How to Discover Your Three Things To Be Uncompromising About

News Year’s Resolutions, fresh starts and good intentions always give a boost to the start of the year. They prime motivation, help slough off the old and put some spring in the step. ✅

Yet already that spring is looking a little saggy for some, and maybe a little too tightly wound for others.

An inspiring leader I was coaching this week said ‘I need your help with maintaining my boundaries. I’ve got a lot going on. Already my partner is telling me my career is all I’m paying attention to.’

She said ‘My partner and I sat down at the beginning of the year to map out our values and how we were going to run our family and lives with kids starting school and pre-school and big career agendas for both of us. I reviewed and remapped my three values for the year - 1 Family, 2 Career and 3 Self-care. It was great. We were aligned. Focused.’

‘A month in and all my partner can see is Career. Hell, all I can see is Career. Work, and yet more work.

And everything that’s happening is great, but if I go on like this not only will my relationship be in trouble but I’ll be burning out. Again.

That’s not the year I want to have for myself.’

While you’re building your career and nurturing your growing family, it’s inevitable that there will be these moments. How do you have less of them, and make them easier to manage?

Get uncompromising about the things that really matter. Let's call it good boundary management.

Megan already KNEW this, but needed help to get the right boundaries locked in. Here's my approach to good boundary management for busy leaders.

Good boundaries are easier when you SET clear goals based on your purpose and values.

Who are you and what is most important to you? Whatever you’re trying to do needs to be aligned with this or you won’t get cut through. You need to deeply feel and believe in the boundaries to make them stick.

You need to SET this foundation, like jelly – clear and firm. It’s OK to have a springy little bit of wiggle in it, because life does have its moments.

Purpose is a central, self-organizing life aim that helps us to make sense of what’s happening to us, create goals, and manage what we do. It guides our daily decisions and helps us make good use of limited personal resources. A sense of purpose helps to remember experiences more vividly and coherently. Memories help us to set goals, to manage feelings and to develop relationships. It’s the heart of your boundary-setting.

Once purpose, values and goals are set, it’s time to review the SHAPE of your work.

Goals provide the motivation to make human progress so we can advance, prosper and develop. And that’s innately human. But they are only part of the story.

Goals power the first weeks of the year. The other weeks of the year need a different kind of power.

Daily inspiration to keep your goals in sight, maintain your energy and resilience comes from two things that are perhaps a bit mundane, but absolutely essential - the right work structures and daily practices to bring them to life.

If the shape of your days isn’t aligned with your purpose and values it’s going to be super hard work to stay within your boundaries.

This is the most common misalignment I see in coaching.

Megan was already finding this. Her purpose, values and goals were crystal clear. They’d helped her lock in some boundaries - work finishing time, and time for school drop-offs and pick-ups were locked and loaded. But she could see in the coming weeks that that wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough.

To stay sane and keep work confined within her desired working hours, she had to stop doing some work, be less involved in some things, and reduce her enthusiasm for others! And make sure all her team were performing at maximum capability levels, which wasn’t the case.

Rethinking the shape of her job was important and she had some degree of autonomy to do this. She needed to think more strategically about what were the important buckets of work that only she could do, and that were critical to success this year.

Getting her own understanding of the REAL value of her role, and being able to continually refer to it when discussing expectations and resourcing was vital. Without it, she was always on the backfoot – her tendency to want to help and be responsive to others really got in the way here and she needed to be on the front foot.

What was realistic looked very different from what was expected. That meant her stakeholders needed some managing.

High achievers and perfectionists often don’t push back when they could, accept too much extra work without questioning whether they should do it, and don’t ask for help that would be very forthcoming.

Both asking for more help and saying no more often could just be the difference between staying well and burning out.

Let’s make them the NEW BLACK for leaders!!

There are nice ways to say no, as I wrote about recently. However you say it, make it an acceptable part of your vocabulary.

SET purpose and goals, SHAPE your work to fit, and then identify the BOUNDARIES that will make it work.

Megan had done well at shaping her start and finish times for work, and had also scheduled in short breaks during the day and micro breaks for recharging in the flow of work. ✅

She had a new sit-stand top for her desk, and was practicing a two-hourly standing regime to help maintain her physical and mental health. ✅

The area that she needed to tackle – again – was meetings and collaborative work. Meetings are pretty useful for collaborative work, but they are rife with problems. Despite this, we STILL have too many, suffer through boring ones, and need therapy after excruciating ones. We REMAIN overloaded with meetings that don’t work.

At the same time, I’ve noticed that in some organisations there’s a shying away from requiring people to be in the office on certain days. Now, I’m all for flexible work. But if there’s a decision to have people in the office 2 or 3 days a week, then as a leader you can, and should, identify which those days are, and expect to see people then. Identify them based on how people’s time will be used, and people’s commitments.

Get your team together to do great, quality collaborative work, and make coming into the office a pleasure.

Don’t let FOMO, urgency, lack of planning or lack of action (yours or others!) make you accept meeting invitations you should reject. And don’t set up meetings for others without a clear agenda, sufficient background information and preparation time.

Megan’s boundaries were –

1. Start and finish work times, school pick-up days.

2. No additional work to be accepted without something being taken away.

3. Fortnightly catch-up with her boss to discuss deliverables for the coming fortnight.

Megan’s boss was very supportive, and this third boundary made Megan’s approach and her boss’ support equally transparent.

It set up the workload to be something that was seen as flexible not rigid, and would be negotiated according to immediate demands as well as longer term outcomes.

She knew she had to manage both herself and her boss in those meetings - and their collective enthusiasm - so she set up an agenda template that she could repeat and use each meeting. She could use her boundaries to focus the conversation.

Having set the boundaries, then you need to stick with them….

SCANNING, staying mindful of your habits and intentions, helps to prevent little deviations from getting out of hand, which is so easy to do.

Surround yourself with cues so your boundaries are always in front of you – don’t lose sight of them!

If you feel like your control over your boundaries is slipping, ask yourself whether you are taking the time to recharge your energy regularly? Mindfully pay attention to your state – are you in fight or flight mode?  Have you got the basics of wellbeing – sleep, exercise, nutrition - under control? If these fundamentals slip, everything else gets that much harder.

Notice what you are telling yourself about how hard you need to work, when and how frequently you take breaks, how much you are achieving. Do you need to give yourself a break – in more ways than one? Are you spending enough time renewing your energy? Do you have the right support network? Are those boundaries rock solid?

Check out my short paper Build the habits for a good daily routine here if you’d like more tips on what to do.

Finally, SUSTAINING is all about the long game and this is the hardest part of it all.

Getting the foundations right is vital. Knowing which boundaries to fix and focus on is also vital.

And then you gotta do what you gotta do day in and day out for the next year.

There are going to be hazards, divergences, and stumbles and you need to work around them, pick yourself up and pat yourself down. Then proceed as usual. This is certainly not the sexy, glossy part of leadership.

Yet if you can sort yourself out a practice to sustain your personal change intentions, you’ll knock it out of the park.

This is what a SUSTAIN practice looks like:

1. A daily checklist.

Use the progress principle to power your daily motivation, using a simple daily diary or check-in process to take notice of what you have achieved. You will be amazed at how powerful and rewarding this is.

To stick with something over the longer term it needs to be rewarding. And that means you need to see progress.

Research by Teresa Amabile and others has shown that when people feel most motivated and inspired by their work is when they feel a sense of progress. People persist longer, accept challenges more willingly and are more innovative and satisfied when they feel like they are making progress.

To start with, at the end of each day, review your boundaries and how well they are working using three questions, eg,

• What WENT WELL with managing my boundaries today?
• What GOT IN THE WAY of managing my boundaries today (don’t beat yourself up about it, just notice what the friction was)
• What do I need to DO TOMORROW to make sure I manage my boundaries?

Don’t skip the first question!

As your boundary management becomes more engrained, use the technique to manage any adjustments you choose to make or any other area of personal change. When boundaries become difficult to manage, revert back to this basic practice and repeat.

2. Adapt practices.

 If it’s not working, and you’re experiencing too much friction, adapt what you’re doing. I think this is relatively straight forward, so won’t say more.

3. Keep a record of what you achieve in a journal.

This could be an extension to your daily checklist, eg on a weekly or monthly basis you might review and summarise your progress and then reflect on how it’s working out in terms of eg success at managing your boundaries, insights into how you are managing your workload better, how your wellbeing is faring, etc.

Take 5 or 10 minutes each week or month to do this reflection – recognition of achievement is empowering and will help you focus on what’s most important to you and why your boundaries are so vital to your wellbeing and success.

Whether or not you’re at a senior leadership level with the power to change the work demands and culture of your organisation, there are improvements you can – and should – make for yourself.

And that's by being uncompromising through the use of boundaries, probably about three of them.

A note on the language as I close. People will respond well to you when you share your boundaries and why they are important, but perhaps less so is you say you are being uncompromising. Use the language that you judge is most likely to create flow rather than fiction.

Focusing on a few critical boundaries could make the biggest difference to your health and wellbeing this year. Invest in you.

🤔  What success have you experienced recently in managing clear work boundaries?

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