WATCH THIS To Set Boundaries So You Don't Get PUSHED AROUND
Aaron Doughty explains how childhood conditioning makes people struggle to say no and stick to it. He shares stories from a chaotic Vegas event and a Cabo trip where he pushed others around, then connects weak boundaries to abandoning yourself for approval. Building confidence, he argues, means trusting yourself enough to enforce limits.
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Setting boundaries is one of the most magnetic things you can do, and having a lack of setting boundaries will guarantee that you might continue to get pushed around. Your own desires, your own wants, your own ways of being aren't respected. And in this video, I promise you, you will change or at least have a new perspective of this whole entire dynamic, know exactly how to heal it, how to have both internal and external boundaries so that it completely changes your life. Now, the first thing when it comes to boundaries to understand is that boundaries are simply our ability to say no to things that we don't wanna do and to have that respected or to at least stand firm in our own level of groundedness. A lot of times what happens when people go through a spiritual awakening or they're into the kind of content that you'd see on my channel is there's almost a feeling of empathy where you're able to feel other people's emotions. You're able to feel and know what other people are thinking. And this happens as a form of childhood energy where maybe you were able to tune into your parents to see and know what they're feeling and thinking, or your family. Maybe you had to be the glue of your family. And what ends up happening is we develop this, in a way, ability to survive as kids. And this ability to tune into other people and to feel connected to other people. And a lot of times what that is is that is our desire to feel safe, our desire to feel like we're connected to other people so that we can create a sense of safety. What ends up happening though is later on in life, we find it very hard to set boundaries with people because we have trained people in a way that the way we respond is we will do anything for other people. There are no boundaries that we set. And the thing with reality is, it's very interesting, is that people are always responding to us based on what we are putting out. So if we're putting out the energy and we're training people that it is okay for them not to respect our boundaries or that they can talk us into things that we don't want to do and move us from our own center of gravity and we let that be okay. Then in their mind it's okay and we're allowing it. There's this common thing that happens when we have trouble setting boundaries that we might blame and tell like other people are not respecting what I want or how I am or me saying no, or even if I am saying no. And the thing to remember this with this, to take our power back, is that we're allowing it. We're allowing it. And at first there could be a level of resentment This happens a lot with boundary setting is people may resent other people because they don't actually project or say what they're thinking or feeling. And for a long time, I had friends in my life that I felt like it was kind of a conditional relationship where if I wasn't acting or being a certain way, then I wasn't maybe valuable. And I would find it so hard to say no to friends. And because it was so hard for me to say no to friends, they got used to me bending. And wavering and then doing what they want. And then I would resent them or I would resent myself for saying yes to things because then I'd feel like I'm not actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm not feeling safe in my own frame and I build this resentment. And then this is why it's also common after you go through like a certain level of like starting to set boundaries, there's like this desire to say like, no, I will not do this in like a very authoritative way because there's all this energy that's been pent up and built up. But the thing to realize what this is, is that if we wanna take our power back, we must become aware that the lack of boundaries was something that we've allowed. And because we've allowed it and we've trained other people to respond to us in this way, we can now change that. We can now be in a different way. We can now choose the way our energy is. And something my shadow work integration coach has taught me, coach that I talk to almost every week, sometimes every other week, and he's taught me a lot about energy and confidence and boundaries. And one of the things he always told me that took me a while to understand is he said, "Boundaries are internal. Boundaries are internal." And I was like, "What do you mean by boundaries are internal?" Well, if you have a good sense of healthy boundaries within you, you don't have to set external boundaries. External boundaries is when you tell someone, "Hey, that's not okay that you do that. No, I will not go do this. Just so you know, I'm not I'm not cool with this. That's external boundaries. Internal boundaries is when you feel it and you know it and you don't have to set it with other people because they feel it off of you and they respect you. Now, back in the day, even when I started doing live events, I had this thing where I had, in the very beginning, I remember doing my first ever live event in Vegas and I did it with some other people and it was like, An awesome event, there were 60 people there. However, at the end of it, we didn't know what the energy was gonna be like because it was right after we all kind of grew on YouTube and stuff like that. And we're in this cool place in Neiman Marcus, it was like the Mardi Post that we had this whole event space and it was like a really cool view and everything. And we're doing this event there. And what ended up happening is at the end of the event, after like 2 hours of teachings and stuff like that, we then had like a 2-hour hors d'oeuvres were served and it was like a meetup. Meetup, and during that meetup it was so interesting because I literally felt swallowed up by everybody because I had so many people coming up to me like, hey Aaron, I want to— they either wanted a photo or they wanted to like tell me about their story and how they found my videos. But literally there were 65 people there and it was like me and the two other people I was with that were also— that are also YouTubers and stuff like doing that kind of thing. We all for two hours just felt completely completely kind of swallowed up into the energy field of everybody there that was wanting our, like, attention or photos and stuff like that. And we were, on one hand, excited to interact with everybody, and a lot of them were really cool, but at the same time, we were starving, we were hungry. At one point, I had to go pee, and I couldn't even make it to this end, this back door to go pee. It took me like 20 minutes to make it there because every time I took a step, 3 more people would come up to me. And then I take another step and I'm like, literally, I have to pee, I have to pee. And people, it was almost like some people didn't hear it and they're like, yeah, but I wanna tell you this thing. And it was a complete reflection of my own inability to set boundaries. Where I tell you right now, this would never happen now because I'm much more in my own gravity. I'm much more in my own energy. And it's almost like there's a certain level of self-worth and worthiness that I just know about myself to where that wouldn't even be set. That wouldn't even be an option for like that to happen. And it's very different the way I handle different types of energy now. And it's because I know my own sense of self-worth and I know that it's not my responsibility to appease everybody. And sometimes to just understand some people just don't have the context for like, maybe some people don't have context for where, what the situation I'm in. Like imagine being at an event and 60 people are coming up to you and in a certain energy and you feel guilty or bad about saying like, no, I gotta go do this thing over here. I gotta go pee or I need to eat some food. We had like these hors d'oeuvres and we weren't even able to eat the food because there was just so many, so much stuff going on. And some people just don't know, oh, like maybe he's like, maybe he needs like, "Eat some food or something." "Well, give him a couple minutes to eat food or something like that." Like, there's not that context there because I'm not expressing it energetically and I almost don't even, I didn't even feel worthy to even say that. I felt obligated to like just spend 2 hours like going in circles and stuff, even though my own needs weren't being met of peeing and having food. So this is an interesting dynamic that we can become aware of and understand that the more vulnerable we are. Now I'd be like, you know what? I totally wanna connect with you. However, I need to go eat real quick and I'll be back in a couple minutes. Totally excited to connect with you, but I have to pee. I'm gonna be back in 5 minutes probably. I'll be back and then leave. Like I couldn't even say that because literally other people's energy, I felt responsible for because that's normally how people that have trouble setting boundaries feel. They feel like they're responsible for how other people think and feel. And now one of the most powerful things you could do to not get pushed around anymore is, is to stop abandoning yourself and to start living according to your own values. Start living according to your own frame. Your own frame of reality is like your own sense of like you being in your body, in your own heart, and knowing who and what you are. And as you live according to that and you live according to that like credo, credo in a way, other people will feel that magnetic energy on you. They'll feel that sense of gravity and just become aware of it. Recently, I also found— we were just— I just got back from Cabo and we had an interesting— we had an interesting dynamic there because I went with my girlfriend Heather and then our friends Patty and Victor, and we were in Cabo for like 5 days. It was awesome, but we had this interesting dynamic that happened because A few of us were tired. I have a lot of energy just like naturally, and sometimes I get tired, but like I wanted to go jet skiing so freaking bad. I love jet skiing. It's so much fun to go on the open water in Cabo and just vroom, you know, like, so I booked jet skis. And I think there's a couple different layers to this now that I think about it though. I think sometimes I feel like I'm the, I don't know how much I need to go into this, but sometimes I think in the friend group, I'm like the one that like, I'm like a, I guess you can call it a controller. There's this whole longer thing we can go into. It'd be more like a podcast episode, but it's like controller, promoter, analyzer, and supporter. It's called the personality matrix. And I'm definitely much more of a controller than I am a supporter. Those are normally the opposite. Same with analyzer and promoter. But basically, Sometimes I guess I feel a responsibility within my friend group to plan everything out, to keep everybody like happy and all of us engaging and stuff like that. So I plan a lot of things. I'm the one normally tipping and taking care of a lot of different things. And I guess I just naturally feel a responsibility. So one of those responsibilities was like, let's go jet skiing. So I planned out jet skiing for like 2 days from like, you know, we were there from Monday to Friday on like Thursday, wanted to go jet skiing. And when we were planning out this jet skiing experience, when I was planning it out, I didn't really ask or think like, what does everyone else wanna do? Does everyone else have energy for this? And I just really wanted to go. So in a way it was a kind of, I could see now how it was somewhat manipulative because I was like pushing for it. And then everybody, some people were like, yeah, I guess I could jet ski, but some people may, What we learned from this situation basically is right before we're getting ready to leave for the jet skiing, my friends Patty and Victor, they didn't wanna go. They were kind of tired. And that kind of brought some stuff up within me 'cause I'm like, well, I planned it, blah, blah, blah. But then I had to understand, well, like I'm the one that really wants to go to this thing and I can't expect everyone else to come. And they were literally going to come because they didn't wanna like bail out. But what ended up happening is I realized that I was like, no, I don't want you guys to come unless you guys actually want to come. I made that very clear. And then they ended up not coming. I went with my girlfriend. We had an amazing time. And what that brought up was just like the ability to express that we don't need to spend time all the time together. That's what we've kind of felt. We kind of felt like we're all best friends. We need to spend all this time together. And what we realized is there's times where we just like, I just wanna spend time with my girlfriend and that he just wanted to spend time with his wife. But we were like afraid to like mention that. We realized we have to be more clear with each other. We have to have more boundaries in that way. And that's what ended up happening. And we got a lot of clarity, ended up being a very good thing. My girlfriend had a ton of fun jet skiing. And I, after being on jet skis, I knew they would've hated it because it was so, the waves were so big that like, it was like, vroom, boom, boom. I just know that they wouldn't have liked it. So it was like they trusted their intuition and that was good for them. But I had to become aware of my own desire to manipulate other people to do what I wanna do because it's almost like I'm such a, I'm a promoting controller. So I'm such a promoter that like want other people to like get excited about things that I'm excited about, but not everyone's excited about that. So when it comes to boundaries, the thing to remember with this whole process is are you honoring yourself and can you be in your own frame and not need other people to like honor what you wanna do in order for you to be happy? And I realize I don't need anybody else to like do exactly what I wanna do for me to be happy. And that's an internal thing that you become aware of. So not being pushed around, there's these different elements to it, but one of the things you wanna do is become aware of where's my energy, where's my own frame, what do I wanna do, and simply start honoring that within yourself and then start letting go. A lot of times there's an abandonment energy there where we feel abandoned when we're kids. Our parents either emotionally or physically abandoned us, and then from that, we started abandoning ourselves to make other people happy because we started it, we had to feel safe in our environment, and the only way we feel safe in our environment is by getting other people and feeling into what other people feel to get their validation or approval. And the magic is when you start pulling your energy back, you pull your energy back and you stay in your own frame, in your own body and you start to become confident. Confidence is a core, the more confident you feel, the easier it is to set boundaries. Now it is so much easier for me to set boundaries because I have more confidence within myself, more of an inner knowing. Remember the word confidence literally means trust, to trust yourself. And when you're living to certain levels of integrity and values, it is much easier to trust yourself. That's the magic of this is trusting yourself. Now, on July 1st to the 21st, I'm gonna be doing a brand new 21-day confidence challenge. So if you wanna find your own frame, feel safe in your own body, trust yourself, trust the universe, and also learn how to remove fear and doubt so that you can be in this energy so that you can either attract love, have a deeper relationship, or attract the abundance that you want, then join below, go to aarondoughty.com/confidence. Now is the best time to join to get lifetime access to it. We are gonna have many live sessions. What makes this different is this is about things you actually do in a safe container so that you can heal and then also wire in this new confident you so that you're completely different in 21 days from now. This isn't about passively watching videos and intellectual concepts, this is about embodiment. So if you wanna join the 21 Day Confidence Challenge, you can do so here or below. And then also there's a video that makes boundaries so much easier to set. It's one of my most popular videos on setting boundaries. Check it out here. In this video, I'm gonna be sharing with you 5, not 10, but 5 reasons you must set energetic boundaries. Now, first off, let me explain to you a little bit of where I was not that long ago and what it's like now that I have set boundaries.
