AKA Setting boundaries

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How and when to quit?

There’s been a lot of chatter about “Quiet Quitting” in the TikTokisphere. If you haven’t heard, this is a trend to cutting back on your work to do the bare minimum (one interpretation). Other advocates speak of reclaiming their time and prioritizing what matters personally over making professional advancement their only measure of success.

Instead of companies seeing this as some form of Millennial dropout culture, I see this as an opportunity and wake-up call for organizations and leaders to redefine work to create more meaning for employees. For individuals, this is your invitation to redefine your relationship with work and decide whether you’re going to go steady or break-up.

What is your relationship with work?

Looking at work/life balance is nothing new, it’s just that COVID and remote work have allowed us all to rethink what truly matters in our life. Now is time to create a new paradigm for yourself. That’s right, you get to set the rules. In fact, most of my coaching work with individual clients is about helping them to understand where, why and how they want to work and to find the best approaches that work for their values, strengths and preferences.

In its simplest terms, what this means is we all have CHOICES all the time – in how we show up and where we put our energy, focus and resources. When the pandemic first hit, I shared a guideline that I’d like to revisit here which may be helpful for you.

ABCs OF MANAGING THROUGH CHANGE

Use these 3 tools to shift your experience of stress and take back control of any situations that feel uncomfortable or challenging.

  • AWARENESS: Check in with yourself about what is really going on. How are you feeling? Are you overwhelmed, burnt out or unhappy? Or are you unmotivated, uninspired and bored? These are very different emotions, with different potential sources, causes and implications. Getting to the heart of what is really going on and what it means for you can be helpful in sorting through your next steps.
  • BOUNDARIES: When do you need to create some space for yourself to feel safe and more at ease? How can you establish some limits that are constructive in your work and relationships? Some people find the word boundaries off putting because it makes them think they are being rude or unavailable to others. And of course, setting a boundary can mean telling someone you are not available for certain things, so they may not like that response. This is why so many employers are concerned that their staff is pushing back or resisting their demands to return to work full-time or be continuously available through Slack. However, people treat us the way we allow them to, so if we want a different experience, we need to change how we act.

 

  • COMMUNICATION: Are you saying what’s true for you? And I don’t mean letting everyone know everything you think that comes into your mind. Can you share your experience with others is a way that is honest, authentic and understandable? When we tell others what is going on with us in a way that they can understand (we need to read our audience), we open the doors for dialogue. Sometimes they won’t get it and they may not respond in the way we would like, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say the things that need to be said.

Here’s a powerful resource to help you get started looking at where and how you might need to reset your boundaries. If you prefer videos, you can check out my LinkedIn comments shortly after the pandemic hit (crazy to think how we’ve survived the past 2 years).

PRACTICE BRINGING YOUR FULL SELF

I firmly believe that the more we can bring all of ourselves to our work and life, the more happy and fulfilled we can be. This means that we get to be ALL or most of ourselves more of the time, instead of hiding, denying or avoiding. It’s just so much easier to keep it real rather than expending all of that energy and emotion to not deal with our current situation.

I invite you to notice the places where you might be holding yourself back and not bringing all of your passion, positivity and brilliance. Where are you dimming your light? Trying to make yourself smaller to make others happy. Holding your voice back when you actually have things to say. Not standing up for what you believe in for fear of making waves. Can you see all these ways that when we try to keep the peace or go along to get along that we can also be subverting our special sauce?

KEEP IT REAL

How might you take one small stance for something you believe in? Where do you need to say “No, thank you” instead of “Yes, of course”? Pick one thing that you can do to take up a little more space for yourself and your needs. I guarantee that after it feels a little uncomfortable, it might actually feel really great.

I’ve started scaling back on many of the commitments I had around certain work and activities that I thought I had to do. Once I started to question my assumption that things were urgent or essential, I could look at what was truly important to me and where I wanted to focus my efforts. It’s caused me to shift a lot of the things I was doing, creating much more space and time for things that I truly love.

If you want some support for making changes that feel challenging but you believe may be needed, let’s explore what’s possible! Reach out to connect. I would love to help you create work and life that lights you up.

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