DIY for Your Soul Podcast - Learning to Set Boundaries

In the podcasted entitled, The Importance of Learning to Trust, we learned that trust is a skill that has to be developed. Trust is not something to be taken lightly or given away freely. People need to earn our trust. When people mishandle it, we are not obligated to continue giving it. But withholding it altogether, out of fear that we will be let down, only serves to isolate us and ultimately stunt our overall growth.

Now that podcast focused on the importance of trust; the need to become willing to accept that we need each other and that this often requires some level of trust. But, admittedly, it didn’t go into details about how we learn to trust.

But how do we deal with the people in our lives that we find challenging to deal with? How do we keep people from taking advantage of us? What do we do when we realize that we’re being manipulated?

In this podcast, we discover that the answer to all of these questions is boundaries. We learn that boundaries are simply personal guidelines we create for ourselves that define what behaviors directed at us are appropriate or not.

We’ll also come to find that boundaries are our way of honoring ourselves. It is our way of instructing people how to treat us. And if we don’t teach people how to treat us, they will simply treat us the way they want to.

So if we cannot, or will not, take on the task of learning to set boundaries for ourselves, then we will likely continue to feel victimized. But that feeling is not a fact. If we don’t set healthy boundaries for ourselves, then we’re not really victims, we’re volunteers.