4 Ways to Strengthen Your Boundary-Setting Muscles

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Boundaries are essential to practicing self-care and flourishing in our life and work. Most of us weren’t taught the benefits of boundaries as children, and now as humanitarians, honoring our limits through boundary setting can feel rude, aggressive, or selfish. But boundaries aren’t any of these things; they’re gifts of clarity that help us create accountability over our time and energy.

The problem is, boundaries are rarely created alone — they’re almost always accompanied by pushback and guilt. Having the strength to push past the things that hold us back from setting boundaries requires to to build up our boundary-setting muscle over time. Here are 4 ways do this:

• Reframe Your Guilt: **Guilt is a product of our internal stories, especially ones about having to be everything to everyone or engaging in selfless service. We often forget that feelings are not facts and allow our feelings to control us and our actions. Reframing the thought requires us to tap into the truth of why we need the boundary and the consequence of not having it.
• Notice the Signals: Our bodies send us signals when we’re reaching a personal limit — cues like a tight jaw, clenched fists, fluttering stomach, or a general feeling of restlessness. This discomfort is a message from our body about an arising boundary need.
• Assess Priorities, Time, and Energy: Trying to do everything, be everything, and experience everything is an express train to burnout, resentment, and for humanitarians, compassion fatigue. Making a list of our priorities and examining where we spend our time and energy can help us determine if we need to make any adjustments to ensure that by saying yes to addressing someone else’s needs, we’re not saying no to our own.
• Practice Saying No: **As a humanitarian, saying no when someone is in need is incredibly challenging, especially if the reason we’re saying no is because we need, or want, to do something for ourselves. If we’re not used to asserting our boundaries, we may feel compelled to provide an explanation to validate our no. But explanations are a courtesy, not a requirement.

It takes, time, space, and compassion to get used to setting boundaries for ourselves, but the more we practice doing so, the easier it becomes over time to hold them for ourselves, and to respect those set by others.