Many clients come to me in despair with problems and issues that actually belong to other people – partners, children, friends, family members, work colleagues. Often they’ve tried to get these people to change their offending behaviour and failed. And therein lies the problem. We can’t change other people, nor do we have any right to. People will change if and when they want to and not a moment sooner.
So what can we do if other people’s behaviour is affecting us in a negative way? Although we can’t control someone else’s behaviour, we can control what behaviour we allow in our personal space. We do this by creating boundaries. Boundaries are imaginary lines that define what other people are allowed to do to us and around us.
Here’s an example. Jane hates cigarette smoking, but her best friend Lisa smokes a packet a day. Jane cannot change Lisa’s behaviour and insist she give up smoking. But, she can set boundaries around how Lisa’s smoking affects her. Her boundaries are that Lisa cannot smoke inside Jane’s house or in her car.
For boundaries to work, people have to know about them. Here is a step by step process to deliver your boundaries.
Step 1: Inform the person about your boundary. Eg, I don’t allow people smoking inside my house.
Step 2: Request that they honour your boundary by changing their behaviour around you. Give them suggestions of how they could make it better. Eg, If you want to smoke at my house, I would like you to smoke outside.
Step 3: Insist that they keep to your boundary. (This step may not be required. Often when people know that they are doing something you don’t like and they have been given an opportunity to make it right, they will.) Advise the person of negative consequences if they don’t honour your boundary. Eg, If you are not prepared to smoke outside, you are not welcome in my home.
Step 4: Follow through with negative consequences if the boundary you have set has not been honoured.
It is human nature to test boundaries, so don’t give up if your boundary setting is not successful immediately. The step by step process may need to be repeated before the person realises you are serious about the new boundary.
Lastly, for boundaries to be effective they also need to match your own personal standards. It is pretty difficult to enforce a boundary, which is “do as I say, but not as I do.”
