Communicating boundaries (part 2)
Your boundaries are a matter of perspective – YOUR perspective. How can others know about your boundaries?
Hej, welcome back! I assume you’ve seen part 1 of this mini-series on boundaries where I talk about my approach of sounding out your personal boundaries from your own built-in warning system. In case you haven’t or it’s been a while – you can find it here.
Wanting to communicate boundaries means that you have defined some for your own emotional safety and personal well-being. Great! Sometimes that can be hard and feel like a huge step. And of course, you want others to respect them.
Unless you have either telepathic abilities or you are wearing a billboard with your boundaries around your neck: it’s probably going to be a bit difficult for outsiders, aka anybody who does not have direct access to your thoughts, to guess at what your boundaries actually are. Plus, you might also want to differentiate instead of building a fence. Or moat. Or… anyways.
Enter communication: making the other parties aware of your boundaries.
In my experience this sort of communication has two major aspects: the clarity of your communication and the degree of nearness between you and the recipient.
Clarity is mainly language – how succinctly you communicate. Let’s take an example: you are invited to submit a bid for a project. The most unclear way of communicating is not answering at all. It leaves everything open to interpretation. The clearest form is actually “No”. In case there was any doubt – “NO” is a complete sentence. Just saying.
The degree of nearness is basically the factor of whether you have any stakes in the other persons’ (emotional) response to your communication. In our example (submitting a bid): you don’t know the people and you don’t care – no nearness at all. On the other end of the spectrum would be a cluster of either chosen or biological family (or both). You care very much how they take your boundary of not bidding.
If we would draw the dimensions into a graph, this would probably look like the figure on the left.
What we typically experience is that even when we try to communicate as clearly as possible, the clarity decreases the closer you are because you don’t want to hurt the recipients.
Let’s have a look at our example and see potential responses and their “positioning” on these scales.
The example: you are invited to submit a bid for a project and you really do not want to do it. Please note: there’s no reason for your boundary, i.e. your decision to not do it, because that’s a thing between you and YOU only. In communicating it does not matter!
Answer 1: “I’m probably outside your price range. “
Positioning 1 – pretty low on both clarity and nearness. You don’t reference the bid. [And please allow me to say – if you were saying that nip something in the bud, there might be more appropriate strategies. You could be surprised.]
Answer 2: “I need to know more”
Positioning 2: pretty low on clarity, and it sounds as if you don’t want to hurt the recipient, so we can probably assume a certain degree of nearness
[Also: why on earth are you asking for more information aka MORE WORK from your side if you’ve already decided???]
Answer 3: “I’m fully booked until xxx”
Positioning 3: maybe on the lower half of the nearness scale, and it doesn’t get much less clear on clarity
[and again: why? They might just postpone until whatever date you insert here…]
Answer 4: “No, thank you, it’s outside my current scope”
Positioning 4: It doesn’t get much clearer. Maybe you are not very near to the recipient, because there is no promise to get in touch and “let’s see the next time”
Answer 5: “I can’t submit this bid at this time. If you are interested, here are a few recommendations”.
Positioning 5: It doesn’t get much clearer. And you show you care about the recipient by signalling that you are invested in them getting quality bids. [I mean, I do assume we always recommend good alternatives and that those are interested.]
Looking at those examples – there are two beliefs that strike me:
Does clarity equal harsh or aggressive? I think that no. On the contrary, it is possible to balance clarity and esteem.
Does clarity negate appreciation? I think that being clear and concise is a way of showing respect, in fact. You are not wasting anybody’s time and it does not need to be hurtful in the slightest.
I’d like to round this out with a third aspect: I don’t know why this is – I see a lot of people trying to counteract a perceived harshness or hurt by giving - socially acceptable, and sometimes slightly bogus – explanations: “yeah no, I’m not a wine person” when really they want to stay in this time.
Be prepared for the counter-offer! If we do this, there’s a 99% chance that (for whatever reason, it doesn’t have to be a bad one), there’ll be an amended offer (Oh, they serve beer, cocktails, soft drinks, etc, too).
We are talking communicating boundaries here. And the initial boundary was not going out. Apparently the communicated one was not liking wine. Problem solved (in the eyes of the other person).
So my takeaway and recommendation:
Do not explain your reasons, apologize for them, or give (lengthy) roundabout answers. The more fog in your answer, i.e. the less clear, the more discussions you might encounter.
Or, in other words: clarity is a way to prevent discussions on your boundaries.
Because, after all, there is the person who finds themselves in front of your boundaries. And it’s also likely that encounter some on the way. So that’s what will happen next on the blog: dealing with boundaries.
Here’s more on boundaries…
When people meet – it's highly likely that boundaries will meet, too. In a perfect world, they would slot together like puzzle pieces, I imagine. Unfortunately, the world is often less than perfect, and the automatic slotting will remain wishful thinking. Some careful alignment dances are probably necessary. So what does that mean?