boundary trifecta

Photo of me with attendees at a speaking engagement.

 

I have an important question for you to ask yourself and journal on today. Ready for it?

How often have you found yourself investing in other things that you think are more urgent or important right now than your boundaries? 

Truly. Get really honest with yourself. Think about it. 

Your answer to this question could actually solve the “mystery frustration” you’ve been feeling in your career or business. Whether it be that you don’t feel visible enough, you’re overwhelmed, you’re not making as much money as you think you should for the work that you put in, or you’ve been stalling on your next level.

ALL of these typical “business conundrums” are related to your Boundary Capacity. 

Have you found yourself reading our posts about Boundary Capacity for the last few weeks and thinking things like:

• Sounds good, but I need to sell a few more of my programs first.
• Love it, but right now I need to focus on re-writing my business model or rebranding.
• I need to work on my visibility or my money capacity more than this right now.
• I should be focusing on growing my list of followers more than my boundaries.

These are all versions of “I can’t afford to be thinking about or working on this right now.”

And I want to help you see how dangerous to your success it is to not prioritize your boundaries… or tell yourself you can’t “afford” the time, energy or money it takes to stop what you’re doing and focus on your Boundary Capacity.

Because you literally can’t afford not to afford it. Here’s how…

1) You can’t afford to keep letting your boundaries slide.

• When I talk to my clients about their Boundary Capacity, we usually identify that your boundaries are either underactive or overactive. You literally can’t afford to keep doing that. Why?
  
• Because when your boundaries are underactive you will be taken advantage of by clients. I worked with a Naturopath client once who didn’t have appropriate boundaries set around clients emailing her. As a result, clients used to email her up to 10 times in between sessions, writing long novels to her and expecting detailed and equally long responses about their health problems.
  
• When she came to work with me, she was burned out. And worst of all her lack of boundaries left her unable to take on any new clients or grow her business because ALL of her time was being taken up managing her boundary-less clients who expected her to be “on” 24/7.
  
• She was also losing money because the clients got so much from her email replies to her, they didn’t feel the need to book follow up sessions with her.
  
• When we worked on expanding her Boundary Capacity, she was able to set boundaries aligned for her (because your boundaries are not the same as my boundaries and you shouldn’t just “copy and paste” someone else’s boundaries. It doesn’t work).
  
• Guess what happened? She maxed out her practice and ended up having to move to a BIGGER office, where she found another income stream by renting out some of the rooms in her bigger office.
  
• All of this was because of expanding her boundary capacity. NOT because of a business model rewrite.

2) What do you say when someone says “I can’t afford it?

• What boundary do you maintain when someone says that to you?
  
• Do you automatically give in and give them a discount? Do you shut down, freak out and hang up the phone without discussing it with the client?
  
• Or do you realize when someone just isn’t a good fit to work with you, respect that and move on to the next thing?
  
• I worked with a client once who came to me complaining of total emotional drainage working with her own clients. She told me she was on the brink of letting her business go because she just felt so depleted emotionally doing sales calls with people.
  
• When I dug deeper, she had no boundary capacity in this area. She was doing what some old school sales coach had told her to do and was spending all this time trying to “convince” clients who clearly weren’t a good fit to work with her. (Because if someone is a good fit, they’ll WANT you to help them figure out the money part and will figure it out. Period.)
  
• After she shifted her Boundary Capacity, she told me it was the most passionate and excited she felt about her work in years, because she no longer had those draining conversations, week after week.
  
• Can you afford to feel drained by potential clients with low vibe money stories every week? What’s the long-term impact of being drained by these types of clients on your business, financially speaking? Can you really “not afford” to not work on your boundaries in this kind of situation?

3) What do you do when a client keeps changing their payment agreement with you?

• One woman I worked with had a client who kept trying to change her payment date with her every two months. She asked my client twice within the span of four months if they could stretch out the payments over more months to lower her monthly payment.
• All of these requests, took time, energy and money paying her team to change things up for the client. It was draining company resources and her to have to renegotiate the terms of their payment agreement so often.
• And then my client wondered why she often felt like she was working more than she was making or was obsessively watching the clock with every client. It was because deep down her lack of boundaries suddenly communicated to clients that they could do whatever they wanted with their payments. This caused her to drain money in her own business dealing with these constant rearrangements and then she didn’t feel well-compensated for her work.
• A few weeks after we worked on her boundary capacity she set a firm boundary with this client. (I helped her write word for word what she would say to this client. Something that we’re going to practice in the new virtual Boundary Capacity retreat.)
  
• To her surprise (but not mine) the problem client never asked for another rearrangement again. And she stopped attracting clients that wanted to do this to her for good.
• Do you have clients who try to pay fast and loose with their payments to you? If so, can you really afford to not be focusing on your boundaries in these kinds of situations? Again, what’s the financial impact to your business or career to allow people to be walking all over your boundaries like this?

The above three scenarios are what I like to call the “boundary trifecta.” You literally can’t afford to have any version of these three situations present in your business or your career. Because they will drain you, your energy, your time, your resources, and your money.

No re-branding, business model rewrite, new launch to bring in extra money or business strategy is going to help you avoid or undo the damage of ignoring any one of these things in the boundary trifecta.

But do you know what will?

Prioritizing the expansion of your boundary capacity.

I’m writing you this email because we tend to look at boundaries as “not one of the urgent things I need to focus on in my work right now.” And actually it’s one of the most urgent things to be focusing on right now. 

Not having proper Boundary Capacity can destroy your business. You can see that clearly in the examples I gave you above and I’ve seen it happen to countless clients in the past.

That’s exactly why I’ve opened up my new Virtual Boundary Capacity retreat. So you can get to the bottom of your business conundrums by focusing on the thing you should be focusing on, your Boundary Capacity.

We’ve already closed enrollment for this Saturday’s retreat. There are only two dates to choose from now. And spots are filling up for the two remaining dates.

 

In love & capacity,