How to ... keep your boundaries

You might not know your boundaries, but you know what it feels like when they are crossed. When someone asks you to do something, saying “yes” can feel easier than “no”. To keep your boundaries, however, you need to know who you are and what is important to you. “You need to know what your goals are and what you want to achieve,” says Brian Colbert, a master trainer of neuro-linguistic programming at the Irish Institute of NLP. “You need to know what you are prepared to do and for who. You are going to want to do more for your immediate family and probably less for those beyond that,” says Colbert.

Know your tribe

The thing that is most important to our happiness and wellbeing is family, whatever form that takes, says Colbert. “You have to ask yourself ‘how far beyond that will I go’,” he says. “I may also have goals that are outward from there, like impact on the world or my community. You have to ask yourself ‘how congruent are those things with satisfying my core and how will that impact on my relationships with my partner or my children’?”

We are in this world just one time that we know of, says Colbert. “Your boundaries are the things that are going to serve you and your immediate tribe. The secondary boundary is the fulfilment boundary of ‘what do I want to do for the world’.”

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Escape your programming

If your upbringing prized a certain way of being this can make it hard to keep your boundaries. When as an adult someone demands something of you, your programming might lead you to do things like placate the person, to blame them, to downplay the incursion or to discount your feelings. These are all knee jerk reactions, says Colbert. “It’s not clever mode, it’s not even rational mode,” he says. The first thing to do is to try to recognise that you are activated and in reaction mode, he says. “Try to separate these unconscious reactions from your response.” To respond effectively you need to know what’s important to you and who matters to you, and then you have to develop what’s called a “hard no”, he says.

Treasure your time

If someone asks for your help your immediate reaction might be to placate them in case they think badly of you. “You’ve got to recognise this is not a thought out reaction. You want your reactions to be thought out,” says Colbert. Take some time to consider things if you need to before responding to them. “As soon as you hand that time away, you will never get it back.”

“We have only got 4000 weeks. Our time is limited so remember every time we give time away we are using our life force and it will never be replaced. You have got to ask the question, is that okay? Your life is so precious it makes sense to ask are you doing what you want to do, or are you doing what other people want you to do, or are you doing it for how it will appear to others.”