Rebecca Zucker | Next Step Partners
We often hear about setting boundaries when it comes to time management or boundaries between our work and personal lives, but there’s another important type of boundary that isn’t discussed as much as it should be – emotional boundaries.
Why do we need emotional boundaries?
It’s common to get caught up in other people’s difficult emotions or worry about how someone might react to something in the future. Sometimes, we even try to overly manage the other person’s emotions or how they will react by doing any of the following:
- sugar-coating or over-engineering a tough message, allowing key points to get lost
- quickly jumping in to soothe or calm the other person at the first sign of difficult emotions
- back-pedaling on something that’s very important to us just to make the other person feel better
- gaming our approach with another person because of our fear of their reaction
These actions illustrate a lack of emotional boundaries. It’s why a lot of people avoid conflict.
Not only is this behavior not healthy, but it also consumes precious time, energy, and mental capacity that are better spent on other things. It can also lead to resentment, particularly when it involves sacrificing parts of ourselves to appease others.
At work (and in life), we need to engage in conflict, make the hard decision that will upset someone, hold firm instead of giving in, and risk dealing with the fallout or messiness of other people’s negative emotions.
After all, are we really responsible for someone else’s emotions or reactions?
The bottom line is, no, we aren’t.
This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t care about what they are feeling or apologize if we’ve done or said something wrong or acted out of line.
What is our responsibility is to conduct ourselves honestly, ethically, and respectfully in our interactions with others. Learning to set emotional boundaries – which to be sure, takes a fair bit of practice – can be incredibly liberating. It involves learning to delineate “what’s yours” and “what’s theirs.” Click To Tweet
By learning how to keep a clear boundary between others’ feelings and your own, you’ll be more effective in dealing with challenges as well as experience a lighter mental and emotional load.
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