Setting Personal Boundaries

A personal space is a space where you hide your own weaknesses, strengths, pain, past, fear, etc. and a boundary is your personal space where you decide, who you want to be, what company you want to be in, what are your motives in life and who are important to you. When you set priorities for each and every person in your life it is the time when you set your personal boundaries. These boundaries show the limits regarding how others can treat or behave around you. Setting boundaries will ensure your protection against emotional and mental exploitation. Healthy boundaries are those that are impartial and reasonable and suitable for one's age and maturity. You can say yes or no without guilt, feel angry or fearful. You can refuse to tolerate abuse or disrespect. Thus, make yourself a unique personality.

Some signs of unhealthy boundaries

1. Talking to someone unknown at an intimate level. 

2. Letting others control your life. 

3. Unreasonably, intentionally hurting someone. 

4. Tolerating false and vulgar remarks. 

5. Letting others set boundaries for you. 

6. Doing something against your family morals, personal values and rights. 

7. Letting others take undue advantage of you. 

8. Tolerating mockery made out of you constantly. 

9. Passing comments without knowing the person's situation and his/her hardships. 

10. Violating other's boundaries.

Tips for setting boundaries

For setting healthy boundaries we need to keep certain things in mind. Due to fear of rejection and loneliness, you hesitate in expressing your feelings and desires. And in order to avoid the conflict and the feeling that you owe them for some reason, you constantly tolerate the disrespectful behavior, hence resulting in becoming a doormat. This happens when you are unable to set your personal boundaries. So, stop being doormat because you are responsible for how you allow others to treat you.

Learn to say No and Stop pleasing others at your own cost. When it comes to your self-respect and dignity then you must not ignore your personal needs, profits and unnecessarily agree to do those things that can harm your well-being.

Using various strategies to set healthy boundaries:

There are some appropriate ways to assert boundaries and you have to follow them one by one according to hardness of the situation.

1. Informing: Firstly we need to calmly make them realize that the way they are behaving is not appropriate. 

2. Requesting: After informing we can request them to lower their voice and try to cool them down. 

3. Instructing: In case the person completely ignores our request, then we must instruct him/her to bring appropriate changes in their behavior. 

4. Warning and demanding: Even after instructing if there is no change in his/her behavior and conduct towards us, then firstly we need to warn them and then command them to change their conduct. 

5. Lastly if there is still no sign of change in behavior then leave the place to avoid further conflict.

Be tactful in some situation, as they are worth letting go, because sometimes your actions can get you into dangerous situation, which are quite difficult to handle. For example while walking down the road, someone whistles or stares you; if you are alone, then it is better to ignore it.

As it is rightly said that if you want respect then you must give respect so, respect other's boundaries, if you want others to respect your boundaries. Respecting other's boundary can help you in becoming more mature, responsible and understanding. Hence

"Discipline yourself to do what is right and important, although difficult, is the high road to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction."- Brain Tracy.

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How to Conduct Your Personal Mid-Year Review

How often do you take the time out to really reflect on how you are progressing towards your goals for the year?

Now that we are at the half-way point of the year, it’s the perfect time to conduct your own personal mid-year review!


Why Conduct a Personal Mid-Year Review?

Conducting a mid-year review gives you the time and space necessary to evaluate your progress towards your goals.

Without taking the time out to reflect, how do you know whether your decisions, behaviour and actions for the first 6 months have helped you move towards where you want to go in your life?

Reflection is one of the most fundamental skill-sets of successful people.

If you are serious about creating your best life and making your dreams a reality, then you need to reflect to ensure you are making the right decisions and working towards them in the most effective and efficient way.
Benefits of Conducting a Personal Mid-Year Review

There are a tonne of benefits from conducting your own mid-year review.

Some of the major benefits include:

• Determine if your actions are progressing you towards your goals
• Determine if you are progressing at the right speed (i.e. will you reach your goal on time?)
• Determine if your goals are still relevant
• Understand the challenges you have faced and what learning’s you can make
• Identify more effective or efficient methods of achieving your goal

The more often you can conduct a personal review, the more effective you will become in your life.


I would recommend that you at least do a 6-monthly in-depth review of your goals. In fact, I encourage you to do it as often as you can. When I talk about these reviews, I’m talking about your ‘big life goals’.
Conducting Your Personal Mid-Year Review

Let me guide you through the process that I go through when I conduct my own personal reviews.

It is a process whereby I ask myself specific questions which help me understand exactly what I can do moving forward to work more effectively and efficiently towards my goals.


Get Yourself Setup

Before we get to the questions, the first thing you need to do is get yourself ready for your mid-year review. No, this doesn’t mean you have to dress up nicely and look pretty, it simply means you need to get yourself in an environment that is conducive for reflection.

So, to get setup:

Find yourself a nice, quiet environment
Have your goals and any other supporting materials with you that you can use to look over
Make sure you have something to write with

One piece of advice on the environment… try conducting your mid-year review away from your ‘normal’ working environment. This would mean getting out of the office, or away from your home and out into a park or somewhere where you can think about your life more objectively and freely.

Let’s get into it!

Question 1: Are My Goals Still Relevant?

Goals change over time. Life is full of surprises!

This is not something to be concerned about, but something to be aware of.

The first thing to do when conducting your personal mid-year review is to look over the goals that you have set and ask yourself whether they are still relevant.

How have your goals changed?

Sometimes when you originally set your goals the future is murky. It’s impossible to predict the future and to know with 100% certainty that a set of circumstances will eventuate. In-line with this, you may have had some clarity on the general direction of where you want to go, but now that you are six months into the year you have realised that there is a slight alternative that you are now working towards.

This is fine and goals are to be constantly tweaked and refined… this is all part of the process!

The key is to ensure that your goals are still linked to the things that you are passionate about.Passion creates the drive, energy and enthusiasm necessary for success.

When looking over your goals, it’s also good to remind yourself of WHY you are working towards them. Your goals and your life need meaning. Answering the question of why will reinvigorate the drive for making them a reality.


Question 2: What have I achieved?

Do you fall victim to ‘setting and forgetting’ your goals? Hopefully not now that you’re part of The Start of Happiness!

Now that you have confirmed that your goals are still relevant, the next step in the process is to reflect on what you have actually achieved.

How are you tracking towards your goals? What ‘mini-goals’ have you met or what smaller steps have you done to help you reach where you are?

Taking the time to reflect on what you have achieved will help you to determine whether your actions and progressing you towards your goals and whether you are likely to achieve them on time.

One of the best things about asking yourself this question is that it will highlight the behaviours and actions that have worked. This is super-important to being able to progress further in the back half of the year.


Question 3: What challenges have I faced?

When you are looking back over your progress for the year, it’s important that you also look at the challenges you have faced.

Very rarely can you reach your most important goals without a challenge being thrown your way.

Reflect on what these challenges have been. Why did these obstacles or challenges occur? How did you feel when they were presented? What did you do to overcome these challenges?

Resilience is a key factor in overcoming challenges. Understanding how you have faced these challenges and managed to overcome them helps you to build this resilience. It helps to embed the confidence in yourself that no matter what gets thrown your way you will be able to continue moving towards your goal.

The other thing that this question can raise is what can you do in the future to prevent these challenges from happening again?

Question 4: What have I learned?

Life is one big learning experience.

When you’re making progress towards your life goals you’re going to make a million decisions. Some good and some bad. One of the key ingredients that separates successful people is the ability to learn from their actions.

Looking back over your answers to the previous questions, now is the perfect time to ask yourself what have you learned from these experiences?

That is, what have you learned about your goals in life?

What have you learned from your achievements?

What have you learned from the challenges you have faced?

Taking the time to understand the key things that you have learned will help you get set-up perfectly for answering the next question.


Question 5: What can I do differently?

Now is when your mid-year review has its biggest impact. Your future.

Based on everything you have learned from answering the above questions, it’s time to think about the actions that you will put into place to make sure that the back half of the year is even more effective than the first half.

It’s all about continuous improvement! Never get complacent.

What habits do you need to change?

What extra support do you need?

What processes do you need to put in place to be more effective?

How will you address your next challenge?

This is a perfect opportunity for refining your goal and working on a specific strategy for the next 6 months of the year. You can start to map out the exact things you will do in this time to get you there.


Next Steps

There are 2 things you need to do first and foremost as next steps:
Set yourself a date for your next personal review
Write down 3 things that you can do immediately (or sometime today) to start building momentum in your life…. and go do them!

Your personal review should be a regular thing. If you can make it habitual then you’re well on your way to success.

I know of many people who write down their to-do lists or goals for a specific day, but how many people look at how those specific things on their to-do list help them progress towards their bigger goals in life?

The more regular you can review your progress towards your bigger, life goals, the more effective and the more speedy you will get there.

If you’re yet to create goals or want to go even a step back and start to look at the bigger picture in life (that is, understanding yourself and where exactly you want to go), then I highly recommend you check out our Launch Your Life Academy which guides you the proven process of making positive change in your life.

So, what are you waiting for?

Let’s make the next 6 months a ripper!

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