Are you a self-confessed people pleaser?
Are you tired of friends, family, or colleagues demanding your time and just expecting you to give it to them, even if it results in a personal, professional, social, emotional or financial cost to you?
Do you often feel you don't have healthy boundaries that protect your own sense of wellbeing?
Do people constantly ignore your boundaries and take advantage of you?
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If you would like to learn to be able to say NO without feeling guilty, and learn how to stand your ground, reclaim your time and energy, and refuse to e taken for granted - then this workshop is for you.
People-pleasing is a behaviour where individuals place the needs and desires of others before their own, often at their own expense. People-pleasers may feel a strong urge to please others, even if it means altering their personality, sacrificing their well-being or values, or feeling resentment and frustration. People-pleasing is not a medical diagnosis or a personality trait, but a learned pattern of coping that can be changed.
Personal boundaries are the limits you decide work for you. They dictate how people can treat you, how they can behave around you, and what they can expect from you. They are drawn from the framework of your core beliefs, your perspective, opinions, and your values. And these things in turn are created from your life experience, and the social environments you have lived in. If you find the concept of healthy boundaries difficult to understand, think of other sorts of boundaries. Property lines, fences, lines in the sand, buoys marking off the deep end of a pool. Do you have any such markers, limits, or ‘stop signs’ in your personal life?
If you don’t set healthy boundaries, you are likely to constantly be at the mercy of others. You allow others to tell you how to think, act, and feel. It also means you tend to spend your time and energy doing what others want you to do, over what you deep down want to do. In the long term this can lead to frustration and depression. You will feel unfulfilled or lost, and you will lose your sense of self. At its worse, not setting boundaries allows others to do things to you that are upsetting, or even harmful.
6 SIGNS THAT YOU LACK BOUNDARIES
1. Your relationships tend to be difficult or dramatic. The less you set healthy boundaries, the more you give others a signal that you don’t know how to take care of yourself. This leaves you open to attracting will people who want to control you. Or you might lack such a sense of power from never standing up for yourself that you resort to unconscious manipulation yourself. This means you are constantly in co-dependent relationships and friendships that lack an equal exchange of give and take.
2. Making decisions is a real challenge. You can end up spending so much of your life doing what others want that you lose a sense of self. This means you often don’t know what you do or don’t want. Faced with a decision, you blank.
3. You really, really hate to let other people down. People without personal limits tend to go along with other people’s plans a majority of the time. They worry so much about letting other people down, they just say yes.
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4. Two words – guilt and anxiety. If you ever dare say yes? You suffer from ongoing guilt and fear. Many people with boundary issues feel guilty for the smallest things, too.
5. You often wonder who you really are. It’s likely that you are unclear on your purpose in life, or perhaps struggle to set goals. You might even have an identity crisis.
6. Your secret fear is of being rejected or abandoned. Lacking healthy boundaries often goes back to childhood. It can mean you didn’t have a caregiver who provided unconditional love and acceptance, or you had to do what others wanted to avoid being rejected or abandoned. And now as an adult those are the two things you fear most.
"Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others."
Brené Brown