The skills you need when the boundaries won’t stick
Recently, I wrote about what resilience is and isn’t, if you didn’t get a chance to read, to recap, resilience isn’t the ability to keep on keeping on. It’s the ability to be flexible in the face of challenges, and bounce back – it isn’t working through chronic stress, it’s the ability to manage acute stress.
And this is an important distinction to consider when you work in a busy organisation where the resources available to meet the endless demands are limited, especially if that work is personally meaningful to you. In this situation it’s easy for the work to become all consuming, to lose sense of where work ends and you begin.
You’re told to delegate more, to say no, to set better boundaries and prioritise rest & self-care. And whilst I agree with this advice, the how to do these typically focusses on the practicalities, not the why this is difficult in the first place.
This is a problem.
Because when we tell people they just need to say no, set better boundaries and practice self-care, and they struggle to do this, we’re placing the responsibility for the impact on work on them as an individual without helping them develop the skills which will actually enable them to do these things, because when work is purpose-led and meaningful, saying no, often means you feel like you’re letting someone down, leaving you experiencing guilt and anxiety. As a society, we’re taught to do whatever we can to avoid these uncomfortable emotions, and so you do whatever to can to do just that; you stay late, you say yes automatically, you stop meeting your needs, even when you want to.
And as a result you find yourself living on autopilot, constantly reacting, waiting for one day when it’s quiet and you can get on top on work, and actually start doing what you want to do.
The trouble is, one day will never come.
On top of this, you’ve been sold the lie that working longer, pushing through, not taking breaks will make you more productive, and will enable you to have the impact you want to. But it won’t. It will make you less productive, because when you don’t take breaks it’s harder to think clearly, creatively, and problem solve. It makes decision making and risk assessment harder. And it makes you more likely to make mistakes.
The thing we’re told to do to have the greatest impact, in fact makes that impact much less likely because we’re not working efficiently and we can’t think strategically when we don't stop.
But this doesn’t mean it has to be like this.
There is a solution, it’s just one that you’ve never been taught. Instead of focussing on the boundaries, we need to focus on building the psychological skills which enable you to do this. The good news is these are skills we can all develop, and maintain, the even better news is that these are the skills which support your resilience building as well.
So today, I want to give you a quick overview of these skills, and over the coming weeks I’ll show you how each of these will help you and how you can start to develop these skills.
These skills fall under the umbrella of psychological flexibility, which really just means being able to be present in this moment (so getting out of that autopilot or reactive way of working), being clear what is important and using this to guide the decisions you make in work and life, so you are choosing your responses, not getting caught up in the emotions which might push you off course (hello procrastination).
Here are the six processes we’re going to be thinking about, and it’s important to remember that these aren’t steps to work through, but interrelated processes, so developing one has a knock-on effect with the others.
Values. Knowing what we value and what matters to us is important because it helps guide the choices we make, they’re like our compass. But when we do work which is meaningful, it’s easy to lose sight of everything beyond the mission, making the automatic yeses more likely. But having these to guide us also helps when we might find ourselves avoiding tasks which feel hard, or procrastinating over things.
Being Present. Getting out of autopilot means we need to get into the present moment. This can be challenging to do when we’re so busy, or where there is urgency, that pull to keep going means it feels counterintuitive to slow down and stop. But when we pause, even momentarily, we can see our thoughts, emotions and actions more objectively, helping us to stop being reactive and start being both proactive and strategic.
Acceptance. Making a proactive choice to accept the things which may feel uncomfortable also feels counterintuitive, especially when we’ve been taught to avoid uncomfortable things. But doing this means we expend A LOT of mental energy trying to supress these feelings or arguing with ourselves. When we choose acceptance, we’re enable ourselves to put that energy into solving the challenge we’re facing, and step into that strategic work.
Thoughts Aren’t Facts. It’s easy to believe everything our brain tells us, “I’m letting people down”, “I’m not cut out for this”, “I’m not resilient enough”, and these thoughts drive both our emotions, and our actions. But these are just our brains giving words to the things we fear or are worried about, and are an indicator that what you’re doing is something you value. We can’t get rid of these thoughts, they’re there, but we can look at them objectively, and ask what else can be true.
The Stories You Tell. We all have stories we tell about ourselves, “I’m strong”, “I’m no good at public speaking”, “I don’t give up”. These can be very helpful, but if we hold on too tightly to these stories, they can get in our way and hold us back. If we tell ourselves we’re strong, then asking for help can feel like a sign of failure. We don’t need to change these stories, we just want to be able to create a little bit of distance from them, so we can relate differently to them.
Committed Action. This is about how we choose our actions and responses as we develop these other processes, we start to work and live more intentionally, and less reactive. And we can act in ways which may feel uncomfortable, because we know this is service to our values (like those difficult work conversations which get put off).
And the bonus of
7. Naming Emotions. To do all this work it’s important we have emotional literacy, we know what we’re feeling, we can name it, and understand why this emotion is surfacing, so I’ll cover this too.
Whilst building these skills isn’t a quick fix, they are skills that will genuinely change not only how you work but how you feel about it. And unlike the advice you've been given before, they address the actual problem, not just the symptoms.
So, over the next seven weeks I’ll take one of these processes, we’ll explore what it is and how you can start to develop it.
And if you want to talk about this in a bit more depth, I’ll be running a free masterclass over the next three months where we’ll explore what this can look like in practice, you can register here.