People who do not respect your personal boundaries do not care about you. Life is too short and there are enough nice people to have to deal with people who sap your energy.

There are people at work or in your life that continuosly do things to rock your boat and piss you off. You want to tell them what is on your mind but you do not like conflict or are afraid of ruining the relationship. There is a way of setting and enforcing your boundaries with these people.

This process calls for calmness, persistance and preparation.

Before confronting the offender, you need to decide what is the thing the other person is doing that annoys you the most. Once you have determined this, write down the times and situations when the other person did the behavior in question. Record as many details as possible about the incident. Things like when it happened, what was said and how it made you feel. The key is to have the other person hear and understand your concerns and not get defensive

Prepare for the discussion well before the actual confrontation. If helpful, script or outline the discussion following the format of listing the behavior, when it occurred and how it made you feel.

When you meet with the individual, make sure that it is in neutral territory. If it is held on your territory, the individual will feel attacked and go on the defensive. If it is held on their territory, you will lose the advantage. Get a place where both of you can relax and discuss things.

When verbalizing the points, use “I”statements. Verbalize to the person how you felt when the specific behavior occured. For example, “When that occured I felt hurt and deceived.”

If the person says that they did not do the behavior, calmly cite the specific instances that occured.

After citing the behavior, the specific times it occurred and how it made you feel, state that you will not accept the behavior any longer and if it keeps on occuring, you will be having another discussion with them.

The real test of your boundary will occur after the meeting. If the other person continues doing the discussed behavior after the meeting, call them to the side and reinforce that you will not accept this behavior and that you will continue to call them on it.

Remember that life is too short to deal with people who don’t value or respect you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Advice, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.