Speaker 1 (00:00):

[inaudible]

Speaker 2 (00:11):

Hello and welcome to the female leaders on fire podcast, the podcasts of women leading in the corporate world. He wants to be a full circuit and make a real difference. I’m your host Nicola Buckley. And in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about something that’s really close to my heart, I think is so, so important that leads on brilliantly from what we were talking about last week for self-care today, we’re going to be talking all about setting Brave boundaries and saying no. And first thing I just wanted to kind of talk about with this. It’s just, it’s really hard thing to say. No, it feels like it’s going to make you a bad person and we want to please, we want to feel good about ourselves. We want to be helpful as part of being a woman. And we’ll talk more about why that’s important in a minute, but it might mean that we give away our time, our love and our energy much too freely, uh, many women that I work with that I coach and that I help and support them to really get to where they want to be and where they deserve to be in reached that higher level of leadership.

Speaker 2 (01:12):

Really struggled with that saying, no, we struggle with setting boundaries. And part of it is down to this kind of feminine ideals of pleasing and supporting, and loving and looking after people. And it’s it’s about that. Not feeling like you can be assertive or say no, or have boundaries because actually then you’re not going to be liked and you’re not going to be respected, but it’s actually the opposite of that as we’ll talk about. So the main takeaways from today, uh, we’re going to be focusing on just really some examples of how of help clients to really say no and set those brief boundaries, why it’s so hard and why it’s we feel so resistance to it. So we’re going to geek out on a little bit of neuroscience. Um, and we’re going to talk about a little bit about why from childhood that might be disbelief that actually want to please people we want to seek approval and why it’s almost physically hard to say no, the truth about saying no brave boundaries, what it actually means, what it actually does for us.

Speaker 2 (02:05):

And then what I’m going to share five or six simple steps to help you make that course correction right here right now, to really start to be able to say no in a really empowered feel-good way without the guilt, without feeling awful about feeling like you’re a bad person and to be able to implement these things right here right now. So I think this is a really, really important episode because it’s all too easy to get stuck in that cycle saying yes, doing more overthinking over-giving over-functioning and then you end up exhausted and burnt out. And then we kind of start back at 0.1 where we’re kind of re saying boundaries. So let’s start at the very, very beginning. So really at its heart saying no and setting those baby Bree boundaries of really a reflection of your own self-worth, they’re really reflection of how valuable see your, your time love and energy is being.

Speaker 2 (03:02):

And the more that you can role model your value and your worth, we’ve saying no being brave enough to say no and being brave enough to set some really strict boundaries, the more it will become recognized and respected by others. So if you’re at that point at the moment where you’re saying yes, when you mean no, and you’re feeling resentful about the things that you’re doing, if you’ve taken on another development opportunity, because you thought it’s going to help you to be noticed and to be seen, and to be heard if you’re taking on more work or another team or another member of staff, because you’re helping and supporting someone else. And you’re kind of almost at the point where there’s nothing much left to give there’s no, not any more time, love and energy to give. And you’re at the point, you know that you’re on the road to burnout.

Speaker 2 (03:50):

It’s about respecting yourself enough to know that it’s, you’re safe to say no, you’re safe to set boundaries. And actually the more freely you give away your time, love and energy and expertise, the less it’s going to be respected. It’s almost like you become invisible. You just become part of the furniture. You’re just, it’s just assume that you’ll say yes. And that means that things will start getting dumped on you. Things will get put onto you because no one else wants to do them. Those development opportunities, opportunities come to you. Not because they’re good, exciting opportunities to develop and be noticed and do something brilliant. They come to you because no one else wants to do them. And everyone else has said no. So really at its heart saying no embrace boundaries are your reflection on your demonstration and role modeling to the world, your value and your self worth.

Speaker 2 (04:41):

So this is a huge area where you can really, really start to make some immediate progress and it can feel really scary. You’ve probably going to feel guilty. You’re probably going to feel bad. You’re probably going to feel it’s going to feel icky. It’s going to feel uncomfortable, but that’s all good. Those are all signs that you’re growing. And rather than think of them as you know, resistance, you can’t get, can’t get past instead. Think of all those uncomfortable toe curling kind of feelings. Think of them as signs of growth to sink them as growing pains. So I worked with a lot of women that when they come to me, that they’ve said yes, so long and they’ve had so little boundaries that they’re just finding it incredibly hard. They’re just at the point where they’re on the road to burn out. They know that they can’t take much more.

Speaker 2 (05:27):

They know that they’re in an uphill struggle and they’re just, they, they are not feeling their value and worth, and they’re not demonstrating and role modeling to anyone else. So I’ve had clients that really, really struggle to switch off. So they spend the weekends catching up on bits of work. It might be that they stay late on a Friday to finish things off. Not that we stay in the office now, but there’ll be working late on a Friday to finish things off so they could feel like they can relax over the weekend. I then had clients that also did some work on a Sunday, so it can feel like they’re ready for the week, but then it would end up being an hour, became two hours to come three hours fully. No it’s most of the day gone. Um, and women work in now, given what we’ve been through in the last 18 months, working longer hours now, more than ever, and examples of clients who are taking their phone to the toilet when they’re at home, because they’re scared of being found out.

Speaker 2 (06:17):

They’re scared of that boss calling in one or two minutes in a day that you’re actually going to the bathroom, but you would do that. You wouldn’t take your phone in. If you’re in the office, you wouldn’t take your phones as well. So why are you doing it at home? Just being able to reset those boundaries, especially when we’re changing, seeing how we work and all that we in the office, are we out of the office? Do we have kind of a hybrid working how we’re working in and where we work? Okay. And it wa working from home and has been this huge blurring of boundaries. Everyone’s work day different. And I’ve worked with clients that have been working extremely long hours and they’d been working and giving more. And they’re worried about being found out that they’re not doing enough, but actually what they’re doing is they’re kind of matching everyone through the day.

Speaker 2 (07:07):

They’re matching people that are starting work early. They’re matching people that are working through the normal nine to five day after school run. And then they’re also matching people that might go home and work on their family responsibilities to then work a bit more in the evening. But they’re there constantly. And they’re just at the point of burnout and exhaustion. So I’ve worked with clients as well that have a lot of Friday stress. And they really, really struggle to have a sense of just Friday when they particularly want switch off. I had one client that she wants to start a four day week. She wants to start taking every Friday off and she had her own business and this was all within her gift to do, but she was worried about clients not being able to get hold of her. She was worried about clients thinking that she was doing a shoddy job.

Speaker 2 (07:50):

She was worried about clients not being able to contact her with something that’s an emergency. But actually when we talked it through the simplest way to do this was really to, just to set those Fridays in her diary, have her VA know that she wasn’t available, have her calls forward it to her VA on those particular days to assist them on an out of office and also just email all of her regular clients and let her know she wasn’t going to be available Friday anymore. Do you know what happened? Nothing happened. And actually similar clients applauded after taking the day saying, yeah, you worked really hard. Of course have a great day. And also for role modeling her value on her worth. And it wasn’t what she expected. So on those Fridays now she loves, and she does some brilliant things. She calls them her freedom Fridays, and she goes off and she’ll explore someone new, or she’ll see a friend or she’ll work on some passion projects.

Speaker 2 (08:49):

And it’s really, really important that she went through that process. And her expectation was that she going to be seen as bad or letting her clients down or not doing what she needed to be was actually as a leader, she could decide to do that. She gets to decide to take that Friday. She could decide to tell her clients and she could decide to set up her assistant to support her and then take that Friday. And we came that time. So when she comes back into the office on a Monday, she’s had a brilliant free days off. She’s raring to go. She’s excited. She feels completely on it and she’s just enjoying work. And she’s in her element and she’s feeling on fire. I’ve also worked with, um, a client more recently, um, for that client when we first started working together, um, she’s really, really incredibly capable.

Speaker 2 (09:35):

She had quite a big team already that has her own team in a new area. So she was still learning that area. But, but she, she was so capable, knew that particular area of technology. She was then also given two more teams, it became three more teams. It became four more teams. So just to look after for a period of time whilst, um, one of her peers was unavailable for certain reasons. So when we looked at her diary and we sat down and we went through it, she was spending nearly 15 hours a week just on one-to-one sessions, supporting her team and then the wider team. So again, when we worked through it and the boundary that she needed to set was to actually make those every other week and to make those for the people that were leading those areas rather than every single person, but also to make sure those reporting lines in place so that she knew that that person was the one with the responsibility and also to have people that she needed to see have visibility of what they’re working on to have a weekly report into her, of what they were doing and how they’re doing it and where their sticking points are that they really needed her help with out of that came, that she was saving.

Speaker 2 (10:41):

She ended up saving five hours a week, every week in her work week. And that meant that she could go from just constantly firefighting. She then started to have the time to do the strategic work, which is what she was love and what she was essentially paid for. That was the bigger part of her job. So again, that comes back to role modeling your value and worth being able to say no to say, actually she did start saying, no, she didn’t take on any more teams. She didn’t take on any more direct reports and really getting those five hours a week back meant that she could go into that have that time set aside, just for strategy, just for thinking, just for doing the big projects that she never got round to. Cause she was so busy supporting all of her team and she was so busy firefighting and just doing what was needed in the moment.

Speaker 2 (11:24):

And then finding my own example. Um, when, when I was in the corporate world, I spent 16 years in corporate marketing and I was very much, I really knew that I, I had a gift. I knew that I could do really, really well and I wanted to progress. I had huge ambition, but that actually I devalued myself because I was the first in, I used to go to the gym in the morning. So at my desk for a, I was an often, the last hour as well. I was the one that said yes to development. I was the reliable one that would just be that getting done. And I would be the one that would just be the right hand woman to our art director, which was all great. But it meant that I became almost ironically invisible because it was just assumed that I would be the one to take on the work.

Speaker 2 (12:10):

It just became assumed that I would be the one that would always be there. And actually when I did go then to leave on time, it was kind of common Sedona in quite a negative way. And, you know, just jokes about being a part-timer and just, just, it was just really, really demoralizing. And I role modeled my value and worth as being quite low because I was just constantly there, especially when we got to launch time. And I would just be guarantee in the week before a big launch, because I ran multi-million pound launches, big household names. You could guarantee the week before something would go horrifically wrong and we would just have to work until it was fixed until it was sorted. And we knew that we could still deliver our launch on time and in budget. And I would just be there. I would be the person, get it done.

Speaker 2 (12:56):

I would pay the person, just making sure that the project plan will still work. Everyone knew that the training was adjusted, that the communications were adjusted, the will still signed off and approved. And it just, I didn’t role model my value in my work by saying no and setting boundaries or ask them for how so, where does this resistance come from? Why to women? Why do female leaders in co well find it so hard to say no and to set those boundaries? So the first thing I want to talk about in relation to this is just around the nearest site. So we’re just going to geek out for a minute. Cause I love the neuroscience because so often what we feel is proved and demonstrated in logic. So from a female perspective, it’s actually a whole part of our brain. That is the mammalian part of our brain.

Speaker 2 (13:39):

The second part of our brains developed kind of in the middle of our brain. And that part is all about social connection and care and love and knowing where we sit in the hierarchy and that part of the brain in women is more developed. So it’s, it’s proportionally weighs more. So it has more influence around how we feel and what we see and what we are shame. So Pitt super, simply we are designed and hardwired as women to care more about what people think of us. We are designed to be more worried and feel judged more because that part of the brain is physically bigger than in men. And it’s really the understanding that it’s this people pleasing part of the brain. That means we feel that guilt of letting people down. We feel the fear of saying no. And also if we say no, once it makes us a bad person, we’re letting people down and how dare we let other people down.

Speaker 2 (14:30):

But if we say yes to that thing that we don’t actually want to do, we’re letting ourselves down every time we do that. And then not only when we say no, we feel guilty. Well then if we go and we say, yes, we’re actually in the thing. And then you can spill resentful of Australia and either way you ruminate and you break yourself over that decision, that wasn’t the best thing for you. And that people pleasing in that seeking approval is really from a gang, from childhood and a gang. If we go back to those very early frameworks, little girls should be seen and not heard, don’t be too bossy. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be too much of anything and just fit in and just be quiet and just assume your role was actually, we should be giving young girls who were posse, who allowed to all outspoken.

Speaker 2 (15:17):

Those are the leaders of the future. That is behavior that we should be drawing out of them encouraging. It’s okay to say no, it’s okay to have a strong perspective. It’s okay to set a boundary and not once do something. And all of that wraps off and making it being really physically hard for us to say no. And how often have you gone to say no to something? And it’s actually come out of your mouth as a yes. And you’ve just thinking, is this just, how did this even happen? Has that happened to you? Are you nodding along to this that you meant to say no, but actually what it came out as was a yes. And you’re in the thing and you’re doing it before you even know it. So we find it physically hard to say, no, we’ve got a people pleasing part of the brain.

Speaker 2 (16:01):

And we’re given that framework when you’re young that we are being selfless is the way to go. Being selfless is applauded. Being selfless is, is it’s a real Testament to how much you can love someone, whereas it’s actually the opposite. So what is the truth about saying no? And the brave boundaries, the truth is really getting that your value and your worth is reflected in how easily you gave your time, energy, love, and expertise away. And it’s really is quite ironic that if you’re so available with your time, your energy and your expertise that you lose, some of the respect, you lose. Some of that recognition. You’re not so appreciated. You’re not so valued. It’s just assume that you’ll say yes, you will get all the development opportunities. You will get all the things that no one else wants to do, because you’re just assume that you’ll be there.

Speaker 2 (16:49):

And it’s quite often only at the point that you actually you’re leaving. And you’re just, you’ve got something better to go to that suits you more. That is, then that recognition comes back, but it’s really down to you to demonstrate your value worth and role modeling and protecting and reclaiming your time, your energy and your expertise and not to give it away so freely and really to role model to others around you at home and at work, your value and your worth and your bloody brilliance and your fire is in that time and space. Your fire is in the gaps in between in setting those brave boundaries in saying, no, that is where you find your fire. You don’t find your fire and keep constant doing mode. If you think about this, you’re human being, not human doing, and they will fire. You’ll find your fire in that time when you’re being well, when you’re doing it more in that feminine energy throughout from the masculine energy.

Speaker 2 (17:44):

So it’s really today, it’s, it’s really an invitation you to shift, make a shift right here right now, and really honor yourself first, because if you don’t, no one else will. And it’s a really, it’s an empowering though. It should be, feel good. No, it should be an inspiring boundary around meetings and relationships and jobs and work. All of that should feel good to you. And it’s stepping away from the sacrifice and the Martin we’ve talked about in the last episode, just really putting your flag in the ground of this is who I am. I know my value, I know my worth. And I’m going to demonstrate that by setting these boundaries by saying no, and being an example and a role model of a powerful, strong woman who is a leader, and I’m leading as myself. So how do we start to shift this?

Speaker 2 (18:30):

What are the course corrections we can start to make? So step number one is just really think about what means, what does know mean to you. What does it mean to you at the moment? Just get a journal and just have just think about it or just write down what does know mean to you? Is it something that you think feels is going to make you a bad person is saying no, gonna make you unpopular or not liked or less respected or less recognized for your expertise? What is the story of no, for you? What does it mean to you and really think about what it means to you now, and then what, what do you need to do to redefine it? Um, really as part of that, think about no is a complete sentence, because even when we start to say no, we can go into that endless justification of why it’s a no, and it’s the wrong time and I’m, I can’t fit it in and I’d love to help, but it’s like, it’s okay.

Speaker 2 (19:19):

Just to say no. And then just to stop, no is a complete sentence. And you can own that step. Number two is really watching your language. So not just the saying yes. When you mean no, but also when you’re kind of downplaying yourself by the words and the language that you use. So are you saying, sorry, almost apologizing for being there or sorry, and asking for question or asking for an update and using the word. Jus are you almost physic you almost shrinking yourself, make yourself smaller by the language that you use and really just physically practice in front of the mirror, practice saying no practice saying it while you’re standing proud, standing tall and allowed a calm, a confident voice, not shouting, but just say it and own it. And again, no being a complete sentence. No does not make you a bad person.

Speaker 2 (20:14):

No. Makes you an empowered, powerful female leader. Step number three, when it’s really, really obvious that you want to say yes, and it’s pulling your heart and you can feel it and it’s making you tingle in every pour your being. That’s a. Yes. And that yes. Means a clear no, and we can often sense it in our own body. We can often sense it in our reactions to something just whether it’s a yes or whether it’s a no. And when we say Gretchen yes to others, it’s a really clear note yourself. And why is it okay to let yourself down consistently, but never to let anyone else down again, it’s that prioritizing everyone else over you, but just remember that. Yes. Yourself means a clear no. And that watching yes to others is a note to yourself. So really think about that empowered.

Speaker 2 (21:08):

Yes. And that, that physical pole of a yes. When you’re excited, when you can feel on fire, when it’s making your heart leap and you feel your head feel giddy, that is your yes. That’s drawing you in to think about your physical reactions of that. Yes. Versus that. No step number four is all about owning your diary. So when you look at your diary, what boundaries you need to set in place, what would be a brilliant first change? Is that finishing early on a particular day, is that always making sure that you can get to the gym and your meetings only start after that, is that working towards a four day week? Actually I worked with a client for a long time and she was commuting and her commute was quite long. And for her part of the work that we did was helping her shift to a week and owning that decision making can a clear case for why it would an impact on her role and then get an agreement, which is absent, incredible when that happened.

Speaker 2 (22:04):

And then also communicating it out. So people understood that she wasn’t going to be available, but also what do they do if they needed support on that day? So own your diary set those boundaries. So what do you need right now? What do you need to have that time when you’re completely off? So is that finishing by a certain time? Is that having an out of office on to remind people when you’re available, what are those boundaries and setting them in place, but also know when you set boundaries and reset your boundaries as a course correction reaction. So people will react. People will notice, people will say something, but you start with where you are now, and then you can keep shifting it back. And know that reaction is probably just from people that have benefited from you not having such strong boundaries before. So this is their stuff.

Speaker 2 (22:48):

This is, and your staff. And then step number five is really just think about your energy and things about how you feel on with those boundaries and that saying yes or saying no, I’m really trust that intuition. So when you think about something in your diary, a particular meeting, or when you know that something is going to happen, um, there’s a particular meeting on a particular day, does it feel exciting and you can’t wait to be there or does it feel like heavy and hard work? How does it feel? How does it feel in your body? What is your intuition? And really start to trust that intuition, because that is your, that’s your heart speaking cheer. That’s what you truly, that is your truth. So it really important to just trust that and start to really encourage our intuition and start with maybe smaller decisions and then work your way up as you kind of build that trust in yourself with your intuition.

Speaker 2 (23:41):

So a quick summary there, so hope this has been super useful. I love talking this stuff, but just a quick summary, every note, and every boundary that you reset is a measure of your value and your worth. You’re really demonstrating and role modeling to others that you recognize your expertise, that you own your expertise and you value your time and your energy. So every note is a measure of your value and your worth. And every boundary is a recognition of the value of your time and your energy, and think about where you need to reclaim that time and energy. You need to reset and know that no is a complete sentence and saying yes to others is a note to yourself and think about that intuition and that instant gut reaction. So I’d love to know how you get on with this. So if you would like any more of my help, um, just drop me a message on LinkedIn are you can download my overwhelm.

Speaker 2 (24:36):

It’s on fire five sec guide, which will help you with your boundaries and saying no. And all of those details are in the show notes. And I’m super excited about next week. Get excited about everyone. But I particularly love this one because we’re going to be talking about toxic gender assumptions. And just if we’re making gender assumptions about men versus women are just across that gender spectrum, what is the danger of that? And what, how can that be quite toxic? So I’m super excited about that. That’s it for today? I hope you’ve got a lot out of it. I’d love to hear how you get on and I will speak to you on the next episode. Bye-bye.