Boundaries in Helping Fields
Setting healthy boundaries is a huge topic of importance in helping fields, particularly mental health. Boundaries have a great significance for a number of reasons. For one, they represent personal values, preferences, and ideas, especially within relationships. Secondly, they communicate value for oneself and others and help to establish trust.
What prompts a need for boundaries? Typically challenges present themselves in which someone’s personal values, preferences, and ideas are not respected, or the participants involved have different expectations of one another, which can result in feeling misused or abused. On the other hand, they can be one’s stance to proactively set expectations and/or demonstrate care for themselves and others in establishing and maintaining a relationship. This is certainly the goal but unfortunately does not always take place. In either case, there is an intentional effort of one participant or more to not only identify what’s important to them, but to communicate this to others, and put this into practice.
All, if not most, people have experienced challenges with boundaries on some level personally and/or professionally. This can be difficult to navigate, more so at times professionally due to the nature of workplace culture, learning to understand different personalities and work styles, and other complexities that exist within organizations. At the same time, organizations in helping fields are in a great position to support both clients and professionals in that organizations have a responsibility (and opportunity) to foster and model healthy boundaries.
However, a concern that I’ve had often in my experiences working in helping fields, especially community mental health services, is the lack of boundaries established between professionals and clients and/or between professionals and the overwhelming burnout that professionals can experience. This is often due to gross use of services on the part of the client, even demands of leadership or society at large, yet enablement of such on the part of the organization. In this dynamic there is often a missed opportunity for clients to develop personal values, preferences, and ideas that encourage them in their growth and for professionals to likewise be supported. We can see this in relationships that involve providing assistance one to another personally as well.
Personally and professionally, how are you communicating value to yourself and others towards growth and change? What does this look like in your role either in serving clients directly, supporting a team, leading an organization, or other area of influence?
I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share a comment or reach out if you’d like to connect, have questions, or are interested in partnering.
Healthy Messages™ helps professionals, leaders, and business owners in human services improve, craft, and implement communication within and across systems.
Learn more about Healthy Messages™ mission, vision, and outcomes.
Setting Up for Success
What contributes to success in your work? Doing what you love or are skilled in? Values of the company being consistent with your own? A supportive leadership and team? Flexibility in your work schedule? Having a good understanding of what’s expected of you? A positive work environment? Additional training? In considering this question, it’s important to think about the various factors that positively influence your ability to do your best work. When I think about organizations as a whole, I found the following areas especially helpful to keep in mind:
Expectations - are you clear about what is expected of you in your role/position and the methods/strategies necessary for accomplishing particular tasks?
Resources - do you have the tools needed to fulfill your responsibilities? This may vary based on the task at hand.
Support - do you have the support of those in leadership, such as a direct manager/supervisor, and other members of your team? Are you able to receive mentorship and coaching if needed?
Systems/structures - are policies/protocols in place to support your work? Are systems organized, clear, and consistent? Is your work environment conducive for the tasks that you need to complete?
Professional development/promotion - are you equipped with the necessary skills/tools to perform duties? Are there opportunities for you to utilize your strengths/abilities, grow, and advance?
Work/life challenges - are there challenges personally and/or professionally that hinder your ability to do your work? What support is needed in order to address these issues?
Does the organization where you work have a good handle on these and other areas important for you to be successful? Or would you advocate for improvements? If you answered yes to the second question it’s likely that you are not operating at your fullest potential. If you are a business owner, leader, HR professional, or other professional who influences members in your organization, how are you helping to set others up for success? It’s a huge benefit to the organization to ensure that members of your team feel set up for success.Unfortunately, the factors that can contribute to success within organizations are often given less attention than they deserve, ignored, or taken for granted.
As you ponder what contributes to your success and the success of others, it is my hope that there will be opportunities for growth individually and corporately. The success of the individuals of an organization contributes to the success of the whole organization.
I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share a comment or reach out if you’d like to connect, have questions, or are interested in partnering.
Healthy Messages™ helps professionals, leaders, and business owners in human services improve, craft, and implement communication within and across systems.
Learn more about Healthy Messages™ mission, vision, and outcomes.
Thoughtful Responses
Have you thought about how you receive and share information? And is one (receiving or sharing) more important than the other? How we receive information can be viewed from a few angles. On one hand, we can look at the method by which information is received, whether that’s verbally, visually, or through other senses (taste, touch, smell). On the other hand, how information is processed may be unique for each individual either due to personal strengths, such as a heightened sense of hearing or smell, or what an individual has found to work best for them to learn (i.e. visual vs. auditory). The same can be said for sharing information. It is this aspect of information that I would like to explore more, especially as it relates to healthy messaging.
Both receiving and sharing information go hand in hand, particularly when working with other people. Likely what you share is based on the information that has been received. And to give an appropriate response, all information available is crucial. There are times though when what is perceived or represented is contrary to what is actually shared or intended. This may or may not be the fault of the listener or sharer. If this takes place, it is likely that there was an absence of dialogue in order to clarify information received and shared. Yet, the sharer is in a great position to give the messages that they wish to convey. How we respond, even when faced with negative experiences, can have the biggest impact. Maybe we are working with an individual who is unkind. Or someone we are close to violates our trust (or that we trust doesn’t follow through as expected). Perhaps we are experiencing a hostile work environment. Sometimes our perceptions of the words and actions of others can determine how we respond. If perceived negatively (as a negative reflection of our character, worth, or intentions), we can easily become hurt, offended, or embarrassed, to name a few reactions. But these types of experiences present an opportunity to speak to the challenges that are before us, either in support of others, ourselves, or both. I’m reminded of feedback a mentor often shared, which was that words are simply information. We get to choose what we are going to do with them. Then, I would say we can take it one step further, which is to use our words wisely, intentionally adding value to the lives of others, including growth and lasting change.
Consider how you both receive and share information and ways that you might create healthy messages in your life and the lives of others. In going back to the questions shared initially, I find that in receiving information we are able to add significant value to others as a listener but how information is shared is particularly meaningful. It has been especially important for me to encourage people and organizations to go beyond the status quo (established cultures). And for me, this is largely founded upon and influenced by giving thoughtful responses.
I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share a comment or reach out if you’d like to connect, have questions, or are interested in partnering.
Healthy Messages™ helps professionals, leaders, and business owners in human services improve, craft, and implement communication within and across systems.
Learn more about Healthy Messages™ mission, vision, and outcomes.