It’s interesting, isn’t it, the way people react to you asserting boundaries in your work? I don’t know about you but whenever I assert a boundary, people think I’m going crazy. I’m not. I’m just letting you know that you cannot manipulate my purpose to serve you instead of serving me.

Boundaries are absolutely essential in my work. Not least because without them I would become swamped by daily demands. It is bigger than that though, especially in relation to running my own business, creating my own approaches and taking my systems thinking into new arenas. I have quite strict boundaries in place already and I tend to implement new ones when I see an interconnected situation that might cause me some detriment in the future.

Then there are my values. I stand strongly in my values and live them. My boundaries are often linked to my values. This is not the act of someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. This is a business woman asserting boundaries based on her values. You may not understand them, but you don’t have to. They are my values and my decisions. The only person who needs to understand them is me.

My message here is that strong boundaries are sometimes necessary but when women in particular assert them, the reaction from others can be quite powerful. I suspect that men have much less challenge to their boundaries.

The only person who generally has an issue with your boundaries is a person trying to manipulate them for their own advantage. For any aspiring systems thinking business owners out there, do be aware of the boundaries you might have to set that others may never understand.