Episode 139 – Setting Better Relationship Boundaries with Olivia Vizachero
I am both excited and delighted to have such a meaningful conversation on the podcast with someone that I love really deeply. If you’re a lawyer or know a lawyer, I hope your ears perk up because my guest today is THE life coach for lawyers.
Olivia Vizachero is a certified life coach helping lawyers who are over the overwhelm to find less stress and more fulfillment by making their wellbeing a top priority.
Of course, being massively successful in your career as well as your relationships (including relationship boundaries) are the byproduct of making your wellbeing your top priority. In fact, one of Olivia’s viral Instagram posts illustrated very simply what a boundary is and what a boundary isn’t.
We all benefit from healthy boundaries in relationships. And that’s exactly what we got to dive into for this episode.
So many of us hold ourselves back from setting boundaries because of the discomfort that we might feel if we do it. I want to lead this conversation with: you will feel discomfort. And you will be okay.
How to start implementing relationship boundaries
Early on in our chat, Olivia said, “I always get really specific with the flavors of discomfort. With the clients that I work with, and I think with most people with boundaries, you have to be willing to feel misunderstood.”
It’s such a powerful place to be when we don’t need to try to convince anyone of anything because our capacity for being misunderstood is big enough.
So, first things first in implementing healthy boundaries in relationships: what IS a boundary?
“Boundaries are never about controlling someone else’s behavior,” Olivia shared. “They’re always about the action that you will take in response to what someone else does.”
For example, a boundary you may set with your intrusive mother-in-law could be If you keep coming over unannounced, I will make sure the door is always locked.
“The reason that’s so important is that people have free will. Other humans literally get to do whatever it is they want,” Olivia said. “We want to make sure when we’re boundary-setting that we’re controlling what we can actually control as opposed to attempting to control what we can’t control, which is another person’s behavior.”
“A proper boundary is always about what you will do, the action that you will take, because you’re the only person that you can control.”
I love remembering how integral our agency and sovereignty is to our life as humans. So often I’ll be coaching clients through a relationship situation and they’re listing all these things that they want to happen, and I remind them that hey, your partner gets to want things, too, so let’s make sure we’re considering all sides. Everyone has their own agency and desires.
The role of standards within healthy boundaries in relationships
Standards and boundaries have an integrated relationship. A standard is like a voluntary agreement that we make. And I like to define a boundary as an action we take to implement our standard.
One of the standards that I teach in marriage is to create a culture where each person speaks lovingly. If it was our standard to speak lovingly, how would we use a boundary to implement that?
If we were having an argument, not speaking to each other like we love each other, maybe the boundary would be we would leave the room. Or maybe we would end the phone call and come back to the conversation when we can speak lovingly. Those would uphold our standard to always speak lovingly.
Most of us just haven’t been taught what standards are or to examine the ones we have. We walk around with standards for ourselves and each other that we might not even realize, and then feel angry or hurt when people aren’t living up to them like we expect.
Olivia shared a great observation here. She said, “A lot of us have long lists of standards. In a lot of cases, it’s really just an attempt to control someone else’s behavior.
You absolutely get to have standards or expectations of other people. A boundary has to be something that you commit to doing when there’s that boundary violation, when your standard isn’t being adhered to.
I used to date a man before I found coaching, and I had a lot of ‘standards’ that I wanted met. I’d complain about the clothes he wore or the way he styled his hair, and I now see in hindsight that he had free will. He probably didn’t want to do his hair or wear the clothes that I thought he should, and I got to decide whether or not I’d accept that.
Another thing he’d do is go out after work with friends, have a few too many drinks, and be late picking me up for dinner. I find that disrespectful and I don’t want to change my thoughts about that, so that’s not a standard I would compromise. But it’s all a matter of, which standards do I want to keep and which do I want to get rid of? It’s about being selective.”
Knowing whether you need a boundary or a mindset shift
My tried-and-true Anger Scale is one of my favorite tools for helping with so many things, but it really comes in handy when you’re boundary-setting, too.
The Anger Scale helps you decide how much a certain behavior or problem really matters to you.
Like Olivia’s client whose husband kept leaving food out on the counter… They tried to figure out if a boundary would remedy that situation. But a boundary is about taking care of yourself. And the result her client wanted to create was that food was never left out on the counter.
But when we live with people who have free will, we can’t control that all the time. She could put the food away herself, but then that’s not really a boundary issue. What she really wanted was to force her husband to put the food away, which she can’t do.
When her client said she didn’t want to divorce her husband over food on the counter, Olivia said, “Great, then I think we just need to manage your mind. This isn’t an appropriate situation for a boundary even though you have a standard for a spotless kitchen.
Just because you have a standard doesn’t always mean it’s ripe for a boundary.”
I love this, because… sometimes the boundary we have to set is with ourselves.
Get the tools to create healthy boundaries in relationships
Boundaries are a major contributing factor to the success of your relationship. If you want to stop being frustrated with others’ behavior and how you respond to disagreements or fights and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to The Marriage Mindset Makeover.
These five workshops are available to take at your own pace, so you have time to learn and implement each tool as you go. You’ll learn about concepts like always be friending, thinking on purpose, and also The Anger Scale tool Olivia and I talked about in our conversation.
All these components will help you hone your skill of boundary-setting. If you’re ready to build a better relationship with yourself and your honey, this is how you can get results.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: