Enforcing Boundaries: Taking Responsibility for Self-Respect and Personal Empowerment

I used to get really freaking pissed off when I felt like someone disrespected me. You know, didn’t appreciate me, uh, took advantage of me, um, took advantage of my time, all of these things. And eventually I realized that I actually wasn’t pissed at them. I was pissed at myself. Because those feelings come up of, like, feeling like someone disrespected us when we set a boundary and they betray that or they go over it, or they ignore it or they disrespect it. But here’s the deal. It’s not their responsibility to enforce a boundary. It’s yours. It’s yours. And so if you set that boundary and they cross that line and you do nothing about it, then it’s you who has disrespected you. It is you who has crossed that boundary. It is you who has failed to enforce that boundary. And I’m dealing with this this weekend. So a big part of, like, what I do and what I advise my clients to do is make sure that you are designing your business around the kind of life that you want to lead. And for me, that means protecting my personal time, giving myself plenty of time to wind down, to recoup, to spend time doing things that feed me personally, not just my bank account. And I hosted this master class on Friday, and I didn’t take my own freaking advice, and I let people. I opened up my weekend for a bunch of people. To book calls, to explore if we wanted to work together. Like, yeah, they’re basically sales calls. And I thought that that was, like, a smart move of I’m going to make it easier for them and easier for me to make more money. And I had six people book calls over the weekend. Um, so far, four of them. Excuse me, three of them have been no shows, and one of them, um, just canceled the call. So I basically set aside my whole freaking weekend to wait around for people to not show up. And my first instinct was to be really freaking pissed at them. Um, particularly because my show up rate for sales calls is usually really, really freaking high. Um, but as I sat with that, I just went and went for a walk to try to, like, decompress this from this. And I realized I’m not mad at them. I’m mad at me. I’m mad at betraying my own values, undermining my own sort of guardrails of how I lead my business and how I build a business that lets me have the kind of life that I wanna have. And I’m saying all of this to you because it’s actually really, really common in my comments that people talk about how frustrating it is when people disrespect them. And so it made me really think about this and about how I view those comments typically. And usually the way I view them is It’s not up to someone else to enforce some sort of boundary that shows that they respect you. And yeah, it sucks when people disrespect us, but what sucks more is when you do nothing about it when they do that, and you make no changes in your life as a result when they do that and you just accept it. And so this is obviously a lesson Learned for me. But I’m curious for all of you is there’s someone in your life that is making you feel disrespected. What are you gonna do about it? Instead of sitting around waiting and hoping or trying to convince them that somehow they should enforce the boundary that you have set?