30. Are Your Boundaries as Strong as Your Morning Coffee? ☕️

Ever feel like setting boundaries makes you the "bad guy" in your relationships? Let's change that!

In this episode of "Speak Honest," we're diving into the real talk about boundaries—what they are, why they matter, and how we can set them without feeling like we're letting everyone down. We get into the nitty-gritty of setting boundaries in our everyday lives—whether it's with our time, emotions, or even our personal space. Together, we'll explore practical, relatable ways to say "no" when we need to and "yes" to what truly matters. We’ll also share some honest stories (because we’ve all been there) and give you steps to start reclaiming your energy and peace in your relationships.

You might want to listen if:

• You find yourself saying "yes" when you really mean "no."
• You're feeling drained from taking on others' emotional baggage.
• You're tired of your personal space being invaded in social settings.
• You're constantly overcommitting at work or with friends and feeling burned out.
• You're looking for ways to stand your ground when it comes to your financial choices.

Grab a cup of coffee (or tea, or wine, or a whiteclaw!—no judgment here!) and join us as we figure out this boundaries thing together. Let's build those stronger, healthier relationships one step at a time!

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DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health professionals for specific concerns. Client opinions do not reflect Speak Honest’s stance. We aim for accuracy but are not liable for errors or outcomes from this information.

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, Jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal what's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve. Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs and boundaries without having it blow up in your face?

Then you have found the right podcast. Get ready for practical tips, empowering advice. Truths and honest conversations. Now let's dive in. 



Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest On today's podcast, I wanna get us started on boundaries. So I had a really great question in a Facebook group about this, and I thought, Hey, let's go ahead and explore this.

But before I get started, I wanna talk to you about our Facebook group. You can search for it on Facebook. It's called Speak, honest, secure, love, and Communication for Women. Or you can go in the show notes and you can check it out there. Just click on it and I'll. review after double checking your questions and just making sure everything is on the up and up.

And once you get in, you will be invited to an, a community of women that are all there to support and lift you up. It is a fantastic community. Honestly, it's going even better than I expected. It's really starting to grow and become something. And the women in there are amazing. You would love to join it.

Trust me. So come on over there and you can ask your own question and I might even be able to answer it in one of these podcasts. It's one of these days. But with all of that said, let's go ahead and dive right into our topic for today. 

So I want to talk to us today about boundaries. So here's a really great question. What are examples of healthy boundaries to set in a relationship? Right? Great question. And I love this question because it does sound like, Oh, I just can give a couple bog standard answers and that'll be easy. But as we all know, everyone is different.

Everyone is nuanced. So what are the healthiest boundaries to set in a relationship? Well, that would be the boundaries that are decided upon between you and your partner. But I understand that that answer isn't exactly helpful. So Let's really dive into this. So when I coach my clients, I walk them through setting boundaries in four areas.

Okay? So we have our time,  mental,  physical, and emotional boundaries. And I go into all of this in my 12 week program, but I wanted to give you all an idea of how this works. When we learn to set  boundaries in these four areas of our boundaries, it actually begins to be easier to understand. It's just getting more nuanced into what our issues are.

And the most important thing is to take these four types of boundaries and set them in the eight areas of life. So now I know if you've worked with me before, you probably know what the eight areas are, but this work is from Dr. Demartini, and I've went ahead and added on another area of life that I think is really important, which is recreational.

It's fun. We need to be playful. We need to have fun. But the other areas are physical.  Mental, spiritual, vocational, financial, relational, and social. Y'all didn't know you needed to grab your notebooks and pens for this episode, did you? But if you need to go grab that, pause this, rewind it, write all this back down, and then go ahead and keep up with me.

So the first step would be to do a deep dive into all of the areas of your life. Right. So the physical, the mental, the spiritual, all of them, and then use the four types of boundaries to check in and see where do you feel like you want to say something in your relationship, but you can't. And so this is where our somatic experience is also really important because when we feel that kind of familiar, uncomfortable feeling in our body, it helps us to see, Oh, Oh, wait.

That I don't like that. So if my partner keeps interrupting me every time I'm telling a story, Oh, okay. I don't, I don't really like that. So maybe that's part of my time boundary in my relational area of life. Do you see how that works? My time is kind of getting taken away from me because I want to tell the story, but maybe you're not so bothered with the time, but it's really affecting your mental boundary because it's really messy with you telling your story.

So this is where you're going to get clear. But I wanted to go ahead and explain what I find are the most common boundaries that I've seen with the clients that I've worked with so far. So the first one, the first one I see a lot is a time boundary in the vocational area of life. So your vocational area of life is your career, your job, your motherhood, your student hood.

And the reason I use vocational instead of career is because I think it's important that not everyone has a career. And it's okay. It's about what is your vocation in life and your time boundary. It's pretty self explanatory, but it's about your time. So many people find it difficult to say no to extra work or hours or projects at work.

And this leads to burnout. And so they feel Obligated to overextend themselves even when it impacts their personal time and well being. So this would be a time boundary in your vocational area. This can also happen, say, in your time boundary in your social area of life. So with your friends, you feel like you can't say no to them.

You feel like you have to go and help your friend move. You feel like you have to go get your friend pizza. You feel like you have to say yes to every party. These are you crossing your own time boundaries. In the areas of your life, and let's take a look at another one, the emotional boundary in the relational area of your life.

So the relational area of your life are those deep relationships that you hold dear, romantic family, just the really close ones. And your emotional boundary is your feelings. It's that big somatic kind of experience that you're having inside of you. So, this is particularly challenging in close relationships where folks may struggle to express their needs or say no to emotional demands without feeling guilty.

So they often take on others emotions, leading to emotional exhaustion. What does that sound like? People pleasing. Exactly. People pleasing is often kind of crossing your own time and mental and physical and emotional boundaries and relational areas of your life. It's when you want to give to everyone else, but you're not giving to yourself.

So where are you crossing your own boundaries in this way? And then where are other people crossing your boundaries? Because if you've said no, and they're still coming towards you, then you just have to say no again and again, right? This is how this works, but it can be particularly hard when you love someone.

And that's why we want to get clear on where do we want to set our boundaries. And let's talk about the third one. The third one is our. Physical boundaries in the social area of life. So our social area is more like our acquaintances, our general friends, maybe what we contribute to society. So like volunteering or giving back in certain ways  and our physical boundary.

These ones are pretty obvious, right? They're our bodies. It's, it's our physical nature of where we are. So a big one I see with a lot of people is some people have trouble asserting their need for personal space in a social. Setting. So whether it's physical touch or the need to step away from social situations, when they feel overwhelmed, they struggle to do this.

I know for a lot of people, COVID, like the pandemic, really actually made this boundary a lot easier. For a lot of people, it was like  society decided we're going to have physical boundaries in the social area of life. Right? And so it's like, Hey, stay six feet away from me. That's what the rule is. And that rule really helped a lot of people to kind of be able to have that boundary, but that's not always happening now, is it?

So we have to learn how to set those own boundaries and we have to learn how to walk away when we need to at any time. And it's absolutely okay to do that. So let's look at the fourth and final one, mental boundaries and the financial area of life. This is a big one I see. So this is where your financial area of life has anything to do with your money.

Anything to do with your finances, your banking, how you spend money, how you save money, all that stuff and your mental boundaries is what you're thinking in your head. So if your emotional boundaries are more about your body, your mental boundaries are about your head. It's about what you're thinking about.

So it's common for clients to struggle with setting boundaries. around financial discussions.  So especially I see this happen with like family or sometimes with partners, but I see this more with families like, Oh, my mom is always inquiring about my bank account or my dad thinks I should be saving this, but I want to be doing this instead.

Or my sister always has something to say about my vacations I take. So people who struggle with this, they might find it hard to protect their financial decisions from outside influence or pressure. So this is a really big one. So you want to set that boundary of like, Mom,  What I do with my money is my choice.

I'm 32 years old now. I'm allowed to do this, you know, or Hey, if you have a friend and they're constantly making snide remarks about all the vacations you take, you can set a boundary around that. You can also decide to that boundary can be, I'm going to spend less time with that friend, or if you want, you can go towards that and you can say to her, Hey, you know, I haven't been feeling very good lately when you make comments about my vacations.

I just, it's been making me feel slightly uncomfortable and I don't know what it is. It's probably just hitting a wall. you maybe stop making those kind of comments about my vacations?  And here's the important part. It's how someone reacts to our boundary that we really want to take a look at. So I know it sounds scary to set a boundary.

And so oftentimes we don't, we don't set that boundary because we don't want to hear what the reaction is going to be, but we need to hear the reaction to understand where to move from that. So before I ever tell anyone to move on from a relationship or a partner or a friendship or a family member, First, we need to take some time to set some boundaries and see how they react.

And then we might need to set boundaries about the reactions. So if you say, Hey, I don't like it when you talk about my vacations, like they're frivolous, could maybe we stop that? And they say, Oh my God, you're so sensitive. I can't believe that. I mean, it's just a joke. God, just like, take it easy.  Then again, Hey.

Remember when I told you about not liking that about vacations? I notice you're doing that again. And also, the last time I told you not to do that, you told me that I was being too sensitive. That doesn't feel good either. Would it be okay if maybe we just stopped doing that in our friendship? And could we maybe just be a little bit more engaging and uplifting to one another?

And then again, if they're like, Oh my God, you're just too much. Sometimes do you hear what's happening here? Is this about you? No, this is about them. And if someone in your life is consistently doing this, then we're going to have to have the hard talk about what kind of boundaries we can set to remove them.

But until then, you're going to set these boundaries and you're going to see how they react. And you'd be really surprised sometimes that actually people show up in really loving ways. But, as we wrap up here, what I have found is that setting boundaries in all areas of our life, and let's go over these again in case you have your notepad and your pen there, but our eight areas of life are physical, mental, spiritual, vocational, recreational, financial, relational, and social. 

It's about learning to honor your own needs and limits and communicating them clearly and compassionately to those around you. 

Well that wraps up what I wanted to talk to you about today in terms of boundaries. If you want to dive more into boundaries and how you can be better at setting them or how you can learn the different areas of life or the different types of boundaries, I'm currently enrolling people in my 12 week relationship reboot program.

I am so excited to get this up and off the ground. It is a beta program, so if you join now, you are going to get so many extra perks and at such a good price. I can't even believe I'm offering it at this price. To be honest, it'll never be at this price ever again, but I really want to get this up and off the ground and running.

So if you want to learn more how to set boundaries, reach out to me, then information is in the show notes or join our Facebook group and ask in there. It's going to be a fantastic opportunity, and I'm only taking a limited amount of women to do it. through it at this time so we can form a group, a community of like minded women who all want to see our relationships heal because I know that's what we all want.

I know that's what I wanted for the longest time and I still want it, but I'm at such a good place now and I want to be able to offer that great place to all of you as well. So please come and join the Facebook group and come and join the relationship reboot program. We would love to have you. All right.

I will talk to you all next week. Take care. 

As we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination and it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we covered today, Be sure to head over to our show notes where you can find all of the valuable information mentioned in today's episode, right there.

And please remember to rate review and subscribe. If you enjoyed today's podcast, your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover our podcast until next time, remember to speak up and speak. Honest.