A Split Personality Helps You Hold Boundaries

I was once in a discussion with a group of executives, and one person in the group described a situation in which her team was being asked to handle the same level of demand from the company’s customers, even though the team had been reduced by half. She asked the group, “How do you handle that situation?”

Everyone else responded with a version of—You don’t.

The question I posed to that executive: “Based on what you want from life, how much of the company’s problem are you willing to make your problem?

If I hadn’t been in a coaching role in that situation, I would have said directly: The solution to your challenge isn’t in productivity; it’s in establishing and enforcing a boundary between yourself and work. 

Of course, drawing these boundaries is tricky. Feeling engaged in our work is a good thing. We like to show up as good employees, and it never feels great to disappoint others. 

As Nedra Glover Tawwab writes in Set Boundaries, Find Peace, “Dealing with the discomfort that happens as a result of setting boundaries is the hardest part. Discomfort is the number-one reason we want to bypass setting them.”

Another challenge: It’s probably not possible to set healthy boundaries if our self-esteem is tied up with work. 

Quoting myself from a previous post: 

“Our jobs often come with frameworks for success that are emotionally laden. Promotions that confer status, performance management systems that force comparison with others, and various forms of in-groups and out-groups—all of these can slowly warp our personal definitions of success. 

As a result, our self esteem can start to become correlated with our sales growth numbers. We can start to see feedback not just as a judgment of our performance, but as a judgment of our human worth. 

In other words, work can tempt us to unduly identify with our professional pursuits, and it can create a false sense of what’s important.”

Recently, at a friend’s 40th birthday celebration, I asked, “What is one thing you learned in the past year that you’re going to apply to the next year?”

Without hesitation, she said, “To not give a f***.”

She’s one of the most accomplished and hard-working people I know, so I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean checking out at work or not following through on her commitments. Instead, I suspect she’s just drawing a clear line between her professional self and her wider self. 

It’s about being able to shift from “We have a problem” to “The company has a problem (that I’ll get to solving in the morning).”

Or, put another way, “The person listed on my LinkedIn profile has lots of work to do. The person listed on my marriage license and kids’ birth certificate could care less about that right now.”

Right after composing those two lines, I opened up my closet and realized that it represented this split personality!

Boundaries!