There’s lots of advice that we should be setting some level of personal and professional boundaries. We want to protect our time, our space, our sanity. But how do we really go about creating, setting and holding tight to boundaries? Three experts helping women shift their mindsets around personal value, money, and relationships weigh in.
Sarah Michael is a coach who focuses on overcoming uncomfortable conversations around money.
Her mission is to help women more confidently charge what they’re worth while making a difference in people’s lives. She thinks the biggest obstacle women have in truly setting boundaries is the primal instinct to feel connected to others.
“Connection equals safety,” she says, “It’s the feminine survival instinct that drives us to avoid disconnecting from other people at all costs. Asking for money, charging what you’re worth and honoring the immense value you provide are potential ‘disconnects,’ which make it easy to default to undercharging or giving your services away for free.”
Michael points out that this mentality is called the “servant’s heart” mindset. She sees it frequently among her women entrepreneur clients.
“When clients come to me without boundaries around money, it creates a ripple effect,” she says. “In an effort to make more money, you have to work harder and put in more hours. This is what causes exhaustion, adrenal fatigue and burnout.”
She advises women to release that servant’s heart mindset, which gets in the way of charging what they’re worth. Many women fear that when they charge too much, others will think of them as greedy or unhelpful. But Michael points out that they could actually be more helpful to others if they had more money to invest in their business. To make more, they need to charge more.
Hilary DeCesare is a business coach and the founder of The Relaunch Co. She encourages her clients to overcome the notion that boundaries prohibit growth.
“85% of our thoughts are automatically negative,” DeCesare says. “When an opportunity arises, we tend to think it won’t work because we lack the tools to allow us to believe that we can succeed.”
Coach Hilary DeCesare
DeCesare sees the biggest obstacle for most of her clients is a lack of self confidence. “Stable, line-in-the-sand ‘boundaries’ no longer exist,” she says. “Many have found themselves in a constant and unsolvable state of inner struggle and stress.”
She says when people start to feel self-doubt creeping in, the first thing to do is ask, what isn’t working right now? Once you identify your biggest challenge, she says the next step is to change the channel in your mind like you would change a song on the radio. This can be a powerful tool to help you start visualizing what you really want and set boundaries around it.
Kate Mangona is a certified relationship coach and host of the Medicine, Marriage and Money podcast. She sees the biggest obstacle in relationships is figuring out the most important boundary to set.
“A boundary is for our emotional safety, not to harm or punish the other person in the relationship,” she says. “I often work with recovering people-pleasers and perfectionists who have to overcome their own mental drama about what a boundary is before they can actually set one and follow it.”
She points out that each person in the relationship has different needs, and both must be accommodated. Mangona often finds herself reminding clients that fulfilling their own needs is not selfish.
“We must first learn to love ourselves and take care of our own desires before we help others or else others will feel resentment, anger, or exhaustion,” she says. “Our children see it and feel it too. What we model, eventually becomes their primary go to reactions as well.”
She worries that too many women place their well-being in the hands of others and she’d like to see more of them take the reins. They also need to meet their partners needs’ based on where they are in reality.
“You did NOT marry yourself,” she says. “If we can accept the fact our love languages may be different, we can learn to receive more love from our spouse. Once we stop trying to change what they say or how they say it, we can start loving them exactly as they are.”
