In today’s demanding work environment, many professionals struggle with overcommitment and the pressure to be constantly available. This often leads to burnout, resentment, and a sense of being trapped in a relentless cycle of work. If you find yourself missing family dinners, feeling always on call, or unable to disconnect, it’s time to prioritize setting and maintaining boundaries at work.
Why Maintaining Boundaries at Work Are Essential
Boundaries are crucial for maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Without them, you risk overworking, which can result in physical and mental exhaustion, reduced productivity, and ultimately, burnout. Setting boundaries isn’t just about saying no; it’s about understanding your priorities and making intentional choices that protect your time and energy.
Lauren Baptiste, a former CPA turned life coach, emphasizes the importance of boundaries based on her personal experiences. She highlights the need for awareness in identifying what’s most important in both your professional and personal life.
Step 1: Awareness – Identifying Your Boundaries
The first step in setting boundaries is recognizing your own needs and priorities. Boundaries can be categorized into two types:
Hard Boundaries: These are non-negotiable limits, such as not working after a certain time for religious reasons or picking up your child from daycare at a specific time.
Soft Boundaries: These are more flexible and aspirational, like preferring to work remotely on certain days or setting aside time for personal activities. While important, these boundaries might allow for some adjustment.
Start by identifying your hard and soft boundaries. This awareness helps you understand where to draw the line and what you need to protect your well-being.
Step 2: Experiment – Enforcing a Boundary
Once you’ve identified your boundaries, the next step is to experiment with enforcing them. Begin with a soft boundary—something manageable that allows you to build confidence in setting and maintaining boundaries at work.
Lauren shares her own experience with a flexible work arrangement, where she initially believed things would easily fall into place. However, she quickly learned that if she didn’t respect her own boundaries, no one else would. She had to learn to say no to non-urgent requests, communicate her availability clearly, and stand firm on her boundaries.
This process might feel uncomfortable at first—you might worry about how others will react or feel guilty for saying no. But maintaining your boundaries is essential to prevent burnout and ensure you can continue to perform at your best.
Step 3: Maintaining Boundaries: Evaluate and Adjust
After experimenting with a boundary, evaluate how well it worked. Consider:
What went well?
What didn’t go as planned?
Is this boundary truly soft, or should it be treated as a hard boundary?
Evaluating and tweaking your boundaries helps refine your approach. For instance, you might realize that your yoga class isn’t as important as simply having an hour of personal time. By adjusting your boundaries, you can find what truly works for you.
Step 4: Repeat – Building a Sustainable Practice
Setting and maintaining boundaries at work isn’t a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process. After evaluating your boundary, tweak it as needed and then repeat the process. Over time, this practice will help you build stronger boundaries that protect your time and energy more effectively.
The key is to be patient with yourself. Boundaries take time to develop, and it’s okay to start small. By continuously refining your approach, you’ll gradually create a work environment that supports your well-being and allows you to thrive both professionally and personally.
Next Steps to Setting + Maintaining Boundaries
Setting and maintaining boundaries at work is essential for avoiding burnout and achieving a healthy work-life balance. By becoming aware of your needs, experimenting with boundaries, evaluating their effectiveness, and repeating the process, you can take control of your time and energy. Remember, boundaries aren’t just about saying no—they’re about making deliberate choices that prioritize your well-being.
If you’re struggling with setting boundaries or need guidance, reach out to Lauren for support. With the right tactics and mindset, you can create a work-life balance that allows you to perform at your best without sacrificing your personal life.
Ready to reclaim control of your life? Subscribe to my newsletter and join a community of ambitious women in accounting, law, and consulting. Learn practical strategies to set boundaries that empower you to thrive professionally and personally—guilt-free.
What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
The importance of setting and maintaining boundaries at work to prevent burnout.
How to identify and categorize your boundaries as hard or soft.
Steps to experiment with and enforce your boundaries effectively.
Tips for evaluating and adjusting boundaries to suit your needs.
The ongoing process of refining boundaries to create a sustainable work-life balance.
Watch The Full Episode:
Full Episode Transcript:
Hi, everyone, and welcome. We are getting started. I hope everybody is having a wonderful Wednesday. It's August 7. I can't believe it. Can you? Well, either way, here we are. Don't worry. Summer is still here. It's still here for another six weeks, according to my book. So let's talk about what we're really here for today, which is setting and upholding boundaries. If you are the type that keeps getting pulled around, getting pushed around, feeling like you always have to be on call, feeling like you're missing dinners with your family, feeling like you wake up, work, go to sleep, and then repeat day after day, you do not want to miss today's episode. Today we're talking about setting and maintaining a boundary. But first, let me welcome you to the show. Welcome to Billable Hour Burnout.
If you need helpful tactical advice that actually gives you the career of your dreams without the stress or the overwhelm, you are in the right place. If you want to build the life that you've. You enjoy the life that you spent decades building, you are in the right place. If you're finding yourself here today, it means you are ready for more work-life balance, more ease, more confidence, and you're ready to make it all happen without having to quit your job or burn down your life. My name is Lauren Baptiste, your CPA turned life coach, and you're listening to Billable Hour Burnout on the show. I'm sharing simple tactical advice so any modern accountant, attorney, and consultant can thrive. You ready? Let's go. All right, everybody, welcome to episode 21. It's a good number.
Well, you may see I've did a little adjustment to my hair. I'm getting more used to it day after day. So you're going to hang with me each week as it looks a little different, as I get used to it. But I'm loving it and I'm really starting to enjoy it. But let's talk other fun news. Yesterday, two big things. First, I facilitated a session at a SHRM conference. If you know SHRM, great. If you don't, it stands for the Society of HR Management. It was a great conference where I was able to share thought leadership on how to solve the burnout problem in your organization. Now, it ties very much to what I talk about. For the individual, it's more than just a tactical shift. We need a radical transformation.
We need organizations to be on the forefront because it's no longer a nice to have, it is an essential for businesses to survive and to not lose money year over year, we really need to maintain our talent and retain them and keep them happy. But when does it start? Where does it start? It starts with us. So that was a great conference. I was really happy to be part of that, to share really great engagement. And that will actually be my success story here. So, as I'm talking through today's success story, I wanted to share some of the feedback because some of you may have come to a webinar.
Maybe you just see me on these lives, maybe you just read my posts, but it's good to share, because that way you can get a taste of what it's like when I have new things coming up, which you'll want to stay for through the end of today's episode. Cause I have some exciting news. But that being said, I had a lot of great feedback. One just really appreciated the conversation and the tools that were provided. Somebody said that the content was great. They said that Lauren delivered the content in a very friendly and inviting style. She's a clear domain expert with helpful and personal examples. This was super helpful. Someone else said that this was informative and it brings up relevant thought processes. Someone said that it was incredibly accessible.
Someone else said that they really enjoyed the session and that they're gonna be sharing the takeaways with their team. Someone else said, this was so valuable. I'm really glad I joined this session. This is just a sample of all of the great feedback that I received from yesterday's facilitation. But this is the feedback I get anytime I host a webinar, anytime I do an event, I always make sure that whatever I deliver is in bite-size pieces so that you can take it with you on the go. That's the point of these Billable Hour Burnout episodes. They're meant for you to be listened to, digested, enjoyed on the go while you're driving to work, while you're maybe working on a very basic reviewing an Excel spreadsheet while you're cooking. Right?
These episodes are here to give you little nuggets of things that you can be thinking about. And this is why I really like the idea of taking this big topic of boundaries and breaking it down into bite-size pieces. We've talked about a lot of different things to mindset up until this point, the ten areas where it's needed, the secret to communicating a boundary. Today we're talking about setting a boundary and instilling it, maintaining it, and then continuing it on and on. So how are we going to do that? I'm inviting you to a challenge this week after watching today's episode. I challenge you to join me in trying to uphold and instill a boundary.
I'm going to walk you through a step-by-step process on this session, and we're gonna figure out what is it that we want to create a boundary for? What's the lowest hanging fruit and what's the step-by-step to walk through it. So I'm saying this up front. I challenge you because I want you to really push yourself to your limit of how to start, where to start, and then when we talk next week about the boundary mindset, you're going to see why it worked and why it didn't work. And that's going to be the component that takes us to the end of our Boundaries series. All right, let's get right into it. So game on. Challenge on. We're going to try this process. So you can take a couple notes or you can just listen along. Step one, awareness.
Let's start to determine what your top priorities are in work and life and what boundaries you need. I like to identify boundaries in two ways. There are hard boundaries and there are soft boundaries. Not all boundaries are created equal. For example, a hard boundary, it's a non-negotiable. That might look like for religious reasons, I don't work after sunset on Fridays. That might look like I have to pick up my child from daycare on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 06:00 p.m. They're not negotiable. They're. You're doing it right. It has to be done. You're not willing to compromise here. And so it's really important that you start to understand what are your hard boundaries. I see this come up a lot with parents with their kids and scheduling. I also see this come up with caretaking. It's easy. Do you notice where it's.
What's happening here? It's easy to have a boundary when someone else is enforcing it or forcing that behavior, for example. Right. I need to go caretake my mother. And what that means is XYZ versus a non-negotiable for you might mean a particular thing that you need to do on a Saturday in order to have healthy mental well-being. That could be, let's say, a yoga class on Saturdays. That might be something you're instilling as a boundary that you need to feel recalibrated and balanced and good, but that's up to you to decide. So I want you to start to understand that's a hard boundary if that's something you need for your mental health, right? And then we have soft boundaries. Soft boundaries are aspirational. Soft boundaries we're a little bit more willing to compromise on.
Soft boundaries are someone who maybe would love a later start time to their workday, or maybe even on Mondays, for example, a soft boundary might be working remotely 60% of the time versus somebody that says, I have to be 100% remote because XYZ reason, right? You know your reason why. Or maybe your preference is so strong that you're not willing to compromise. That's your hard boundary. Again, we talk about boundaries as that fence, that perimeter, that limit that is to protect you. So whatever your boundaries are, whether they're hard or soft, it's important to be mindful of what they are, if they're willing to negotiate. So, for example, if that I need this yoga class for my mental health on Saturdays, well, does it have to be the 08:30 a.m. Class, or can it be the 10:00 a.m. Class?
Does it have to be on Saturday or can it be on Tuesday? It's not saying, like, we're not trying to move the things that are important to you, but we're trying to understand how in cement they really are, somebody might really have an aspirational soft boundary. For summer Fridays. What I hear is a company will put out the boundary or the opportunity of saying, okay, guys, in the summer, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, we are doing summer Fridays. And teams are so busy that they don't even get to leave at four or 430. They have a full workday until 05:00 and they're not getting that opportunity. So what they have to do now is create the boundary. So we're going to move into step two. Step one is awareness. Identify your hard boundaries and your soft boundaries.
You may want to pause this after and just take a moment to really identify what that is and then come back to step two. But we're going to keep rolling because we're alive. Step two, I want you to identify one soft boundary. So we're going to use summer Fridays because it's summer. It's not Friday, but it has me thinking about Friday. Coming up, I want you to identify the one soft boundary that you would like to work with. I have four questions for you that I want you to think about. I want you to identify first the boundary that you want to uphold. This is a challenge. There's going to be so many things
we want boundaries on or for. But right now, we're only picking one. If we can successfully do one, it gives us proof that we can successfully have other boundaries.
So number one, what soft boundary feels like something you should be able to have. So for you, this is right. Identifying the summer Friday, identifying the late start time, identifying what you need. The second question, where do you need to limit tasks or interactions that are not the best use of your time? For example, if you're trying to go for that summer Friday, what I see is a lot of professionals will say, okay, I'll move my more administrative tasks to Friday. I'll move my less important meetings to Friday. And what that means is now your Friday is filled with fluff, potentially, or more of less essential work. And then it has you feeling resentful when three 405:00 comes and you're still at your computer while everyone else is out and about and running around having fun. Summer.
Okay, so we're thinking, okay, about what we need to limit, right? What interactions do we need to cut out? Where can meetings become an email? Where can emails be just closed? Right? How can we finish off? How can we continue to focus on what's essential, what's taking up all your time? Friday may also be that day you go for the client lunch, right? All of a sudden, three or 4 hours of your day are gone. What ways do you need to shift?
And you can go back to some of the time management things we've talked about. We'll go into more time management as we go through this journey. But just starting to think, what do I need to reduce? What's not the best use of my time? Let's go through the third question. Where or to who may you need to communicate your boundary? For example, if we're going with our summer Friday soft boundary, what we're going to want to do here is say, all right, if I have all these meetings that I might need to block my calendar anytime after 12:00 right? No meetings after 12:00. People cannot get on my calendar. Anytime a boundary is crossed, which means somebody tries to put an invite on my calendar, I say, hi, what's this for?
Is there something I can respond to over email? How can we move this from a meeting, or can this be done next week? You might need to communicate with the person that's trying to get on your calendar. Is this urgent or can it wait? And you have to really decide, is it urgent or can it wait, do you have to be there for that meeting? A lot of the women partners I work with get invited to a lot of things, but don't actually need to be on a lot of things. I put on my Instagram story the other day, this meme, and it's like, are there more than ten people? Then you should decline. Is it like, do you actually need to be there? Then you should decline.
And then it was like, ended with a joke of like, do you even want to be there? And if it's a no, then you should decline. But really getting clear with who do you need to communicate this with to make sure it happens? Now, if you're at the top, you really don't have to communicate it with that many. You just might need to push it to another day. But if you're someone who reports up, I mean, in some ways we all report up, right? We're all at some level. But if you're more in the manager senior manager level, what you're going to want to do is start to dialogue. Fridays, I'm not able to take meetings because I am taking care of this. Or I really would like to actualize the summer Friday policy that our team is being given.
How can we make that work so we can have communications? And how can we keep morale high even if that means we work an hour later, Monday to Thursday? What might we need to say? The fourth question in this second section is what might you need to experience on the road to exercising a boundary? So you might need to feel. You might need to feel a little uncomfortable. You might need to feel a little guilty asking for what you need. You might need to feel a little disappointed if they say no. You need to be willing to put yourself out there, because otherwise you're going to be disappointed in yourself. So you're either going to be disappointed if they potentially say no, or you're disappointed in yourself if you don't raise your hand and ask. But here's what I know to be true.
If you don't ask, then the answer is always no. Then you definitely will not have your boundary. So we need to practice with a soft boundary to try to get to where we want to go. Okay? So those are a couple questions to think about as you're identifying your soft boundary. Now, number three, we are committing to experiment. No one will respect your boundary if you don't. There was a time when I was working in corporate, I was on a flexible work arrangement, and I had this belief that once I'm on this FWA, that my life's going to be easier, things are just going to be easy peasy, and everyone's just going to make space for me. Wrong. That did not happen. That did not happen at all.
Actually, I started within a few weeks, I was starting to get very resentful because I was like, why isn't anybody respecting this? And it's because I wasn't respecting it. I was not putting up out offices saying, I'm not working on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was not asking someone, does this need to be done today? I'm not working on Tuesday. So the earliest I can get to this is Wednesday. Is that. Will that work? If not, you should find someone else to help you with this project. Right. No one will respect the boundary if you don't. What I'm going to challenge you to, and this is why we're starting with a soft boundary. I want you to start with the thing that is easiest. Now, some of you may say work actually feels really hard because there's so much on the line.
There's so much to lose. By enforcing a boundary, I may be saying no to a client. By enforcing a boundary, I might not be promoted. But this is where I want you to be thinking about what is an easy boundary to practice. Maybe that means something at home. Maybe a boundary is, I'm going to stop cleaning up after everyone in my family because they're at the ages where they can clean up after themselves. What that means is now you're going to save time because you're not cleaning up after them. After dinner. You take care of what you need to, you wash up, and then you move on. Does that mean there might be crumbs? Does that mean ketchup might be left out overnight? Does it mean that there'll be dirty dishes in the sink? Yes. Yes. And possibly yes.
And you need to say, all right, I'm gonna take a deep breath, and I'm gonna feel really skeeved out right now that the kitchen is dirty. Right. Or I'm gonna feel frustrated and I'm gonna, like, let that go and say, all right, they'll clean it on their time, because they will. That's what we discussed, right? So we're committing to experiment. If work feels too risky, start with something at home. Number four, we're going to evaluate what went well, what didn't go well. Is this soft boundary actually a soft boundary, or is it a hard boundary? Right. This is an added question to an evaluation that I normally talk about. And then what would we do differently? The reason why? I add in this extra question of, is this boundary actually a hard boundary? Is it truly a soft boundary?
Is it something I want a boundary? Is it something I want to create a fence for and protect? We need to know. After thinking about it, maybe the yoga class isn't that important to you, but what's important is that you have an hour to yourself. Maybe it's not actually showing up in that yoga room, but it's just saying, okay, I need an hour for me time. And it can happen anytime on Saturday. Notice that as you're practicing, you will start to learn how important this is to you. You may say this is actually the most important thing. I'm really not going to clean up in the kitchen anymore because I notice how stressed I am or how frustrated I get with my family when I'm cleaning up after them. You'll start to notice what needs to be truly enforced and what has wiggle room.
And that's why I like starting with a soft boundary because it helps bring up these questions and we can go through this protocol to understand where we're at and what we need. And step five, we're coming to the end of it. Step five, repeat. So we are going through our process. We're aware, we're starting with our awareness. We're identifying what we want to work on. We're committing to experiment on it, we're evaluating it, and then we are repeating, I should say tweak and repeat. Actually, tweak and repeat because we want to not just evaluate and say, this didn't work. Let's keep going. We want to say, okay, this didn't work. Let me see. What if I make this one adjustment? Let's see if that works and try it again.
When I went on my FWA, my flexible work arrangement, it took time and I had to iterate because in that first few weeks, it was not working. So I started to have conversations. What work? I can't hold all this work now that I'm working. Less time. What. What needs to be passed on, right. I think this is what's best for me to keep. I started to have conversations on what needs to move. And then things started to move. I started to have working hours. I started to put up out office messages. Things started to move
. I was able to start finding peace. People started to know, she's not around on that day because I wouldn't respond to emails, I wouldn't look at my email, or I would be secretive.
And then in the beginning, I would look, but I would only respond if it was urgent, and I was not responding to non-urgent matters. But over time, I learned to then fully disconnect. I would not look. People knew if they needed me and it was urgent, they would send me a text. But that happened very few and far between. So it starts with creating a boundary and then reinforcing it over and over again. And if we don't evaluate, tweak, and repeat, then we're just bound to live the same bad boundary over and over. And that's why I think it's so important as you're thinking about boundaries, is to be kind to yourself, be patient with this process, and know that it can take time to get to exactly where you want to go.
If you go in, all in on the hard boundary, and nobody really knew you had this boundary, and all of a sudden, you just, like, blaze through and you're like, this is my boundary. Respect me or I'm quitting. Right? It's too extreme. It's too extreme. So if you've been, like, holding back or suppressing this boundary for so long, let's start one step at a time to work through it. I highly suggest, if this feels hard, to reach out to me. Boundaries are not easy, because if we had them, they would be enforced, right? Think about even, like, landscaping in your backyard. If there were a fence there, then maybe your dog wouldn't run away. But we have to figure out first, where do we need to fence? Are all the holes closed?
How do we make sure that the fence is high enough so the dog isn't jumping over, or that it's the right type of material used so that the dog isn't running under the fence or through those wooden plank things, if you know what I'm talking about. If you're in fence farm, fence world, you'll know what I mean. But we need to be thinking about boundaries as something that takes time, as something that we likely need support with because we weren't taught this in law school. Getting our CPA in college when we onboarded into our company. This is something that we need to have in order to be successful for where we want to go. All right? This is the process awareness. Identify the boundary, like picking the boundary, committing to experiment on it, and then moving forward, evaluating on that process.
Tweaking and repeating, doing this over and over again gives you success, gives you progress, gives you the boundary, ultimately, that you're looking to instill. All right, so we're going to practice this. I challenge you. I challenge you. You have one week. We're going to be meeting next week to discuss a boundaried mindset. And that's going to be the end of our Boundary series. Now, if you want more information about boundaries, you can visit old episodes of Billable Hour Burnout, or you can visit my blog, www.akaloawellness.com/blog. You can even type in Lauren Baptiste boundaries, and you'll definitely get posts that talk about boundaries. But this is it for today. But I told you I had some news, so I want to tell you I have another webinar coming up. It's coming up on Tuesday the 20th at 01:00 p.m. Eastern.
And I'm talking about the five fatal thoughts that lead to overwork. The five fatal thoughts. There's a good chance you might have one, but there's definitely a chance that you have all five. So this is a webinar you're not going to want to skip. I am going with my full release on this webinar soon. But I'm telling you as a secret, as someone who comes week over week to my Billable Hour Burnout episodes. All right, everybody, I will put the link in the comments. If you want to register, you'll want to lock in that spot. You'll get the recording whether you make it or not. But it's always so much more valuable when you're live. I just know that and see that time and time again. But thank you so much for joining today's episode.
Drop a comment and let me know what you think. How have you been doing on this boundary journey? What? Well, what other questions come up as you're thinking about boundaries? All right, everybody, I will leave you here. Thank you so much for listening. Continue to follow me in all the places, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook. I'm there. Thank you for listening today. If you want more information about me, Akaloa Wellness, or my coaching program Freedom, you can visit akaloawellness.com to book a consultation. You can do that from my website, akaloawellness.com. You can also find it on the featured section of my LinkedIn profile, and you can find it in my link tree on Instagram. Don't let bad boundaries hold you back from the life that you want.
They are way easier to implement than you think when you have someone to help you make it possible. All right, everybody, I will catch you next week for the final episode in this Boundary series. But for now, see you later. Thanks for joining.
