Boundaries Lead to Better Business: 3 Tips
Emily Soccorsy
Endlessly curious about how humans make meaning ?? Obsessed with tea, journals, and reading voraciously ?? Committed word nerd turned soulful brand strategist
When I started my first business in 2011, I entered with a boundless mindset.?
My working hypothesis on how to be a successful entrepreneur (although I wasn’t ready to even think of myself that way) was to say yes to everything that came my way.?
If people wanted to hire me for a project within my skill set, I would say yes and see what I learned.?
When I look back now at my first few clients, I cringe. They were not remotely the sort of projects – or collaborators – I would agree to now. There were misalignments with the people and with the businesses themselves – not to mention not a lot of joy on my part with the work itself.?
Nevertheless, I learned powerful lessons about myself, about the work I wanted to do and about who I wanted to work with. Even though I had to fire one of those clients later on (an awkward, difficult, and empowering, experience) I remain very grateful to those early clients. They believed in me! They gave me the honor of their trust! They invested in a fledgling version of entrepreneurial me.?
More than a decade later, I know this is how a lot of businesses begin.?
We enter with a giving mindset. The work we do is a giving of oneself. It’s lovely we give of our time, our expertise and want to do so, at first, without limits.?
And yet. One of the gifts of maturity is that we realize we are not boundless. We learn that boundlessness can lead to breakdown.?
We also realize, as a good friend reminded me recently, that working for and with someone is, at its essence, an exchange. It’s a transaction – and that’s not a demeaning construct. Transaction is literally an exchange of goods or services, “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other.”?
I want to be reciprocally influenced by the work I do, and I want to be valued.?
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And since those things are true, I also want to do it with boundaries.?
How do we have boundaries as empathetic people in business?
Here’s how:
Lastly, be direct and clear about your boundaries by committing to showing up as yourself. Don’t snow someone – or yourself – into thinking you are someone you’re not or can do something you can’t.
Believe me, it’s far easier to be open and clear about who you are than to deal with the messy complexities that come with bending yourself into a shape that someone else wants to see you in.?
Boundaries in business allow us to preserve who we are, they give us the ability to build constructively around ourselves. They give us the ability to tend to our capacity.?
And boundaries around what we will or won’t do help us preserve our sanity as we expand our work and grow our practices.?
Emily Soccorsy is owner and lead brand strategist of Root + River, a brand strategy team that believes brand is how others experience your soul. Root + River provides brand messaging, language, positioning and catapult content for brands, leaders and teams who want to change the world, their industry or their community with their brand. She's also a speaker, and an award-winning writer, who feels most alive when creating word alchemy or visual art. Emily is the co-author of Rooting Up: Essays in Modern Branding and is the author of the newsletter, Thought Cookie. Emily has been a lifelong empath, and a daughter, mother, partner, sister, mentor, creator and sometime baker and runner.
She is a board member of Ellivate Alliance, The W Source?, Rosie's House and a contributor and guest of the EntreArchitect? community. She is a cohost of Reclaiming Ourselves podcast and a participant in Love and Healing Work.
Creating the Everyday Exceptional for Commercial and Modern Residential Clients
1 年Well said!
Profound Em. Brings to mind a study at University of San Francisco. They took groups of children out into an open field, with no fences, walls or natural boundaries surrounding it. Grass as far as the eye could see. Where did the children go? Invariably in group after group, they would cluster in a single group at the center of the field. Then fences were put up around the field. Where did the children go? Small groups could be found all along the fences 360 degrees. These boundaries provided a sense of safety and security. Gave children confidence to go as far out from the center as the fences would allow. So the boundaries you speak of do not have to be limiting. Indeed they are freeing! Freeing us up to do our best work and play.