For many people, the struggle with boundaries isn’t saying ‘no’. The problem is that it feels selfish or wrong and makes them feel anxious. So they clam up and feel resentful instead.
It is good to have some skill around what to say and how. But the other half is feeling OK about it: Feeling and knowing that setting boundaries is a valuable, caring thing to do.
This course is to help you feel good about setting boundaries so you can start setting them, stop feeling resentful, and let others see you as you really are.
You
This course would be great for you if
- You want to have more balanced relationships but setting boundaries feels alien and wrong so you don’t do it
- You’ve learned some assertiveness techniques but you just can’t bring yourself to put them into practice.
The Course
The course uses a combination of body awareness, perspective shifting, visualisation and practice to help you remove some of the most common roadblocks that might stop you standing up for yourself such as
- “I’ve overriden how I feel for so long, I find it hard to know what I want.”
- “Standing up for myself is selfish. It feels wrong.”
- “I’m afraid of their reaction and/or damaging our relationship”
- “Even when I say ‘no’, people don’t think I mean it.”
You’ll have a chance to
- Escape some of the traps that can keep you stuck around feeling ‘selfish’ or fearing rejection and anger
- Reconnect with your needs and identify what is a ‘yes’ for you and what is a ‘no’.
- Embody your ‘yes’, ‘no’ and asking for what you want
- Build the conviction of your ‘yes’ and ‘no’ so people hear it when you say it
- Have a plan for how to reinforce your learning in the future.
Like going to a yoga class, you will need to engage with it to get the best results.
A couple of notes:
- This course is about your ‘inner game’ – how you think and feel about setting boundaries. It doesn’t address “What should I say to person X in situation Y?” kinds of questions. Very often, once you’ll feeling OK, you already know what to do or say.
- Step by step: If you have struggled with something for years, it’s unlikely that any one class will change everything. As an analogy, one yoga class won’t fix years of back pain. But regular practice can. It’s the same here. Each nourishing step makes you feel better for the next one and the next one. It’s unlikely you will have explored boundaries in these ways before so you have a very good chance of making good progress.
