Creating Boundaries Creates Opportunities for Success

So many people on their paths to success and during periods of immense growth struggle with outside forces interfering with their progress and can derail them all together. One of the hardest parts of achieving your goals is not necessarily the planning, articulating specific goals or even staying motivated, it is combating the outside forces that can be stacked against you. Outside forces can be anything from a demanding job, overbearing parents, a needy partner, social obligations, friends who don’t have your best interest at heart, health issues or parental obligations. Obviously, the preceding list is not exhaustive, and everyone’s lives are unique, but it is meant to be reflective of the type of outside forces that can try to derail your progress train. Outside forces cannot be completely eliminated but they can be better managed.

Managing outside forces and creating rules, procedures, and boundaries will help you stay committed to achieving your goals. But like with every other step on your journey towards success this step takes planning and daily implementation. To combat the individual outside forces that can deter your personal strides you have to take the time to sit down and first identify which outside forces or distractions are most likely to get in your way and how you can plan around them. In the same fashion that you must be open, honest and realistic with yourself when setting your goals, you equally must be open, honest and realistic with yourself about what or who could hinder your progress.

Let’s first discuss the “what” type of forces that can wreak havoc on anyone trying to better themselves. “What” type forces include job responsibilities, finances, health issues, self-deprecating thoughts, morality dilemmas or even geographical limitations. The “what” type of forces need to be identified in general as well as goal specific “what” limitations so you can create rules and procedures for yourself to overcome them and to create boundaries for yourself to protect your own personal peace. Boundaries are going to be one of the most important elements to solving your success equation.

Job responsibilities can be some of the hardest outside forces to combat because they are tied to your sense of importance, your financial security and more than likely also some of your personal goals. But when analyzing how job responsibilities can get in your way of where you ultimately are going, you must find a workable work/life balance. Additionally, you must ask yourself if your current job brings you joy, facilitates where you want to end up career wise and whether it is not taking too much of your soul on a day-to-day basis. It is okay to do your job well and not be a slave to the nine to five. So, if you believe that your job responsibilities are going to get in your way, ask yourself why and what you can do to protect your peace, put yourself first and still progress towards your goals both professionally and personally. Create rules for yourself when you start to feel that unmanage urge to work too much or put in more than you receive back and create healthy boundaries that help you achieve your goals (not the goals of your employer, clients, or customers).

Learning how to set rules around your work/life balance will create a framework that will allow you to meet and exceed expected outside goals (those of your employers, clients, and customers) while protecting your inner peace and creating space for personal growth. These rules can range from only working overtime on one night per week, leaving on time three times per week, not working through your lunch so you can utilize that time for personal tasks, not working more than 90 hours per week, or whatever is going to give you time to balance being a productive employee or working individual versus the person you are outside of your job/profession. So often, we lose our identity to “what” we are in our jobs/profession and that can outshine “who” you want to be, and these rules can help balance out those comparisons.

So, once you’ve identified the “what” type of forces and you’ve created rules and boundaries to help you combat the outside constraints that could trip you up on your goal achieving journey you are ready to move onto the “who” type of forces that can create minor inconveniences to your goal achieving or could completely derail you all together. “Who” type forces include your significant other, your parents, your children, your extended family, your co-workers, your friends but, the biggest “who” problem is usually yourself. We are all guilty of putting ourselves behind the needs of others and doing it so consistently that people in our lives believe that it is the norm. So, in this part of the goal achieving journey, you again must be brutally honest with yourself about how you can put in place personal boundaries that will give you the space to be able to achieve your goals. If you are always putting others before you and doing everything for other people, there will be no time for yourself and thus you will fail on your journey to success.

Learning how to identify the “who” forces in your life that interfere with your individual goals is a multi-step process and can be emotionally taxing, but it is a necessary step in becoming the person you want to be and becoming the type of person who easily achieves their goals. First, identify who gets in your way of achieving your goals or having the time to do so. Then, identify the reason you allow this person or people to get in your way. Most often, this reason is going to be out of a sense of guilt, obligation, expectation, or societal responsibility. Very seldom are the reasons that “who” forces interfere with your success journey, reasons that bring you joy, a sense of belonging or in furtherance of your success and that is why this next step is so important. Putting yourself first is the most important aspect of this analysis. Priding yourself on being a good partner does not mean you completely give up your own hobbies, time for yourself, eating food you enjoy or the like, but unfortunately this can happen when your focus turns to making your partner happy. Priding yourself on being a good parent does not mean you completely lose your adult identity, that you stop chasing your own goals and live for theirs or that you spend all your free time enriching their lives to the detriment of your own, but again this happens to so many parents and then they feel lost and depressed. These types of pitfalls happen because you are trying to live up to someone else’s expectations, you are trying to fulfill society’s version of a partner, a parent, a friend, a child, etc. And once you take the time to unpeel these expectations and the why for what you are doing you can make simple changes that lets you focus on staying true to yourself and focusing on your goals and overall dreams while considering how to do that and be comfortable with boundaries with others. It is ok to create boundaries especially when they are aligned with the goals that you set for yourself and not those created by society.