Holiday Tip #3: Boundaries
I created the Holiday Tips series for ambitious high achieving women trying to juggle everything this holiday season -- closing out the fiscal year at work, coordinating holiday events, hosting, cooking, cleaning, communicating, shopping, wrapping. The mental load is extra heavy this time of year, and I'm hopeful these holiday tips will help make things a little lighter for you.
Connect with me on Instagram @execcoachleanna or LinkedIn to tune into the full series and join us for the Seasonal Support Sessions.
Hi everyone. Coach Leanna, the executive coach for Moms here, and I am back with another holiday tip, and today I want to talk about one of my favorite things to teach, and that is boundaries. And I know that when you hear that word, maybe you get a little pit in your stomach because you're a recovering people pleaser like myself, and you like saying yes to everything.
But the way that I have reframed boundaries to myself is that I think about that every time I say yes to someone or something, that means I'm saying no to someone or something else. And most of the time, when I'm saying yes to somebody else, then I am saying no to myself or something that I might need, or I might be saying no to something that my family or my kids need because I wanna say yes to this other thing or this other person.
And so when I think about it that way, then I [00:01:00] think about the fact that if I say no to myself over and over and over again, as we often tend to do, then what does that eventually mean? It means that after the holiday, I might have to say no to spending any time with my family because I'm just so burnt out that I can't get out of bed or that I wear myself into the ground and I get so sick that I can't actually enjoy these holidays that I've tried to create for my family.
And so for me, that makes it a little bit more palatable to say no to someone. When I recognize that with every no that I deliver, I'm also delivering a yes somewhere else. And a lot of times we forget that; we're just so focused on the awkward conversation we need to have or how that other person's gonna feel, how we are gonna feel when we say no, then that feels so uncomfortable
so we just we just go and say yes. But if we can get through that [00:02:00] and remember that we're very capable of having those conversations and of feeling those things, then we can also celebrate what we're saying yes to. We can celebrate our health. That we get to actually enjoy this holiday season if maybe we haven't in the past or our kids' happiness and sanity, that they don't feel like they're being pulled in every direction this holiday season, because we are setting boundaries for our family.
There's a yes there.
So I hope that's helpful to reframe how you think about boundaries and I wish you the very best in saying all of your nos and yeses.