You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode seven.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. This is where strong people, just like you come to have honest, open discussions about anxiety, depression, and frustration, but we don't stop there. We go deeper by learning and applying mindset management tools to once and for all break free from the pain. So we can actually enjoy our lives. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you joined us.

Hi, my strong friends, we are getting close to the end of January. How has your January been? How have you been doing on your goals or looking for new adventures and opportunities? I'm excited to say that I have seized on several new opportunities in January. I've met some amazing people and I have created two new opportunities that are starting in February.

For people that live along the Mendocino coast, I'm really excited to share that I have a weekly class that will be happening in Point Arena on Wednesday nights called 'Find Your Emotional Freedom By Redesigning Your Mindset.' I know making it out to the Mendocino coast. Isn't something that's possible for most people. So I am launching an online program that starts in February. This is called Unshakable. 

This is a men's monthly coaching program. In this program there'll be monthly topics, monthly themes, exercises, and also two group coaching calls every week to either have coaching on the topics of the month or on whatever activities, whatever events are coming up for you that you just want to talk about. And you need a little bit of help on. It creates a community of like-minded, safe men to talk to. For more information on either the class being held in Point Arena or the online Unshakable program, please head over to my website at myfreedomgrove.com to learn all the details.

Alright, so let's get into today's topic on grow love with boundaries. This is one of my favorite topics. I know that some people like to use boundaries in kind of a negative way, but as a recovering people-pleaser, I found that the work on setting boundaries actually brought a lot more love to my life. I wasn't using it as a way to try to punish people. I was using it as a way to create the life and the environment that would make me flourish and make my relationships flourish. All of this work started when I was inspired by Lisa Nichols. She's a motivational speaker that said something really important. She said, you teach other people how to treat you. And I thought about that. And all of the people pleasing that I had been doing over the years I was doing so that I could get people to like me or want to be around me.

But the result was I actually had a lot of activities on my plate. And the feelings that I was having inside was actually building up as quite negative. I was having a lot of resentment, a lot of self-loathing of myself for taking on so much. And the overall quality of my relationships was getting worse. It wasn't getting any better by everything that I was trying to do. So I picked up a copy of the book Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, to try to understand what I could do to try to make significant improvements in how I showed up in the world so that I could actually have the life that I wanted. 

Defining Boundaries

In the book they do a great job of creating a visual explanation for what a boundary is. They tell us to imagine that we have a house that has a fenced in yard and that we get to decide what type of behavior is allowed in our space? Now our neighbor, they also have a space. They have a house and they also have a fence around their yard. Now this doesn't always just pertain to neighbors. Of course, this can be other people in your life. People at work, people in your personal life.

If you imagine that everybody has their own house and their own yard, their own fenced-in yard, everybody wants to have their own particular vibe in that space, right? How do they want people to feel and act in their own space? So when you're thinking of your own house, your own fenced-in yard, what are the behaviors that you like to have around? And what are the ones that you don't.

When you're thinking about the amount of work that you do also, you can also include that in your yard. How much work are you willing to bring into your yard for you to have to take care of. Boundaries are something that I never really thought about growing up. No one had ever really had these conversations with me or explained the concept of it. And that I always had the choice of what I wanted for myself.

Why is it so hard to set boundaries? I know for me, I was always worried about rejection. The whole reason why I didn't have boundaries was because I was willing to do just about anything and put up with just about any kind of actions from other people because I wanted them to like me or I wanted them to love me. When I'm thinking about work stuff even, I wanted them to think that I was a team player and that I was cooperative and willing to go along with the flow because I wanted them to like me and find me a valuable team member so that they would always want to have me around.

The Power of Rejection

In some instances, I might've even compromised my boundaries or my needs, because I'd want to have a promotion because a promotion or having an 'exceeds expectations' on a review would mean that I was more valuable. For all of those reasons saying no to requests for me to do things was really difficult.

And these requests could either be a direct request from somebody else or it could be a request that I was making of myself because I thought I'd get this desired outcome. I also was scared to say no to other people of their actions of telling them no, that wasn't okay because I was scared of what their reaction would be when I said, no, I didn't want them to reject me or to get mad at me in any way. So I just kind of go along with the flow. What ends up happening is that while we're worried about other people rejecting us, what we've done by not saying no to these things is we have rejected ourselves.

We have denied ourself, our own self, love, our own self-respect. If we want other people to find us valuable or to love us or to respect us, we have to practice loving ourselves, first of accepting ourselves and respecting ourselves first, because as Lisa Nichols said, you teach other people how to treat you. If you're not role modeling how to treat you, how will people know that they're supposed to treat you that way? They can go along, treating you however they have. And if they haven't heard differently, they'll assume that that's all okay.

Over time, we'll start to have a lot of resentment towards those other people. As a result of how they're treating us, that resentment will start to grow so big that it far outweighs any of the positive benefit that we got by saying yes to all of those things in the first place.

The ABCs of Behavior

In this episode, I'm going to go over the ABC model with you on how people learn their behavior. And then we'll get into a couple of exercises on how to set your own boundaries. And then because we're always wanting to improve ourselves. We'll do a little section on a turnaround on how are we showing up in comparison to other people's boundaries. Let's take a look at the ABC model. So the ABC model is something that has been used in cognitive behavior therapy.

I've seen two different ways of it being defined. One is in antecedent belief consequence. The other one is antecedent behavior and consequence. The first way of looking at it, where it has the antecedent, the belief, and the consequence. That's very much so in line with what I've been teaching you about how we start off with a circumstance that is our antecedent. B is for belief. So that's the same thing as us having a thought about a circumstance. And then C is the consequence. So consequence in this first model is that you have a feeling and an action. So the first ABC model is really following what I've been teaching you with the framework.

Antecedent
Belief

Consequence

Now, the other one, this is the one that I want to teach you about today is on how people form and learn their behavior. So in this particular way, it's looking at antecedent behavior consequence where antecedent still is a circumstance, but the B for behavior, as opposed to believe that behavior is your action. The consequence is your result. 

Antecedent - The events, action(s), or circumstances that occur immediately before a behavior

Behavior in detail
Consequence - The results or responses immediately after

Okay? So hopefully I haven't lost you too much on this. Alright? So you have some type of a circumstance that happens. That's your antecedent. And then you react in some way. And then there's a consequence. The consequence is usually either something good happens, and that reinforces that your behavior was the right behavior. Or something negative happens that gives you that negative reinforcement that your behavior is not going to give you what you want. The behavior is going to give you something you don't want. So when we have that repeated cycle of you're doing some type of action, and you're either getting a reward for it, or you're not getting a reward, it helps you to choose which behavior you want because most people want to go after the reward.

So how does this work with boundaries? We want to be able to teach other people, which activities are acceptable in our little fenced-in yard and in our house. So if we look at what actions we want to have there, we would want to reward someone, give someone that positive reinforcement that that behavior is what we like. If we have a behavior that shows up that we don't want to have, we want to give negative reinforcement. I know that we've grown up all in different generations. And some people used really harsh negative consequences where it's actually a punishment, but I found that all that does is instill fear in people. And it creates a whole other mess of stuff to have to deal with.

If you stick with a reward system, instead, I find this to be a lot more loving and helpful, and people still learn from it. So when they do an action that you want them to have, they get the reward. If they do an action that's undesirable, they don't get the reward. The rewards are very specific to each individual. You have to find out what it is that motivates them. But I find that there's three that tend to work pretty well in work lives as well as in personal lives.

Rewards That Work Well

One reward is spending time together. Another one and is having an interaction of some type. And then the third one is conducting some type of a transaction. So this is usually where there's one thing that somebody does. And then once that's done, the next person does something. And then there's maybe a third step that happens.

Using these three types of rewards you can think if someone shows up doing a behavior that is not acceptable in your space, that you give them the lack of the reward as their negative consequence. One you choose not to spend time together. As long as they're acting that way, or you're choosing not to have an interaction with them, or you can choose not to conduct your transaction. 

So they've done step one, or maybe they haven't done step one and you're supposed to do step two. You can choose not to do step two. One challenge that you might feel in the very beginning is controlling your own emotions. Typically when somebody does an action, that's undesirable to you. It's so hard to catch yourself before you have a negative reaction to them. But if you're doing a conscious practice of trying to set boundaries, you're going to condition yourself to be able to recognize an action and think to yourself, that's an undesired action. I've already decided what's allowable in my space. And that action by that other person is not desirable for me. And just leave it at that instead of starting to react towards them, just try to catch it ahead of time and think about it as just, it's something that I don't want to have in my space. And then what is going to be my consequence that I give to share with them that this is not desirable.

1. Spending time together
2. Having an interaction of some type
3. Conducting a transaction
   
   

Communicating Consequences or Negative Behavior Feedback

This is where it comes in very handy to do a little bit of upfront work, to prepare ahead of time so that you don't have to do all of this mental gymnastics right there in the moment because sometimes that's just really hard to do. And we'll get into those exercises in a little bit. Once you already have your consequences decided ahead of time. In that moment, you have two options. You can either just do the consequences and not give any explanation, or you can give a short explanation and then do the consequence.

One is you could just do the consequence with no explanation at all. A person shows up in your space, they're doing an activity that is undesirable for you. You then choose to do the consequence. You walk away, you don't have that interaction. You don't do a specific activity. What happens is that the other person will notice that something went wrong in how the interaction went, because they could see that your action is different than what they're used to.

And your action is not giving them what they wanted. It will teach them something, but it might not give them the whole picture. And that's where we get into option two, which is to provide a short explanation. And then the consequence. Now, this has to come when you are at an emotional state that's pretty calm and objective. So you don't come off in a punishing type of way. And I typically don't use the word consequence with them because that will automatically make them think that they're being punished in some way, but that's not it. You're not delivering a punishment. You're just not giving a reward.

Now a short explanation can follow one of two types of formulas in the first one. It's saying what that end goal is that you want to have for both of you. This could be that you want to have a relationship that works or be able to complete a process for your job.

Then you're going to state what their behavior was that was not acceptable for hitting that end goal. And what that behavior's impact was on you. Now, remember this isn't going to be a blaming type of a thing. This is just going to say, when you acted like this, I had some thoughts about it that made me feel this way. Remember, you have to take ownership for your own thoughts and feelings on things because it really comes down to your responsibility. But that doesn't mean that you always have to be around those actions. You don't have to make yourself believe that those actions are acceptable. You've already decided ahead of time what actions are not acceptable and why. The third part of the explanation is then sharing with them. The consequence. 

Now, again, you're not going to use the word consequence because it sounds like a punishment. All you're going to do is inform them of what action you're going to take as a result of that negative behavior that you're not going to be around that behavior, or you're not going to be around them while they're acting that way. Or that you're not going to have a certain interaction with them at that time, or that you're not going to do an action that has been requested. Okay. So again, you're setting that end goal, something that works for both of you. You're saying what the behavior was that wasn't acceptable, the impact on you, and then what your action is going to be as a result.

The second type of explanation doesn't focus on what their behavior was. Instead, it's going to focus on what behavior you need from them instead. So with this, it has the same, similar three pieces to it. The first part is you're setting that end goal, that desired end state that works for both of you. And then you're going to state the basis that you do need from them in order to be able to work together to do these things. And then you're going to state when you do that positive behavior, what are the positive consequences that you're going to do. Again don't use the word consequences you're just going to say, when you do this, then I will engage with you. Or then I will want to spend time with you. I'll want to have conversations with you, then I'll be willing to do that step that I need to do.

The last part you're going to throw in just a little bit more, which is until then, which is until that behavior is what's happening, you're going to, and then it's the opposite, right? Until that behavior happens, I'm going to spend some time over here. I'm not going to interact with you, or I'm not going to do that particular step or activity.

You could try out either of those, tweak it, however you need to, to make it work. But it gives some context to people so that they're not left trying to read your mind or guess that, you know, did something go wrong and if it did go wrong, what was it? People aren't mind readers. We want to help them out. Right? The whole point is to have a really good relationship with the other person. And that takes some communication. When my husband and I first got together, we had a little bit different style in how we communicated when there was a disagreement. I don't like yelling. I don't like raised voices. I prefer to just have a conversation with lowered voices, where we can talk about the facts and then start talking about where we want to go forward.

My husband had been in a relationship where he was used to a lot of yelling. And so when we first got together, when we'd have disagreements, that's how he would show up, is yelling. And at first, I got pulled into it and it felt awful. I mean, when we were having these raised voice conversations, we usually wouldn't resolve anything. And we'd eventually just give up, walk away our separate ways and not feel that love together.

That's not what I wanted at all. Instead, I wanted us to be able to have conversations where we could resolve something quickly and we could get back to being all lovey-dovey with each other. So I had to recognize that I had to catch it right there when it was happening. 

So instead of getting pulled in, I had to think this was how he was used to having a disagreement with someone. I'd start off by setting that end goal that worked for both of us as a, I recognize we're having a disagreement. I want us to be able to resolve this and get back to being all lovey-dovey. That's something he could agree with. And then I stated the behavior that I was looking for, which was to have a conversation without raised voices. And then I stated the positive outcome that would happen from that is that then we would be able to continue our conversation. 

So once we were speaking in regular tone voices or regular volume voices, we could go on and have the discussion and until then I chose to not have the conversation that I would actually remove myself from the room until we were able to have that conversation. And it wasn't fun for either of us like relearning and trying to train ourselves on what would work for both of us. But we eventually got there. Let me tell you, there's still disagreements that happen. We have a great marriage and we still have disagreements from time to time, but now we know how to approach it, and we can try to resolve it a lot faster and get back to just loving on each other. It's pretty great.

Workplace Boundary Examples And How to Respond To Them

I have a couple of work, examples that I think most people can relate with. In my early adult years, I was working in a customer service type of industry. So one, I was looking at building repairs for state buildings, and another one I was working where people would come and get their film developed. And in both instances, there would be times that I would get customers that were really angry about something. So I remember one specific incident where there was a man that was really angry that had a pipe leak in his building, and there was water going everywhere. So he called up and he's screaming at me over the phone.

I wanted to be able to help him, but I needed to get certain information from him. And instead of him being able to convey that he was just screaming about what was going on. And so I had to do one of those conversations of saying, I really want to be able to help you. I need you to be able to talk with me calmly and give me some pieces of information so that we can make this happen. You're not able to do that right now. Please call me back when you are. And then I hung up and I know that sounds pretty harsh to just hang up on someone as he's still yelling at me, but it was something that needed to happen. He needed to know how to be able to talk with me because otherwise, we would have been on the phone for 20 minutes without any resolution.

So the man called back three more times and I had to repeat that same thing over to him. And I felt kind of bad doing it, but I knew that it was what needed to happen. When he called on the last time, he stated calmly what he needed. And we were able to get it resolved right away. I had the same thing happened when I was developing photos for people, I had someone come to the counter and whatever he had going on in life at the time, he was really stressed out and he had never talked with me before and I had nothing to do with why he was upset. But the way that he showed up was in a pretty irate way. And I had to establish some boundaries with him, again, doing the same thing as sir, I really want to help you, but I need you to talk to me this way.

And until then, I'm going to go help this customer out. He didn't like that, but he learned pretty quickly and he saw how the other customer interacted with me and how helpful I was being. And he wanted to have some help too. So he was able to change his behavior pretty quick to be able to have that great working relationship together.

Exercise 1: Define Your Own Boundaries

So how do you start figuring out your boundaries? The first step would be listing all of the behaviors that don't work for you, you know, so imagine you have your house, your fenced-in yard. When people come into that space, what activities have you observed in the past? What actions that other people have taken don't work for you and write all of those down, jog your memory. Start thinking when in my work life have people shown up in a way and what specifically were those activities? Try not to get descriptive where you're just using adjectives, like, well, they were rude to me. You need to be very specific of what did rude look like.

• Was it the volume that they used? 
• Was it the tone of their voice? 
• Was it hand gestures? 
• Was it the way that they moved a certain object? 

Because when you go in, you're trying to talk with someone about it. You have to be that specific so that people know what actions are acceptable and what actions are not. If you come at them with, when you were rude to me, they're not going to know exactly what that was. And they'll probably get more defensive than anything. Once you've listed out all of the ones from work examples, then think about in your personal life. What are some of those activities in your personal life, where someone has done something, an action that didn't work for you?

One workgroup that I was coaching had a transactional type of process where something wasn't working and it was because they didn't have the right boundaries set. In this example, a requester would need to submit some paperwork to get an activity to happen. The paperwork had all sorts of different fields that need to be filled out and they needed that to be correct. What would happen is that people wouldn't know the right things to put into that paperwork, or they make a lot of errors on their paperwork, or they wouldn't turn it in at the time that they needed to. So the requester's would turn in these as I call them bad inputs and that's step one of the process.

Step two would be that the other group would need to take that request and process it. What was happening was that, that group, because they all had really big hearts, they wanted to help and do their part and make sure that the process would run really smooth and hit the due dates easily, that they would make up for these bad inputs.

They would do all of the corrections themselves, or they'd set up extra meetings to go and learn more from people so that they'd have all the information that they needed. This resulted in a lot of extra work on their plate. This was not the work that was required of them. This was extra going above and beyond. They prided themselves in doing this because they saw themselves as the experts in the field and giving really high, great customer service. The end result though was, this group was really disgruntled.

They had a lot of resentment towards so many people because there are requests coming in from all sorts of different requesters. And they were feeling really worn out with the amount of work that they had to do. When I asked them why they didn't just return it to the requester and tell them that no, there were errors, maybe point out what those errors were. They shared, that they would feel bad about doing that, that they would be seen as being mean or that they weren't team players, or that they weren't giving good customer service.

I'm sure many of us can relate with a story like this because we have a lot of our own internal thoughts and feelings that we're generating for ourselves. So with this group, we had to do a little bit of mindset work first, before they could even set the boundaries. And I find that doing a little, return on investment or a cost-benefit analysis, helps in making those tough decisions.

You have to think about one of those old-fashioned scales, where on the left-hand side you're putting on all of the different weights. So this can be all of the workload that you're taking on all of those extra negative feelings that you might be taking on. And then on the right side, that part of this scale, you're putting the benefit, how much love and appreciation or pride, those positive feelings, how much are you getting in return?

Put those on the scale and see which one outweighs the other. The one that is the heaviest is the, is the one that's winning this war, right? And so if that turns out to be the right side, which is your benefit if your benefit outweighs the cost, then sure continue doing what you're doing. But for this group, the cost of what they were doing was so significant to this group that it far outweighed the benefits, but it wasn't until they saw that written out that they could get that handle on, Oh, maybe this isn't a good thing. Maybe, maybe what we're trying to do. Isn't giving us enough in return that we're willing to set boundaries.

So they actually put in place some metrics to measure how frequently things were not coming in as good input. And they did start doing a return practice. And what they found was that their requesters, they didn't even know that there was a problem, right? Because the boundary had never been set. They'd just turn in whatever. And that, since they never heard that that was a problem, they just continue going about their business. But now that they knew that something wasn't working, something wasn't acceptable, they could make the choice on if they were going to submit something at all that had a whole bunch of errors, or if they would take the time to make sure that their input was good before they put it in. 

The final outcome after a couple of months for that group was really positive. Both for the requester's and for the group. What they found was that they were getting good quality inputs and things were going a lot faster. It ended up being a win for everybody. Coming up with boundaries it's not controlling someone else's actions. You're just letting them know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to you, and that all of the actions are yours to take. You're choosing to not be around that person or have that conversation or do that next process step. Those are all of your actions. The other person is still fully allowed to have choice on what they're going to do, but they also know what the outcome will be as a result of their choice. 

Exercise 2: The Behavior Exercise

This is going to lead us into our next exercise. With this one, you can make a list of specific people. Now start to list out what are all of their behaviors that don't work for you. Some people might have a list that only has one or two things. Some people may have really long lists. Now for this exercise. I want you to pick one behavior, just one, and circle it, right? So you can choose to do multiple people at the same time but for each person just circle, what is one behavior that is really, really not working for you. Circle that one.

And again, make sure you're very specific on the activity itself. Is it a facial gesture, particular words that they say, an action that they do. And then think about how would you go about letting them know that that is not a desired behavior? What type of consequences would you have when that behavior comes up? 

So remember their behavior is their choice. They get to do whatever they want to do. You get to choose, how would you respond when they are having that? So they've come into your space, into your house, your fenced-in yard, and they're having this behavior. What consequences are you going to have for that person? Are you going to ask them to leave? Are you going to remove yourself? Are you going to disengage? Are you going to not do specific activities? And then think about what is the behavior that you would want them to do? 

And if they were to do that opposite behavior, what would be the positive consequence. Is this that you're going to stay around them. Maybe give them a hug, give them a high five, let them know that you really appreciate that behavior. It has to be something really noticeable. Because in order to get people to do the behaviors that you want to, they need to have some kind of indication that one, it was something that you really wanted and two they need to get that positive bump, that little dopamine hit of that this was something great and wonderful. The more that you can give that positive reinforcement for the things that are working, the more they're going to give you that behavior.

Now, the reason why I said to just pick one behavior a time is change is really hard for people, and change for you is also going to be really hard. Especially if you're working with someone that might have a negative reaction to you setting boundaries. If you try to pick more than one behavior all at the same time, you're going to overwhelm yourself. And you're going to have a hard time sticking to those consequences because you need to make sure that you're consistent in applying that consequence. Because if all of a sudden you have a different action, it's just going to confuse them. They're not going to know if that's okay or not okay. But if it's consistent on how you're showing up, they'll know for sure if their action was okay or not okay. It's also important to know that it'll probably take several times before anything changes. 

You know, you're not guaranteed that their behavior is going to change. That's one thing to really keep in mind. So when you're thinking of what these consequences are, pick something that really works for you because you're going to have to be consistent at it. And it has to be some, some activity that you do. That's going to allow you to still have your peace and your serenity, wherever you're at, that person might not ever change. So figure out what is going to work for you in your own space.

The Turnaround, Receiving Behavior Feedback

Now let's do a little turnaround. There's going to be times when you are violating someone else's boundaries and you don't even know it. I'm going to go back to how I shared at the beginning that no one had ever really talked to me about boundaries or said what they were. So I wasn't really paying attention and being conscious of what was going on around me. Other people might be doing actions to try to let me know that I was stepping over the boundaries, but I didn't really know. If they had conversations with me that helped clue me in.

But if they, we just did an action, I might just be left, confused, or having thoughts about them or judging them for their actions. So with that one, I'm going to share, I used to work in a shared space and this was new environment that our company was trying out. And we had a lot of stuff to try to work out. We had a group of introverts and extroverts. And me being an extrovert I tend to talk quite a lot or share a lot of my ideas. And I love being around other extroverts that bounce those ideas around with me too.

What I wasn't aware of was that for some of the folks in that area, they were introverts and how I was acting in my normal character that seemed to work for a lot of other people, really wasn't working for them. What I observed was with one particular individual is that, in the middle of a conversation, he'd just hold up a hand and then get up and walk out of the room.

I was so confused and no idea what was going on. All I could tell was he didn't want to be there anymore, but I didn't know why? I wasn't able to correct my behavior or change anything. So I wasn't sure if it was something going on with him. I didn't know if I had done anything wrong. So when you're doing this turnaround, take a look at how other people are acting, right?

So if we're thinking back to the consequences that we might have for someone where we remove ourselves, or we don't engage in a conversation, or we don't do an activity. Pay attention. If other people are doing those same things, it might be because they're trying to teach you that you have violated one of their boundaries.

One of the other things that I observed is that I had someone that worked in the same space. They didn't always set their boundaries and keep them. What I observed is that when I would be talking with this person and sometimes the conversations would go a little long, he would be shifting from foot to foot or looking at the clock quite a bit. And sometimes I would pick up on those cues. And sometimes I wouldn't. In both of these instances, people were trying to convey to me that how I was showing up, wasn't working for them.

Now it might not have been that my activity was super bad, right? For other people, it might've really worked, but for these particular people, it didn't work. And this was their space too because this was a shared space that everybody had to be in it. Because I had been doing a lot of boundary work I started to recognize that maybe I was the one that had the undesirable actions.

And so I just came straight out and I asked them, but in a very collaborative, supportive type of conversation. Where again, I set that end goal of, 'Hey, I really want us to be working really well together. I know we're in this shared space. We might have some different approaches to things, and then I'd state, I noticed that you held up your hand and you walked out of the room and I wanted to learn more about that. Was there an activity that I did or an action that I did that didn't work for you?' And by opening that up, it allowed someone who might not have felt comfortable having that conversation to share.

And the same thing with the other person who was shifting back and forth and looking at the clock, I started to get more practice added of noticing that that would happen. And I had stopped myself and I had asked, 'is there somewhere that you need to be, or do we need to stop the conversation?' And this allow the other person to say yes. And I could tell that he was pretty uncomfortable in speaking up for himself about it, but it was something that he really needed.

By doing both of those actions of asking the other people with curiosity, it showed respect to them, and then they could also show some respect for themselves and speak up for themselves. Boundary setting and communication is not easy. It can be really, really uncomfortable, but the effort is so worth it because then you learn how to treat each other. And again, it's not to be used as a blaming or threats or anything like that. You're trying to grow the respect for yourself. 

And for the other person, you're trying to teach yourself how to have some self-love, some self-compassion while still, also showing love and compassion to the other person. Relationships that seem to not be working, this might be one of those very reasons why. And if you go through and you do those exercises that we went over, you try to have those very specific conversations and you practice it over and over and you're consistent and it's coming from a place of positivity, you can definitely change your environment and have what you want. I hope you found this really helpful. Like I said, this has been one of my favorite topics because it's made such a profound difference in my life and the people around me it's made their lives a lot better too. Not just mine. I hope that this can help you in all aspects of your life.

With that. I just want to remind you again about those classes that I have coming up in Point Arena in California and the online Unshakable Men's monthly coaching program. Both of those you can check out from my website and until next week, have a wonderful time. And I'll talk to you soon. Alright. Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. I hope this podcast provided you some relief and some inspiration. If you know somebody else that can benefit from this podcast, please share the link with them together. I know we can make a difference. To access more podcasts and offerings, please visit MyFreedomGrove.com Until next time, take care of yourself. This world needs you.