Good Life Project - Nedra Glover Tawwab | Better Boundaries, Better Life [Best of]

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

We want to hear from YOU! Take our survey.These last few years have tested our boundaries on nearly every level. Work, friendship, family, community, geography, politics, religion, social issues, love, and well-being. It’s like we’re being asked to draw lines, all day, every day. Question is, how? How do you create and uphold boundaries that are clear, healthy, and constructive, while also acknowledging the nuance, kindness, and understanding this moment demands? Well, my guest today, Nedra Glover Tawwab, can help. A licensed therapist and sought-after relationship expert, she has practiced relationship therapy for 12 years and is the founder and owner of the group therapy practice, Kaleidoscope Counseling. Every day she helps people create healthy relationships by teaching them how to implement boundaries. Her philosophy is that a lack of boundaries and assertiveness underlie most relationship issues, and her gift is helping people create healthy relationships with themselves and others. Nedra is also the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, and The Set Boundaries Workbook: Practical Exercises for Understanding Your Needs and Setting Healthy Limits.You can find Nedra at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Terri Cole, who brings a beautifully complementary lens to the critical exploration of boundaries.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Repeating a boundary is very helpful. Perhaps we need to repeat more often and move away from the idea that saying it once is enough. We're trying to change the relationship, and sometimes that change requires patience and practice. These last few years have tested our boundaries on nearly every level. Work, friendship, family, community, geography, politics, religion, social issues, love, and well-being. It's kind of like we're being asked to draw lines all day, every day. Question is, how do you create and uphold boundaries that are clear and healthy and constructive, while also acknowledging the nuance

and the kindness and understanding this moment demands? Well, my guest today, Nedra Glover-Tawwab can help. A licensed therapist and sought-after relationship expert, she has practiced relationship therapy for a solid dozen plus years, is the founder and owner of the group therapy practice Kaleidoscope Counseling. And every day she helps people create healthy relationships by teaching them how to implement boundaries. Her philosophy is that a lack of boundaries and assertiveness, that's actually what underlies most relationship issues. And her gift is to really help people create healthy boundaries with themselves and others. Nidra is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book,

Set Boundaries, Find Peace, A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, and the Set Boundaries workbook, Practical Exercises for Understanding Your Needs and Setting Healthy Limits. So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, Flight risk. Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. So I want to take a deep dive into your work around relationships and boundaries, but I also want to take a little bit of a step back. I'm fascinated by what draws people into different pursuits, into different careers, different types of work. You've been in this world of therapy, especially with a focus on relationships, how people engage with each other. It sounds like for the better part of two decades at this point, I'm curious what drew you to the field in the early days? Being in relationships with people and trying to figure out how to make those relationships work. Our first relationship is, of course, with ourselves and then with our family and from their friends and partners and all of

those sorts of things. And just watching how we are in relationships is so interesting. And I've always thought about, well, if you're having this issue, I wonder what the fix could be. So that just my therapeutic mind was like, there must be a way to prevent or shift or do something in these relationships. And I'd love to help other people

with that. And I'd love to help myself with that. So were you the kid that all of your friends came to when it was sort of like, help me figure out this conflict between other people? Half and half. I was a very chatty child, so I love to talk and I love to listen to people talk. So I there's not a lot of action when it's action. I kind of zoom out. I'm like, oh my gosh, really deepening into and deconstructing and then sort of developing tools around dialogue. What is it about dialogue that is so fascinating to you? It's the vulnerability. It is the healing that happens when we talk about and through things. Kids are even very profound. When I was a kid, kids would say stuff and I'm like, oh, that's good. And just being able to unpack what people, what they say and what they

think, it can help them and it can help you if we really listen to what other people are saying, I think of being a therapist as having this wonderful opportunity to experience a lot of things that I might not experience. It gives me an idea of how to grieve because I see people grieving certain things that maybe I haven't gotten to yet, or I'm able to share with them some ideas about things that I have grieved. So there is this process just in talking and listening where we are getting to experience life before we actually experience it.

Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. I'm curious, when you're thinking about saying yes to this particular path as a vocation, growing up was the notion of therapy. I'm curious how it was perceived. I'm always fascinated because I know different families, different communities, different cultures very often have very different lenses on therapy, on whether it's valuable, whether it's something that you should never, ever do. In your family, in your experience of therapy, was it something that was talked about that was welcomed? Or I'm curious sort of like what the conversation around just the field of therapy and the exploration of therapy was. I had no concept of what therapy was. I did not know of the vocation at all. Mental health was not something that was discussed. And so my introduction to wellness was self-help books, still not therapy. It was some guests on an Oprah Winfrey show, and maybe they would talk about their self-help book. It was some guests on an Oprah Winfrey show, and maybe they would talk about their self-help book. It was me going to college and taking certain classes and learning about,

oh, people sit down and talk to a therapist. And I really learned about the process when I actually went to therapy. And I was like, this is a job. I would love to have this job. This is what I do anyway. So there was no conversation about mental health. And so many folks around me growing up had mental health issues and no one gave it any vocabulary. There was no language to say, this person is depressed. This person is autistic. This person is anxious. There were other words like, you know, they're touched or they're special or, you know, he's kind of eccentric, you know, like all of these things. But as I've come into adulthood and as I've learned to understand those things that we did not speak about, I'm like, oh, that's what that was.

But I did not have a clear understanding and certainly not the language of what I was experiencing. I knew in some instances that there is something here, but I didn't know what that was. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating to me how we tend to, especially if we're not comfortable with something, you know, we tend to sort of like use language that makes us feel okay. You know, rather than, you know, like if somebody has anxiety, like we'll sort of, we'll use a language or even a label, which is not necessarily constructive or healthy to frame it in a way that makes us feel like we're understanding of who they are and we can kind of see how they fit into our family, our friends, our community. But I also wonder whether

sometimes when therapy or even just acknowledging that mental health is a part of health, is a part of our human experience, our well-being, that when we sort of don't acknowledge that this is a part of, that it's something to address, something to explore, something to think about, and that it stops people sometimes from reaching out, from seeking help, from actually doing the things that might really help them navigate the world with much more ease. Yeah, I think that kids now, I'm amazed because they have this level of understanding about feelings, about assertiveness that was not honored when I was a child. When I was a child, if you had feelings, it's like, okay, go chill out, sit down.

You know, it wasn't like, oh, let's process this. Why are you upset? What's going on? It's okay to feel upset about this. It was like, okay, suck it up and chill out, you know? But now this generation of children, they're able to feel. And even the adults, when I was a kid, they weren't able to feel. And if they did feel, they couldn't express those feelings because those feelings were seen as a weakness. I had a neighbor who was schizophrenic

and no one talked about it. It was like, you know, she's just, you know, she just does these things. And I would ask so many questions and no one ever said she is schizophrenic. Like that's what I was looking for because I knew something was not like everyone else with her behaviors because she would do certain things. And so I

just wonder what is going on? Why isn't anyone saying why she can't live on her own? Why does she say these sort of things to people? Yeah, it was like this shame around mental health, this sort of covering up of things. And that's, you know, I think schizophrenia is one of the bigger things that we think about with mental health. But the thing that we see every day is depression. The thing that we see every day is debilitating anxiety. And those are the things that we really don't talk about. I think even with someone who has schizophrenia or something a little more severe, it's like, okay, we can now name that. But there are so many things that in a space where less and less, that's the lens and that there's less stigma, but I guess there still is. And especially depending who you are and the circumstance that you're in. I often wonder because we hear so much now about the rates of depression, the rates of anxiety, especially in kids. And sometimes that's connected to social media. Sometimes it's connected to technology.

I'm sure there are a lot of contributing factors, you know, and I wonder sometimes are the rates genuinely that much higher now, or are we so much more open about the conversation? Are we looking for it and seeing it and then creating opportunities for people to actually say, no, this is what I'm feeling. So it's just presenting much more publicly and much more readily. I'm curious what your take is on that. I do not think the rates are higher. I think that what we're seeing is more research.

We are asking more questions. We are more aware of many things related to mental health. But I recall kids being bullied when I was in school. Now there are like bullying programs and conversations. But when I was a kid, it's just like you're scared and that's it. That's how it was handled. Or, you know, you tell your parents and they say, well, what are you going to do? There weren't these, you know, specials about how to handle bullying with your kids. It wasn't even a concept. And yet it was a huge thing. Yeah. So when you decide to step into this field and you decide to focus intensely on sort of like interactions between people and relationships, at some point, the boundaries become something that comes up over and over for you. And that's certainly become, you know, an intense focus of your recent work, your recent books. Tell me what it was that led you to start to focus on this, the idea of boundaries as something that was critical. My work as a therapist began in a runaway shelter for teenagers, and I would provide therapy for the teenagers and their families.

And when you're doing family therapy, there's a lot of generational things that come up. Some of those things can be prevented and some of those things can't. I was often shocked by situations where parents did not change a thing and their kids repeated the cycle, such as sexual abuse. There is, you know, incest in families. There is generational patterns of pedophilia in some situations. And our silence has led us to, especially with sexual abuse, the silence of it, not wanting to speak about it has led so many to almost ignore it, to not even be aware of the signs. But I saw that as a boundary issue. That is a boundary violation to violate kids and to not protect children. So how do we start to have a conversation around there are certain people, no matter what your relationship is with this person,

they cannot be around a child, particularly your child. And those are hard conversations to have. And from there, I saw enmeshment issues, codependency issues, issues with alcoholism, drug abuse in families. And as I grew in my career, I started to move from teens to adults who are now the adults dealing with the trauma of childhood, boundary violations. And now guess what? They have to set boundaries. And oh, how hard it is to tell someone no

when your no wasn't honored. Oh, how hard it can be to stand up for yourself when you were abused for doing so. So the work really became, how do I help people to reclaim their voice? How do I encourage them to be more assertive and assure them that, you know, perhaps there will be consequences, but maybe not as bad as you're thinking. And so the work evolved from the abusive boundary violations to some of the more routine things that we see, like work-life balance and, you know, in our marriages and all of those sorts of things. But all of the work has setting where so much of it was related to trauma and sounds like, you know, often multi-generational trauma. And it's got to be when boundaries either don't exist or are violated in such a way and often at such an early age. And then you see the same pattern through

generations for somebody to then reach a point where they are effectively trying to break that cycle. I wonder if it's almost like when you see this, not just changing a behavior or belief set, but almost rewiring your identity. Yeah. And that's typically the point when people come to therapy, they're in this phase of, I am trying to do something different. And then there's this pushback when you start to set the boundary of this family member is dangerous or this is what happened and I want to break away from it or this is what I'm trying to do to lead a healthy life. Sometimes it's just going to college. It could be moving to a new place. It could be any sort of thing that can be a threat to a system that hasn't had a lot of healthy boundaries. And so people do come into the

therapeutic space and they're like, what is wrong with me? And my job is then to reassure them, nothing. There is nothing wrong with you. And what you're experiencing is a natural part of changing. Really, you're changing not only yourself, you are battling a system. Sometimes the system is work. That is saying you need to work 65 hours a week and always be available. You are battling a system. And when you're doing that, you may have a boss who says, well, why can't you answer your email at 6 p.m.? Why can't you? Everyone else here is doing it. Doesn't mean that everyone else has healthy boundaries. It means that this system has operated with none. And the expectation that you stay in line is very alive. And it is okay to say, I am finished at this time because your mental health

is impacted. There are so many people who come to therapy after they have already taken that time away from spaces. They're ready to leave the relationships. They're ready to throw in the towel with work because it's the last resort. It's not, oh, how do I prevent this? How do I deal with it while it's happening? It's like, I can't take anymore. If this doesn't work, I don't know what will work for me. Yeah. So it's not proactive. It's usually at a point where somebody is probably, the boundaries have been impeded on so much and so deeply that they're sort of like, it's like a final resort type of thing. Like if I need to figure this out because I'm just about to break. Mm hmm.

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Let's talk about what we actually mean with this word boundaries, because I think probably people will hear that differently. When you use the word boundary, what are you actually talking about? I think of boundaries as your needs, your expectations, things that will keep you safe and sane in your relationship with yourself and others. There are some pretty clear boundaries that are legal, right? Laws are boundaries. And there are some that are just for us and very unique. It's interesting to hear you use the word expectation. It's sort of like, this is the expectation I have for how, I guess, maybe I will treat myself how others will treat me. Because that expectation also, it sounds like, is something that can be changeable potentially over time, and maybe changeable for the good, but also may be changeable in an unhealthy way.

Yes, I think as we change, our expectations of people can change. I've been in conversation a lot lately with adults who are trying to navigate their relationships with their parents because their parents' expectation has not changed of them as children, but the adult's expectation has changed of what a parenting job looks like when I'm an adult. And so it can be very challenging to shift roles in relationships when we have a global idea of this is how it should be. We have to be flexible sometimes with our expectations, especially when we're in relationships with other people, maybe not with ourselves. We can control whatever expectation we want, but with other people, things change and we have to allow some things to shift. And, and if not, we always, you know, we always have options in our relationships to stay or go.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You talk about a number of different types of boundaries. So I thought it would be helpful to walk through sort of like the major categories, probably first up is what I think a lot of people might think about first and foremost when they think about boundaries, which is literally physical boundaries. What are we talking about when we talk about physical boundaries? We are talking about your body and your space. During the pandemic, physical boundaries became very important. Six feet back, right? So space is really important. Six feet back, right? So space is really important. And some of us are

like, I don't like people standing too close to me. I don't like people like touching me when they talk. Those are all physical boundaries. And those are things that should be communicated. Because if we're not communicating, we're typically cringing, we're upset, we're mad. And these are things that people may need to know to be able to engage with us. Yeah. And like you shared, I think in the last year and a half, two years, this has been something that so many of us have been struggling with. As we have this conversation, I'm in Colorado, but I spent my entire life in New York. And we were in New York City for most of last year, especially when New York was a pretty terrifying place to be early in the year. And like most New Yorkers, I lived in a large building with elevators. And you would push the button for the elevator, especially in the early days.

And it was slightly terrifying about whether the doors would open and there would be another human being in there and whether you were going to step in. Because all of a sudden, my normal day-to-day boundary about physical closeness was totally fine. A long-time New Yorker, I'm used to being elbow-to-elbow in subways, used to being elbow-to in, you know, in elevators. And now all of a sudden this big external circumstance just completely rewires that boundary overnight. And I become, you know, I literally would just wave elevator cars by until you sort

of like, you know, either you wait for three and there are still people in them. So you just decide to take the stairs or, you know, so it is really interesting how in the blink of an eye, a physical boundary that I had for my entire life without even thinking that it was a boundary, it became much more intentional and it changed literally overnight. It occurs to me also that this is probably a lot of the work that you were doing in that early work that you were talking about. And I wonder if of the different categories of boundaries, physical boundaries may be the type of boundary that is most often affected by trauma. Sexual and emotional. Emotional first. Because with emotional boundaries, you are told, when the boundary is violated, you are told what to think, how to feel, what should be appropriate for you in terms of how you feel. And that happens a lot with physical and sexual abuse. People are told it's not that bad.

It could have been this. Don't tell this person. These are all of these things. So it's not just one boundary that's violated. When people are in trauma situations, there are multiple boundaries that are violated. And so repairing all of these areas is the work that a person must do is not just, OK, you're not being physically abused anymore. It's like, let's talk about the emotional part of this, because you told someone or even while you were crying, can you imagine being beat and someone telling you not to cry? Like the emotional violation of even the sexual and the physical is pretty significant. Yeah, I could see how they would compound and be intertwined in really devastating ways. So you and

you just referenced emotional and sexual. So we so we've talked about physical, sexual, emotional, intellectual boundaries is something that you referenced too, which I thought was really interesting. And I'd never really thought about before. Tell me more about this. Yesterday, I was watching a show with my daughter and she was saying, this is the person on the show who doesn't know a lot of stuff. I said, what does that mean? She's like, you know, the person who doesn't understand things. And I thought to myself, oh, she's saying stupid, but she's not saying stupid. She's saying what's appropriate. She's saying, you know, this person doesn't know a lot of things. And I said, well, what are they good at? And so she was able to say, well, this person,

they're really good at baking, but everything else, like they don't know anything. And so intellectual, it reminded me of intellectual boundaries because the intellectual boundary is saying that people are stupid. They're dumb. They don't understand things. Their ideas are off. They don't matter. As humans, we are strong in some areas and maybe not so strong in other areas. We may not think the same about certain things, but how do we communicate with people who think differently than us? Is it appropriate to demean them? Is it appropriate to shame or smear them for having ideas? And sometimes, especially on social media, these ideas aren't even unsafe. arrangements. And the comments are like, you're doing it wrong. Really? Isn't that about creativity? Like, you know, just to stump on someone's differences is often an intellectual boundary, particularly when their differences does not harm them or other people. I mean, the example of flowers on social media,

clearly an example of when it does not harm other people. But I feel like we're in this moment, especially now, where we have these ideological divides and people are so dug in to their ideas and their beliefs. And many of them have spent a lot of time researching and studying and forming these things and feeling like they've done the work and they will defend them vigorously. And so it's interesting, the notion of intellectual boundaries, on the one hand, you say, okay, so we want to have our ideas respected. We want to have our expectations, as you sort of referenced

before, about how we'll be treated based on our ideas or how our ideas will be received, respected. And yet on the other hand, we're in this moment in time where so many people see another person's ideas as fundamental to that other person's identity. And so it's like everything gets completely enmeshed, tied up, blended into this thing where I wonder how you can set ideas, you know, between two individuals, let's say, where you can say, this is how I feel. Like, you know, these are I feel. These are my ideas. These are my beliefs. I would like them to be respected. When two people so vehemently disagree and they

see that disagreement as being on the level of literally defining each other's humanity in a way which sometimes will stop somebody from seeing another person's humanity. I'm always skeptical about us deciding which thing defines someone's humanity, because for centuries, for decades, we've gotten it wrong, where we say, oh, this type of person is this. Black people are this, and this is this. And it's like, I don't know if we're the best definers of what certain things mean about other people. And so the whole intellectual piece, and particularly the internet, because that's where we started, we're getting a piece of people.

We're not getting the whole person, especially when we're looking at these bite-sized bits of information and we don't know their full life. We don't have any context behind certain things. It's hard to make a judgment call based on what someone is saying. And I think that there are some things that are absolutely harmful. There are some things that are hate. And I think most social media platforms would agree with you and say, this person shouldn't even be on here, right? But we have taken up this sort of community policing that I think there are some legal things that can be done in some instances.

You know, there are some blocking features that can be had. There are some letters that can be written to these platforms. But trying to get a truly harmful person to quiet themselves, it creates a lot of arguments when the person doesn't even need to be on the platform. I think we should be looking for platform removal and not more conversations around problematic belief systems. Because there are some that are harmful. They're problematic. They do lend themselves to abuse of other people or even upholding certain things. But how do we address those things so the issue is actually resolved and not in a way that's creating more conversation and attention towards a problem? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I feel like it also relates to you just wrote a piece about red flags. Like there are moments where, you know, it's sort of like, well, maybe this is an opportunity to step into conversation. And there are these other really clearly defined moments where it's sort of like, no, this is something where like there actually is no conversation right now.

And it's important to sort of like identify those things and those moments. You also talk about material boundaries. Or, you know, there should be some idea about this is my expectation for my car. This is my expectation for my home. You have some level of ownership over the things that you possess and other people do, too. This is a this is one where, you know, there are laws around tearing up property. Like there are laws around violating material boundaries. It is a very serious thing. And we feel, you know, very seriously about it. And yet it can be very hard to communicate to someone your expectations around your stuff. Yeah. I mean, and even sort of the lesser infractions where it's not a law thing, but maybe like you're living with roommates, right? It's got like four people in an apartment or a suite in college, or maybe like, you know,

like you're in, you know, in a new place and, and you're, you're sharing space with people who maybe you're not even super comfortable with yet. Maybe you're kind of just more roommates and not quite yet friends. I have to imagine that this comes up all the time in those situations because people will have very different expectations about their stuff, you know, and about whether it's okay to share or to use. And if you do, how, how do you actually treat it? Um, the category, and tell me if I have this right, and it being the sort of like last one was time boundaries. Tell me more about this. Absolutely. I think that is the one that many of us are most impacted by. We're constantly trying to figure out how to turn the clock back, get more time out of a day, manage our time better, all of these things.

How do we develop healthier boundaries with time? And really, we have to be strategic about how we allow others to use our time and how we allow ourselves to use our time. Often, we get very upset at people for wasting our time, for using too much of our time, when in actuality we're in power of what they can waste, right? We're not giving our time away. We're allowing it to be used. And so if there is an issue with time boundaries, we really have to think about what can I do to manage the time that I have.

So how do you handle a situation? You kind of referenced this earlier in our conversation, but I think it's so relevant right now in this moment. How do you handle a situation, especially around time boundaries, where I feel like this really comes up often probably, where you have a particular expectation about like what's okay and what's not okay with your time, but you exist within a greater culture or community where there's a norm, there's a cultural norm about what is and what isn't okay.

And there's a big clash. Like the example you gave earlier, let's say you work in a company, you know, and the expectation on your team is that the leader or the manager can call on anyone in the team at any given time. And that's kind of what people are saying yes to when they sign up for. And, you know, they're extraordinarily well compensated. And it's sort of like the team or the project or the company everyone aspires to be a part of. And the norm is you will be basically surrendering your life. I'm thinking back to a past part of my life where many, many years ago, I was a lawyer, actually, and I worked in a giant firm in New York City. And it was expected that you would work 80,

100 hours a week. And if there was a call, you would show up. That actually ended up putting me in the hospital because I honored that norm. I had never drawn my own boundaries. But I'm wondering how you deal with it when this is tied to something like your ability to earn your living. And there's this cultural norm that's really strong and it's really expected and it's been established since way before you showed up. And you're at a moment where you feel like if you set your own boundary, it may well leave you without a job. I love talking to attorneys and accountants about time boundaries because those are industries where there is no concept of time boundaries.

It's like, no, I have to do this. This is a really important thing. And I often wonder, what if someone stopped doing it? What if we change the culture? be the person on vacation not responding to this thing? How do we get other people to join us? How do we start to have these conversations? Now, I understand that when you agree to work in certain places that there is a culture of overworking, but we know that overworking doesn't mean that you're being more productive because you're often distracted, you're tired, you're all sorts of things. There's so many problems with overworking people, burnout being

the top one. So how do we create truly engaging work environments? It's not having people work 70 to 80 hours. If they're working 70 to 80 hours, man, if you let them just work 40, they'd be as productive as if they were working 90. Yeah. I mean, and I 100% agree with that. And yet still, if you're that person who's in that culture and you say, no, there's a safe bet that you're going to lose your job. And let's say you have a family to support.

It's got to be a brutally hard moment, you know, because you're trying to do what's in your best interest, what's in like the best interest of your wellbeing, your physical and emotional wellbeing. And, and at the same time, you're, you feel that there's a value around you potentially supporting yourself, supporting a family. So I wonder if there are these moments where drawing a boundary line has potentially much bigger implications. And you would love for that system you're working to change, but it hasn't yet. And so the decision to draw and hold to that boundary also has bigger consequences. And you kind of have to make a decision to say, I'm acknowledging that doing this is going to prioritize my health or my wellbeing. And it may also have consequences, but it's sort of like a value-based thing. It's important. It's so important to me that even if there are consequences, this is the thing I still have to do. pick your consequence. Do you want to not be able to work at all? Or do you want to at least try to change some of the things? Now, what those career fields in particular, I think it's,

there are small ways that we can place boundaries and that's how the boundary setting starts. It's not this grand, I'm not, you know, but it is these very small things that you can do to start allowing people to acknowledge that there are some boundaries in place. Now, I have often been shocked by the people who say no one has boundaries. And you can think of one person, even in that work environment that has boundaries, it's like, well, this person leaves every day at five. How? How? I thought this was a system where no one could do it. What are they doing differently? How are they able to really manage this system in a different way? How do we start small when we're in environments that will not accept our boundaries and we choose to stay in those environments? If we're choosing to stay, how do we have healthier boundaries in other areas? What are our self-care practices? What are our relationships like?

You can't have relationships that are chaotic, no self-care and work 80 hours a week. Like you have to have some other things that are really holding up, holding you up so you can function in this 80 hour a week job. And I think the challenge therapeutically is everything is on fire. It's not just that you are working 80 hours, it's you're working 80 hours, you have a terrible relationship with your brother.

Your mother hasn't talked to you in four weeks. You can't keep a partner. Your laundry is. So there are so many things. So yes, you want to be an attorney. Less focus on that piece, you know, that piece you don't want to change. You know, you want to stay there. But what about all of this other stuff that's also contributing to your, your boundary issues that's contributing to the

burnout. So there, there's typically not just one piece is multiple pieces, even in a system that you can't change. There are many other things in life that you might be able to change so you can stay in this system that you want to be in. Yeah, that's so powerful. And I didn't really think about it that way. There's sort of this compounded effect where you can sort of address what you can address and maybe that actually stabilizes the ship. It creates enough stillness and health that you can actually function a little bit better in this other area, even if it's not immediately changeable. Between me and you, I'm going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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It also occurs to me, everyone these days is talking about this thing, the great resignation, where we've never seen this volume of people quitting job in measurable history. And I almost wonder if what's being done, even if it's not the intention, is that people en masse are quitting. And what they're effectively doing is they're saying no more. We are going to make this really big disruptive move. And so many of us are saying no more that we're actually going to change the cultural norm and that like we're, and we're literally not coming back until this has been fixed, you know, until there's no longer an expectation of overwork. There's no longer an expectation of always on, always available.

I feel like we're in this moment right now where there's this massive cultural shift. We're from the outside in. There's, you know, people are saying no more. If you want us there, this has to change. Do you have a sense that this certainly boundaries are built into what's going on also? I certainly think we have reached the aggressive boundary phase. We have, you know, maybe we did try to have some talks, but now it's like, I'm just quitting. I won't, I refuse to do this.

And in some ways, you're right. These systems will have to change in order to retain employees. There are tons of people who are like, I'm not going back to in-office work, period. I'm not doing it. And so guess what employers have to do? Figure out a way for their folks to work from home. There's no other way to have this business unless I allow these people to work from home. And so that is one of the wonderful things that has happened over the last few years

that companies are having to shift this overworking sort of protocol and people are more vocal about what their needs are and what their desires are walking into new jobs. Yeah, I'm really fascinated to see how this all shakes out. And until this conversation, I never really looked at it as a potential boundary issue, but I do think it is that central to what's being renegotiated right now. Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see what it looks like in a couple of years.

I actually recently read research that examined the productivity and the creativity and the output of people who are working a four day work week versus people who are working like not just 40 hours, but what's very often 50 to 60 hours now. And you're right, like people are getting more done at a higher level in less time. And a big part of the reason is because those three days off allows them to rejuvenate and to step back into a process of work where they're much more engaged, much more focused, their cognitive and creative capacity, you know, they can bring it online at a higher level and get more done at a higher level in less time. So I do think we're in the middle of this sort of re-imagining right now. One of the things that you mentioned earlier also is this notion of how boundaries are

communicated. And I feel like that's got to be such a big part of this process, right? Is the communication side of it. Tell me more about your lens on how important that is and on how to effectively do it. And maybe also where people tend to stumble. You know, speaking your boundaries can be done in two ways. We can verbalize it or we can behave differently. Oftentimes we are very disturbed

by saying something to someone. I think of folks who say, oh my gosh, my friend calls me every day at five o'clock and she talks about blah, blah, blah. And I don't want to hear it. And my first thought is, why do you answer the phone? Why do you answer the phone? Oh, because they're calling me. We have voicemail. We have text messages. You don't have to answer your phone if someone calls it. That's a boundary. I'm not always available by phone. There are times where I will not be available to you at 5 p.m.

What do you want? Leave me a text message. So that is a way, maybe not answering the phone is a better way than saying, hey, I don't like it when you talk about blah, blah, blah. You can say that as well, that sometimes our conversations go to a space and I don't know how to support you. Can you tell me how to support you? Because you're having a reoccurring issue. So those are ways that we can say to people or show them these are with boundaries. I think the challenge is often. We try to control how a person will respond to the boundary in doing that, we say a lot. I think you can state most boundaries in one to two sentences. Typically, people will have an hour long conversation and they still haven't stated a boundary.

They're problem talking and then this happened and this happened and I'd like you to fix this. And this is what happens with work environments. There has been, you know, little discussion of we need less hours and we're working too much has been the conversation. What is the solution? The solution is the boundary um i cannot do blank often we'll say well why would you invite me i can't understand why you would want me to come there you know that i'm really busy and blah blah blah we still haven't said we're not coming they still don't know so how do we get to the point without giving all of this information and we do it it. I know why we do it. We want people to understand. We want them to persuade. We want to persuade them to think like us about this

boundary. We want them to be okay with us saying no or okay with us being in disagreement or wanting something different. And unfortunately, people won't always get that. You can say the boundary with a smile. You can dress it up. You can do whatever you want to. And there are things that you will say that will unintentionally hurt other people. A no can be the worst thing that someone can hear. It can be. No, I don't think kids like no. I don't think adults like no. We all want a yes all the time. I want an all the time yes. Yes, yes, I'll help you. Yes. There are times when we hear no, and we have to allow people to say no to us because they have boundaries, and people aren't always available to us and we are not always

available to them. So the biggest challenge that I see is this approval seeking with our boundaries. If people don't agree with my boundary, should I even have the boundary? The answer is probably yes. Yes. If it's a healthy boundary, I will say you should still have it even if the other person is wanting to have their way with you. Maybe even more so at that point, right? So I'm thinking about the language. As you're sharing that, my mind was thinking, okay, so how would I try and clearly establish a boundary. And it was in reference, especially to your thought that most boundaries can be clearly established very likely in literally one or two sentences, and then you're just done. And I was wondering what those one or two sentences are in my mind.

I'm really curious how you think about this. And I'd love to learn from you. In my mind, it's almost like sentence one is, here is my boundary. And sentence two is this is why it's important to me. Does that feel healthy to you or unhealthy? Or like, how would you approach that in sort of like a very practical way? I think that's a healthy way to do it to say here is my boundary. And this is why it's important to me. Sometimes we just need to say here is my boundary, depending on the person we're talking to, because the reason it's important to you might be a point of defensiveness or it may be a place for them to initiate an argument. And we don't want boundary setting to turn into arguments. And sometimes with explaining yourself by giving people context, feeling, and all of these things, they are able to talk you out of your boundary, convince you

that you don't need them, or violate the boundary and tell you that the boundary isn't even important. They will violate that emotional space and say, well, why would you think that way about this? You know, what if you could do this instead? And now not only did your boundary go out the window, they violated a whole new boundary. And so being careful about how you communicate things to people is a wonderful way to protect yourself from further boundary violations. Because there are some people we can say things and they just get it, they care, they understand. And there are others who have created such egregious boundary violations that even saying something that would make sense to a thousand people, they will fight you about it.

Yeah. I mean, I would imagine even if you said like, here's my boundary, here's why it's important to me, there will be some people who will say, oh, but it shouldn't be important to you. That's not a valid reason. They'll literally reject your own personal experience and they'll reject why something matters to you. I would imagine trying to argue that it shouldn't matter to you, that it shouldn't be important to you. And then you get into this, like the whole back and forth of defending it. So I almost wonder whether, like whether you even drop that second thing and just say like, here it is.

And simply like, this matters to me. So I'm going to stand by it. I like going with the one sentence, sometimes two maybe, but I love the one sentence because it really lets people know what you feel about something. I think about a party invite. And if you don't want to go to a party, the best option is no, no thank you. Thanks for inviting me, but I won't be able to attend. When we say things like, no, I can't go because I have to pick my

auntie up from the airport. People will figure out 15 ways for you to pick your auntie up from the airport and come to their party. The real reason you don't want to go is because you don't want to go. And it's okay to say, I won't be able to make it. Yeah. Just succinct like that. And yet so many of us feel so uncomfortable just being direct like that. And I think it goes back to what you were talking about before is that we're trying to take care of the other person at the same time that we're trying to take care of the other person. At the same time, we're trying to establish our boundaries. And also, I think so many of us are not comfortable with the notion that, oh, if I do this, this

will lead to conflict and I don't want to have to deal with conflict, so I'll just back away from it rather than just being clear and standing with it. That I would imagine comes up in another scenario that has got to be really hard. And I would imagine, especially now, because people are sort of being housed together in really intense ways. When a person who, when you establish a boundary and then a person or a group of people, sometimes maybe it's a family member, refuses to respect that boundary. And yet at the same time, maybe it's a parent, maybe it's a sibling, maybe it's a cousin

who you're not going to walk away from them. Like family is family and that's important to you. You know, so this is not someone who can easily, if you establish your boundaries and you make it clear and you show that it's important and they repeatedly overstep them, they don't honor them, and yet they are a part of the family that you're not going to walk away from. Do you have thoughts on how to navigate that in a way that would be as comfortable as possible? Repeating a boundary is very helpful over and over. It's almost like a parent repeating to a child, have you brushed your teeth? Go brush your teeth. Go brush your teeth. I mean,

parents probably say that thousands of times. Put your shoes on. Get your shirt off the floor. I mean, the way that you have to repeat that and then 20 years later, you visit your kid and you realize, oh my gosh, their shirts aren't on the floor. Perhaps we need to repeat more often and move away from the idea that saying it once is enough. We're trying to change the relationship and sometimes that change requires patience and practice. When we aren't ready to leave, that doesn't mean that we should give up on our boundary, but that we need to lean more into repeating the boundary and really honoring it for ourselves. There are a lot of violations that occur that we are accepting.

What is your consequence if this boundary is violated? If you say, hey, I understand you want me to babysit for you, but I need a heads up, you know, maybe a day or so before. And this family member keeps just, hey, I have to drop my kids off. Hey, I have to drop my kids off. What is the consequence of that behavior? Do you say yes every time? Who's violating the boundary there?

I would say you, because you have the power in that situation with this family member you don't wanna cut off to say, no, I won't do it today. I have something else going on. They don't have to know what your something else is. You could be watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. That's not their business.

But no, not today. So how do you uphold this boundary that you set with this person? That is the new work. They won't listen to you. They won't honor it. How do you uphold the boundaries that they won't honor? The last boundary that's popping into my head right now, we've been talking a lot about boundaries between you and other people, whether it's a family member, a friend, a team at work,

a boss. Then there's the boundaries, and you write about this with yourself. And I think this gets provoked most often with technology and social media these days. It's sort of like, okay, so I literally have to stop myself. I have to set limits for myself. It's like an internal boundary where I'm actually so compelled to do this thing, which if I do it in a certain way or for a certain amount of time can be really destructive to my mental health. And yet I keep doing it.

So it's like an internal boundary that we literally have to make this contract with ourselves. We have to honor our own boundaries. And so often we look at other systems. When I think about financial issues, we get really upset at the credit card company. Why are they charging us a high fee? Why are they doing this? And it's like, it is us using the card. It is us downloading the app. It is us doing these things. Now, of course, there could be safer practices with any of these things, but how do we manage ourselves and not put everything on the systems to keep us in check with ourselves?

Because there are things that can get out of hand. And the systems aren't even aware until there's some report that comes out that, oh, this thing is causing this. Well, we know that. We felt that. How do we step away from things when it's starting to disturb who we are? Now, with social media, we know that you get a hit of dopamine when you when you get a like and all of these sort of things. So it's you know, it's very strategic. However, I wonder if we could just go back to a time when we didn't even use it and we were okay with life.

How do we put ourselves back in that space? I was talking to someone the other day and I remember there was a time when you used to leave your home without a cell phone. Can you imagine such a thing? I was listening to Will Smith's book and he was talking about having to wait on a phone call. Be at home to wait on it. There was no cell phone. If you miss that call, you just had to wait for the person to call again. There was no caller ID. There was no cell. It wasn't this constant connection. How do we say I can still be that even in a world with blank, I can still use cash even in a world with access to this. Now, I'm not advocating for don't use credit cards. I like them. But if we have a problem

with something, how do we set boundaries with ourselves to practice so we're having the experience that we want. Yeah. I feel like that's almost the ultimate frontier in the land of boundaries and maybe the most challenging. It's fine. As a writer, it's interesting because the way that I actually do my work is I'm on a device, which also is the exact same device that like, I see the little things on it. I'm like, there's a notification here, there's a notification there, like, who just checked in and stuff like that. And I've learned that just like you described, you know, there is a very, there is a cycle of dopamine and then like technology that uses intermittent reinforcement that creates almost an addictive behavior pattern. And for me, I literally

will, because I know myself and I know the way that I create boundaries is to literally enable programs that turn off all other connectivity to ensure that I literally have to, I use technology against technology to enforce my own boundaries. Yeah. You have to outsmart yourself. When I'm writing, I turn my phone off right now as we're talking. I have my focus on one. So I'm not getting the ping to say new text message, new email, because out of sight, out of mind, I'll make sure my writing space is full screen. So I'm not even tempted by all of the bars at the top. So there are a lot of boundaries that I have to set in place for myself to do the things that I want or need to do. Yeah, I love that. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well as we come all the way back to our own ability to

navigate our own boundaries personally and as well as interpersonally. So as we have this conversation in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life, you have to create it. I think of inventing what you want to see in your life, not holding other people accountable for providing it, but accepting ownership of creating what you want to have. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation

we had with Terry Cole, who brings this beautifully complimentary lens to this critical and timely exploration of boundaries. You'll find a link to Terry's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven-second favor, and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better

so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

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