Personal Boundaries 101

In all brutal honesty.

Most of us can agree that — for the most part — relationships are complex.

Some would even argue it’s the most challenging life aspect to manage and keep up with. We’re all constantly trying to figure out how to navigate our relationships — to maintain them without having them stand in between us and our personal goals, or taking away too much of our time and energy.

A fantastic to help us do that is personal boundaries. It allows us to draw our lines to maintain mutual respect toward everyone’s life choices and beliefs.

Personal boundaries can be an excellent tool indeed. However, there’s a catch — because they can do more harm than good when not used properly.

In this article, I will be going over things to keep in mind to advantageously maintain personal boundaries and exploring different ways to keep up with them along with our chaotic lives.

Enough with the intro, let’s get into it!

The 6 Pillars

Throughout my journey to understanding personal boundaries, I have come to classify 6 main pillars to effectively maintain personal boundaries across relationships. For each of them, I will go over their concept in-depth and provide some executable tips to implement them.

Pillar #1

Personal boundaries are not limited to relationships with others.

For some reason, we often love to blame relationships for our misery and struggles. Or, more accurately — we love blaming what we can’t necessarily control. By doing that, we choose to ignore that our reaction to events around us accounts for 90% of the outcome.

How does that come into personal boundaries?

Personal boundaries are not concepts we can implement just for people around us to respect, but also for us to respect to maintain a good relationship with ourselves to start with. Our relationship with ourselves is essentially our “standard” in relationships that people around us can look us to determine some factors in the equation of their relationship with us.

Okay, we get all that fluffy part but how does that translate into real life?

Self-discipline.

Actions and decisions you make daily affect how people around you perceive you. I am not saying you should be working to please others, but you should understand the consequences your everyday decisions can have on your relationships.

Before deciding— whether that be what you post online, the food you eat, places you go, and everything in-between. Understand your personal goals and rationally think through your decision — does it align with your personal goals? Does it align with your core values?

That train of thought might seem like a tedious and frustrating process, but you should be working towards training the muscle to make it a subconscious step you take before every decision.

Pillar #2

Step 1: Knowing your personal boundaries yourself.

The first step to maintaining your boundaries is is recognizing them and understanding where they stand.

Image how hard it would be for other people to recognize your boundaries if you don’t recognize them yourself.

For that reason, personal boundaries shouldn’t be just an intuitive thing that you grew up with. It would be best if you were intentional about your boundaries to clearly communicate them to your surroundings.

The Key Idea?

Be intentional with your personal boundaries.

An excellent way to stay on top of your personal boundaries is to regularly reflect on them and how they are maintained in different aspects of your relationships. I will share some specific reflection prompts to help with that later in this article.

Pillar #3

There is no “once”.

The urge to compromise one of your boundaries to protect your relationships with your best friend or compromise your boundaries with person X because you look up to them so much so “it’s worth it”…

However, that can have quite the opposite effect — that best friend you compromised that boundary once will expect you to compromise more boundaries later on. People around you will also expect you to compromise on your boundaries because you did so with person X.

It’s a whole cycle that, once started, is hard to get out of.

In fact, by strictly sticking to your boundaries at any given time, you filter your relationships only to keep the people who value and respect you for who you are and the way you are.

There’s a catch though — if the next pillar is not maintained correctly, this pillar can be extremely difficult to impossible to enforce…

Pillar #4

Boundaries are red lines, not orange or yellow lines.

If you’re trying to stick to your boundaries, you need to think of them as red rather than yellow or orange lines.

They are not preferences that wouldn’t really you if not respected. They are the line that, if crossed, has direct consequences in any given relationship.

By doing that, you ensure that people around you take your boundaries seriously, and thus, they consistently respect them.

You could have orange and yellow lines as well. However, be aware of the difference and make sure they are entirely separate from your absolute personal boundaries.

Pillar #5

Communicate you personal boundaries and be clear about them.

Sadly, most people around you are probably not good at guesswork. That’s a reality that everyone of us needs to accept and deal with.

Consequently, stop assuming that people can read your mind and guess your boundaries.

Therefore, you need to communicate your personal boundaries and clarify them. Doing that simplifies both your life and those of people around you.

Pillar #6

Respect people’s personal boundaries if you want them to respect yours.

Respecting people’s boundaries is a joint action. By respecting the personal boundaries of people around you, they owe you respect towards your boundaries in return. It also gives you the right to enforce yours when they are crossed.

This concept is simple and intuitive, but we all need a good reminder of it sometimes, so remember that it can do miracles 🤗.

Staying on Top of It

As I mentioned before, personal boundaries are not an intuitive aspect of our lives or shouldn’t be if we want to maintain them effectively

As I previously mentioned, the most effective way I have found to help me keep up with personal boundaries was reflections.

I would highly recommend weekly reflections for best results. However, bi-weekly and monthly can also do for a start. Here are a few reflection questions you can go from. Of course, feel free to tweak them to fit your situation better🤩

→ List your personal boundaries: Think about why you have each. Which ones do you do best for? Which ones do you struggle with the most? Take off any unnecessary ones. Break down the ones you struggle with and identify one thing you can improve on to help with it.

→ Identify your top 5 relationships: How are you maintaining your personal boundaries in each of them? Any recent incidents that you should look into? What can you improve in those relationships?

→ Look at your relationships overall: How do you feel about your social life? How do personal boundaries contribute to that? Do you feel too restricted — loosen up a bit, too exposed — tighten up.

Another thing to remember is that dealing with personal boundaries will likely vary depending on your lifestyle choices, how you feel about relationships overall, and the type of boundaries you like to maintain… Take this as a general rule of thumb — managing relationships is NEVER a one-size-fits-all.

Personal boundaries this, personal boundaries that. I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning already. Fortunately though, this article is coming to an end 😎.

On a serious a note, reading about personal boundaries and tips to maintain them will not provide you with any real value if you don’t act on what you read. Taking steps to maintain your personal boundaries better is a decision future you will thank for. So get off this screen and reflect on your current situation with personal boundaries 🤗.