Transcript
Personal boundaries are really tied to one’s personal values, ideas and also convictions. So this means every one of us has different boundaries. They show up in all your life areas, they show up in your family life, your personal boundaries show up in your job and your friendship, everywhere. Your personal boundaries are your own special mixture: what is accepted by yourself and also what is possible for yourself. So they are connected to your personal experiences in the past. Mostly in our childhood, we gain a lot of our values from our family and also other relationships. Personal boundaries are whether good or bad, you cannot judge them because everybody’s so different and everybody has such a different mixture of boundaries. And of course, they can change throughout your life, like when you grow older your boundaries may expand or they may narrow. A personal boundary can be not to like certain stuff or that you have some ideas in your mind of how you want to be treated by other people. It’s really important to know your boundaries because otherwise you are just violated by people. So it’s good to know them and to protect them.
Knowing your boundaries also means really knowing yourself like: What is important to you? What do you want from life? What do you want from relationships? And the better you get to know yourself, the more you can feel what is working for you. And the more you step up for this, the more confident you will feel. Because basically, self-confidence means stepping up for ourselves and making sure that we get what we need. Concretely, to set your personal boundaries, it’s really important to get to know yourself. This is the first step. And then what is also really important is to connect to your body, really in a physical way, because when your boundary or one of the boundaries is actually violated by another person, you can feel it in your body. Your body is sending you signals 24/7 and it’s doing this through feelings. Every feeling is like a signal with a certain message. It’s good to connect with your anger because most of the time when we feel angry, some person crossed a border or we did it ourselves.
So if you are angry for the next time, then you can ask yourself: “Ok, what personal border did I disrespect or what did the other person do that made me react in an angry way?”. For example, a workmate was talking to you in a rude way, and your personal boundary is something like “I want to be respected at work, I don’t want to talk about private stuff at work”. But this person is constantly asking you about your private life and then you get angrier then the next step would be to go to your workmate and to talk about this because you are the one who is responsible for your boundaries. It’s not your mom, it’s not your partner, it’s not your friend. It’s you, it’s your boundaries. So you get to know them and then you make sure that they are respected. So go to your workmate, for example, go to your partner, whoever was crossing or violating your personal boundary, and then you can talk with this person in a polite way. If you don’t talk to the person, they cannot know, so the chances are very high that they might cross your boundaries again and again. And normally what we do is we don’t talk to people about our boundaries, because most of the time we don’t know it. So that’s why it’s really important to change thinking about feelings like anger or fear, to decode the message behind them and to talk about your boundaries.