Why People Keep Crossing Your Boundaries (and How to Retrain Them)
Maybe you told your team you're not answering emails after 6:00pm. Then a message came in at 7:45pm, and you answered just one.
Or you told your kids screens go off at 8:00pm. One exhausted night, you let it slide. Then it slid again.
Maybe you promised yourself you'd stop volunteering for every committee, until someone asked really, really politely.
And now you're frustrated. People keep interrupting, asking, and pushing, as if your boundaries don't exist.
I've had some version of this conversation four or five times in the last month, and it always lands in the same place—People will treat you the way you've trained them to treat you.
Every time we let a boundary slide, we're training people that it's optional.
So when they keep walking all over it, it's not their fault. It's on us as leaders.
The guilt that keeps us saying yes
A client of mine was getting interrupted all day long. People would knock on his office door, ask, "Hey, do you have a minute?" and stroll right in as if he'd already said yes.
When I asked why he didn't put up a boundary, he told me he didn't know how. No one had ever taught him!
So we talked about a few simple ways to say no. Something like, "Not right now, but I'll come find you in 10 minutes," or, "Let me finish this one thing, and I'll be right with you."
He felt really guilty about asking people to wait. Then he had a big a-ha moment.
He didn't want to be an inconvenience to them, and in the meantime, he was inconveniencing himself every single day.
Maybe you feel that too.
We say yes to the interruption, the extra ask, the favor, so nobody else gets put out. And the person who pays for it is us. Our focus, our flow, our energy at the end of the day, our time with the people we love.
Why boundaries fall apart
Setting a boundary is usually the easy part. Holding it once it feels awkward is where most of us give up.
Our 10-month-old goldendoodle, Ellie, reminded me of this the hard way.
She was doing great on the leash until I got busy and we skipped our walks for a couple of months, and she turned right back into a little terror on the leash.
My friend Travis Brorsen, owner of the Greatest American Dog Den, says he helps dogs with people problems. He's so right.
Training anyone, a dog or a person, to follow through is a people problem at its core. It only works if you uphold the boundary.
A therapist once told me that if a boundary moves, it's not really a boundary.
The first few times you hold one, people are going to test it. Your team will test it, your kids will test it, and honestly, so will you. That's part of the process.
Anything new is uncomfortable until it's normal, and repetition is what makes it normal.
In the latest episode of The MindHER Podcast, I share how to push through that awkward stage, what Supernanny taught me about consistency, and a simple challenge to help you retrain the people in your life this week.
