Tim Arrigo recounts a client interaction to argue that we're often stricter with others than ourselves. He explores how we fail to enforce our own boundaries while demanding others respect them, and why self-discipline and accountability matter more than we admit.
Having a conversation with a client earlier today, and he says, man, I get upset because people don't respect my boundaries. And I said, the irony in that is that you don't get offended when you disrespect your own boundaries. So you're getting offended that people disrespect your boundaries, but yet you cross your own boundaries every single day. A boundary is a guideline, rule, or limit that a person creates to identify reasonable, safe, and permissible ways for other people to behave toward them. See, but yet we haven't even established, some of us, the guidelines, rules, and limits in our own life to create reasonable, safe, and permissible ways for us to behave toward ourself. We don't get offended at our lack of discipline, our lack of focus, our lack of drive, our lack of ambition. We don't get offended at our procrastination, being paralyzed by fear, our negative habits, our self-destructiveness. But yet we get offended at what somebody says to us before we have an expectation that other people are going to respect our boundaries, why don't we start respecting our own?
