The Secret to Badass Boundaries? Using your Hands.
This post contains edited excerpts from COMPOSURE: The Art of Executive Presence, available now wherever books are sold. Order your copy today!
Here’s a piece of advice that’s changed my life: You can’t do everything, no matter how much you may want to.
Whether it’s in our relationships or our careers, there’s always going to be more potential work than is possible to achieve. But we can make choices to determine what we will do given our finite amount of time and energy. These choices are our priorities. And our priorities become more manageable when we establish personal boundaries.
Listen to Joshua Isaac Smith on The Origins of Boundaries — The COMPOSURE Podcast ➞
If you’re curious where you may lack robust personal boundaries, simply consider areas of your life where you wish others would treat you differently.
A lot of my clients say, for example, they wish their managers would be more aware of their workload before assigning them new projects or loading on additional work. Or they wish their spouses equally shared in childcare duties or helped out more around the house. Any of that resonate?
The power of making your boundaries “badass”
Take Michelle as an example of someone whose weak personal boundaries had immensely damaging effects on her personal and professional life. I remember when she appeared in my office the first time, looking scared as she walked gingerly down the hallway. She was like a deer in the headlights, frozen in her own life.
Because I’m somatically trained in psychotherapy, my work with clients like Michelle concentrates on accessing the body as a way to heal the mind. As such, I utilize the science of body language as a method for understanding the myriad ways our unconscious dominates our behavior.
I knew right away what we needed to do. Michelle and I worked on “unfreezing” her body by creating healthy boundaries. As I had done with countless clients before, we needed to access body movements and awareness to get her to a better place.
Only in Michelle’s case, we needed to be a bit bolder than any client of mine had ever been. The reality was that Michelle was in a bad place. We needed to put in some extra work to help her create lasting change in her life.
In a matter of weeks, Michelle would establish “Badass Boundaries.” She went from feeling frozen and fearful, to stronger and more self-confident than she’d ever been.
The secret to all this? Unlocking the potential of Michelle’s body, teaching her how to move in a way that helped her feel powerful and safe. But before we dive into the how, a quick note on what:
Personal boundaries are the limits that we establish in our relationships with people and can help us assess what actions we take. Boundaries reflect what we feel we’re entitled to. But equally important, they determine what we’re willing to give (or tolerate) without compromising our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Our boundaries are somatic, meaning they live in our bodies. They’re actually felt more than seen. It’s that felt sense that indicates where we end and others begin. Your personal boundary creates a protected, sacred space around you, in which you and only you get to decide what gets in and what stays out.
But that’s not to say that a boundary is always exclusionary. Boundaries work both ways. Boundaries are badass when they allow us to say ‘No’ or ‘Back off’ to things we don’t want. However, they’re equally as badass when they encourage us to say ‘Yes’ or ‘I can’ to what we really, really want. It’s your ability to know and assert your boundaries that reflects a healthy sense of self-worth, ensuring that you’re not subject to other people’s judgement, expectations, and needs.
Michelle was a different person once she experienced her Badass Boundaries. She was bolder, more empowered and inspired. Here’s how she did it.
Step 1: Understanding why healthy boundaries are so important
Boundaries will Help You Learn to Protect Yourself
As trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk says, the source of healing any trauma is to “help traumatized people find a sense of safety in their own bodies.” Boundaries help us find that safety. Boundaries are like a forcefield around you that keeps out toxic people and experiences. Michelle’s lack of safety originated from traumatic experiences in her past, and before she could do anything else, she first needed to find her sense of safety.
Boundaries will Help You Learn to Differentiate Yourself
Taking on too much of other people’s problems leads to codependency and people-pleasing, two major contributors to chronic depression and burnout. Without a sense of separation (or boundary) from others, people often struggle with developing their own identity and sense of self. With healthy boundaries, you don’t internalize the toxicity of others and you’re able to put your own interests, desires, and commitments first. When Michelle began to form her own boundaries, she became softer on herself, recognizing that other people’s problems weren’t hers to fix.
Boundaries will Help You be More Self-Compassionate
Self-compassion is the antidote to self-shame. Boundaries dramatically increase our capacity for self-compassion, which turns out to be a crucial first step in healing any mental health condition or stress experience. 76% of people have more compassion for others than they do for themselves, meaning that for most of us, our harshest critic truly is ourselves.
On Michelle’s Badass Boundaries journey, she committed to performing at least 3 acts of kindness for herself every day for a month. She took breaks during the workday, pampered herself, wrote herself sticky notes with words of encouragement and left them around her house. What she noticed was that she had for so long been listening to a toxic, self-shaming voice in her head, rather than the kind, compassionate, forgiving voice that had always been there for her — if only she would listen.
Boundaries will Help You Feel More Deserving, Worthy and Confident
Boundaries help us feel more deserving of what we want. This is where we’re able to practice saying “no” to what we don’t want, so we can conversely practice saying “yes” to what we do want. Boundaries enable this distinction and thus connect us with a higher sense of self-worth and confidence.
Michelle noticed that with boundaries in place, even her perception of her past was changing. Michelle began naturally silencing the critical voices of people in her past who had put her down, while amplifying the positive voices of encouragement. She took this self-confidence into work with her, speaking up more in meetings and pitching creative solutions for clients. Michelle’s whole team took notice, and her hard work (professional and personal) paid off with a promotion and a raise.
Step 2: Create Badass Boundaries using your hands
An important aspect of body language is called proxemics, or the usage of space in how we sit, stand, or show up in interactions with others. Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on power poses is a good example of how proxemics can communicate with those around us, simply through our body language. For example, taking a wider stance with our legs (what Cuddy affectionately calls the “Wonder Woman” pose) conveys dominance by taking up more space.
But we’re not all Wonder Woman — there’s two sides to the proxemics coin. The opposite of a dominant stance is a narrow one, with our legs close together, crossed, or with one foot in front of the other. A narrow stance says “I’m diminutive”, coy, or even shy.
In creating Badass Boundaries, we pay close attention to proxemics. How we use the space around us helps dictate our boundaries to ourselves and those around us. We use the hands to push out a “perimeter” that establishes a more physicalized experience of being protective and empowered while establishing a more commanding presence. Try it now.
Joshua demonstrating the Badass Boundaries pose.
Stand with your feet shoulder width apart
Bend your knees to engage your thigh muscles
Extend both hands out in front of you like you’re creating a stop sign with your hands
Look at the back of your hands and imagine that the space between the back of your hands and your body is your sacred, safe space. The key is to realize that you have the control and authority to protect the space between the back of your hands and your body.
Now imagine you’re placing anything you don’t want inside your boundary on the other side of your extended palms. In other words, this is a person, issue, belief, or even a statement that feels like it’s too close to you, is gnawing at you, or maybe even feels threatening and unsafe. Place all of that unwanted energy on the other side of your extended palms.
Now that you have all that you don’t want outside of your boundary, you’re able to contain and protect a healthy space inside your boundary. This is differentiation: separating what you want inside your space and pushing out what you don’t want.
Build on this initial boundary-setting action by pushing out your hands and simultaneously exhaling through your mouth powerfully, like making a boiling kettle sound (“shew”). This creates space for yourself and establishes a safer distance between you and the negativity around you.
I call this the Badass Boundaries pose. It quickly became Michelle’s favorite exercise in our work, and she practiced it every morning before she went to the office. She would go into her bathroom, shut the door, and step into her Badass Boundaries pose.
Michelle focused primarily on how strong and assertive she looked in the mirror. This helped her take ownership of her Badass Boundaries and feel more comfortable speaking up. By looking into the mirror, she trained her brain to capture the powerful image of herself standing in a firm posture and protecting herself with her fully extended arms.
Whenever Michelle felt as though she needed to assert a boundary at work, she remembered the image of herself in the mirror earlier that morning. Soon, she noticed shifts in how she felt about herself and her interactions with others. Even with her most challenging colleagues, Michelle — protected by her Badass Boundaries — was more calm, confident, and composed than ever.
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For more details on this exercise, download the free COMPOSURE companion workbook. And for those who prefer putting pen to paper, you can purchase a physical version of the workbook here. The workbook includes a collection of videos with coaching exercises and guided meditations to help you establish Badass Boundaries while elevating your Executive Presence.
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Joshua Isaac Smith is Co-Author of COMPOSURE: The Art of Executive Presence and a clinical trauma therapist based in London.
