Each month, as part of my Inner Circle, I run a masterclass and this month the masterclass was on Boundaries.

We talked about why boundaries are so important, what they are and starting setting some for ourselves.

Now, if you’re not familiar with the concept of boundaries, boundaries are basically rules, lines, bounds, or limits that you’ve put in place that tell you what you can and can’t do.

What you will and won’t accept.

Behaviours that you will and won’t accept of yourself and of others.

The reason why they’re so important is because:

• they create efficiencies
• they improve productivity
• they enable you to be more present in the moment
• they allow you to reduce distractions
• to improve your focus
• And importantly, they reduce mental burden

So if you don’t have any boundaries in place, if you have no limits you can find you are just going through life doing stuff…

You’ll find that you can often be in a state of chaos.

You’re unfocused.

You often don’t achieve your goals, especially not in the timeframe that you would like to because you’re often feeling unproductive.

So, it’s really important to put boundaries in place to help you remain productive, be more efficient, reduce that mental burden, that chaos, that overwhelm on your mind.

To just be more present in the moment.

If you’re not sure what a boundary is are some examples:

Example 1

You have a rule that every day you finish work at 6:00 PM. That’s your cut-off time.

Having a defined end of work time reduces the burden of your mind thinking that you should be doing something else. Feeling like you should be working on something.

You’ve decided that that’s the time that you finish work.

Side note: It’s also really important right now where our work and our life have blended into one in a lot of cases, because a lot of us are working from home.

You need to create that boundary, that limit, that delineation between work and home.

Example 2

Another example is you might have a rule that you don’t look at your phone and you switch off all devices at 9:00 PM every night.

Example 3

Or maybe you don’t look at your phone and get distracted with whatever else is going on in the world until you exercise and have breakfast in the morning.

You give yourself that peace and time to yourself to do something that’s important to you.

Another important area to consider is emotional boundaries or values-based boundaries.

Example 4

For example maybe you won’t work with people that don’t have certain core values aligned.

Things such as honesty, integrity and open-mindedness might be some of those values that are not negotiable.

So if there are certain core values that are important to you, then maybe you have a boundary that you won’t work with staff members, clients or business partners that don’t have those core values aligned.

They’re just some examples of some boundaries that you could put in place.

On the inner circle coaching call it was so lovely to hear some of my clients talking about the benefits that they felt by putting boundaries in place.

Things like…

‘it’s made them more productive’ and the biggest one was that ‘they just feel less burdened by all the stuff that they should be doing’, because they’ve told themselves what their boundaries are and what their limits are.

So why don’t you give it a go and try putting some boundaries in place today?

Wishing you an amazing productive day!

Louise x

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about what the Inner Circle can offer you then let’s jump on a quick 15 min call. Book into my calendar here.