens when we don't set boundaries. And the last one I'm gonna get into today, the last thing that happens when we don't set boundaries is the people around us. And this one is huge. Okay, and you, you maybe have an example of this in your life, but the people around us actually become less responsible people when we do not set our boundaries and when we do not let other people sometimes fight their own battles or when we do not let other people sometimes figure out their own problems, or when we do not let other people do things for themselves at times. We actually create less responsible people around us. And like, it's not fun to have people around us who are not responsible, sometimes it is possible that we love too much, okay? And we do this by tolerating things that should not be tolerated. There are some things that should be tolerated, and believe me, s supporting other people is so important. So in no way, shape, or form am I saying like, Hey, when someone needs a helping hand, there are plenty of times where like we can lend that helping hand and we can like be that person for, for other people. But there's a line, and I'm not saying this line is easy to know, especially when it comes to family. This line can be like very hard to know where it is, right. But there is a line and there is always a line. And when we start to tolerate things that should not be tolerated, when we do not set our limits, and when we sometimes view other people as more deserving of forgiveness or even more deserving of help, then they should be, we create less responsible people around us. Okay? So this is a huge consequence of not setting boundaries. And again, A lot of times this can happen with the people who are closest to us because it can feel like these people are all deserving and these people, like we need to tolerate everything that happens with these people. So what happens when we don't set boundaries? God, hopefully, you know, I'm, I'm hoping I'm being convincing here and I'm hoping you wanna take my advice on this to actually set your boundaries and, and take the time to figure out what boundaries that need to be set, because it's, nothing is good, nothing is good. When we don't set our boundaries, okay, we get frustrated and we get resentful, we get taken advantage of, Ugh, right? There's all this passive aggressiveness that happens. We start to lose our energy. We start to lose our time and our joy. And lastly, we start to be surrounded with people who are like not responsible. Ugh, that does not sound fun. Okay? So. Again, hopefully that is convincing enough to say, okay, like what boundaries do I need to set in my life with the people I have around me? Last thing I want to touch on before I let you guys go from this episode, and I'm gonna kind of keep this quick, I think this could be a whole episode in and of itself, so maybe one day I'll do that, but I'll keep it quick for today is what happens when we don't respect other people's boundaries. When we step on other people's boundaries, think about a boundary as being like some sort of fence. It doesn't necessarily need to be a concrete fence. Maybe it's a fence that you can see through, we can visualize all these different kind of fences as different kinds of boundaries that are being set around us, but when we just go ahead and step on those boundaries and we don't respect them, just like when we don't set our own boundaries, the consequences of this are huge. A lot of the times it is relationship ending, right? Or relationship killing. Meaning even if it doesn't end, the relationship is not gonna be in a good place. So just to be like really crystal clear on this though, like what happens when we don't respect other people's boundaries, number one, which I. I mentioned this at the beginning, is we make them feel unsafe. And like I said at the beginning, I think that's one of the most important things of setting boundaries, is setting boundaries with other people, assuming they get respected, allows us to feel safe, that it allows us to have this safe relationship with other people, which is an amazing feeling. If you have a relationship with someone that you feel safe in, you know what I'm talking about. You know that that feels so great, but when we. Don't respect other people's boundaries. We make them feel unsafe. And guess what? When someone doesn't feel safe in a relationship, guess what happens? All of a sudden that person gets further and further away from being their authentic self. Don't we wanna see people around us just be who they are? And I say that kind of with a question mark, because I know that there's actually people in this world with a lot that's going on right now. Not to get too political because I don't even feel like these should be political issues, but there are a lot of people in this world who actually don't want other people to be their authentic self, which, ugh, I hate that. Like makes me wanna be sick. But I would assume most people who are listening to this podcast, you would say like, yeah, I want the people around me to be their authentic selves. I want these people to be who they are. Whether that's super goofy, whether that's super smart, whether that's super. Determined, whatever it is. Like I want them just to be who they are, but if we're making someone feel unsafe in our relationship, they are not gonna do that. They're gonna start to either be who they think you want them to be, right, or they're gonna be who they think they need to be to not cause any conflict within that relationship, et cetera. Right? They're gonna be everything. Basically, except for themselves, if they feel unsafe, or maybe they're even gonna be more explosive because they feel unsafe, which again, that is not a fun scenario. When we don't respect other people's boundaries, the quality of of the relationship will inevitably decline. Okay? If we don't honor other people's boundaries, we don't give them much reason to respect ours either, right? So all of a sudden, there's like one side of the equation that's not being respected. We're not respecting someone else's boundaries. Well then most likely what's gonna happen is that person's gonna stop respecting your boundaries as well. And again, just a recipe for disaster. And lastly, probably what's gonna happen is if we stop respecting someone else's boundaries, they're gonna stop coming around. And maybe this doesn't happen for years because I think that this is a concept that is hard. To grasp, hard to come around with that if like someone doesn't respect our boundaries, that sometimes maybe we just need to stop coming around. It's a hard thing to come to terms with, but I do find that a lot of the times it, it, it will happen. It will happen at some point. And so if you just continue to not respect someone, boundaries, they're gonna stop coming around and maybe this was a relationship you really want and they're not gonna be there anymore. Okay. Respecting other people's boundaries is just as important as setting your own boundaries and the consequences of not doing either, of not setting our own boundaries and then not respecting other people's boundaries are huge. Their relationship, ending their progress, stopping their goal. Killing. Okay. I hope I convinced you of that today. If not, like, let's have a conversation about it. Seriously, I'm, I'm, I'm not joking about that. Reach out to me. I would love to talk more about this. I'm finding more and more of that boundaries is something that I'm super passionate about, and I think because I just see the importance of it, I see how much it can have an impact on our livelihood. Literally everything that we're doing on a day-to-day basis. So that's what I'm gonna leave you guys with today. But like always, I have one more thing to say and that is that changing your path will not be easy. It will be challenging. And setting your boundaries is one part of that equation. And like I said, many times already, it is not easy to do. Okay? It is gonna be challenging, but that is part of changing your path. I will say it over and over again how challenging this will be, but I promise you this, it will be worth it. So I ask you, do a self-check today. Are you on your path of your mountain? And if not, what path are you on?
