Boundaries: How to have a Healthy Relationship with your Job.

May 28

Everyone needs to set up boundaries. Even you, whether you like your job or not. This is especially true if you like to avoid uncomfortable conversations with your manager. Why? Because if you don’t, they’re gonna end up unhealthy, hating your friends, being around people, and ultimately yourself.

Recognize your Obsession

Stop lying to yourself. You are constantly thinking about work, and you dream about work; this is not normal, and it’s not cute. Nobody’s paying you to do that off the clock; you’re obsessed, and you need to deal with that. You need to come to grips with that. It’s not about coin, it’s about you doing too much and making your job your life, unless you are working for a nonprofit saving lives, not even that needs to have a limit. It’s called being obsessed, not being an entrepreneur.

Advocate for Yourself!

Advocating for yourself by speaking up for yourself many times means fighting for he right to have a balanced life. There are many managers and coworkers who have a toxic relationship with work and expect others to match their toxicity. For example, they email you demanding a response off the clock. This is why I strongly recommend letting your managers and coworkers know your boundary of not responding to work-related messages after contract hours. I personally have had to delete my work email from my phone. Tell people when they are crossing the line. Most of the time, people who have poor boundaries with work arebecause no one has told them otherwise and have people-pleasing tendencies.

It's just a Job!

Even if your job pays $1 million, it’s really just a job. We need to stop thinking that our job is our God. God is the only one who provides for any of us, and the only one who has given me every job I’ve had. The talent, effort, and energy to do every job, every task that I’ve ever done, was given to me by God. Coworkers are not your family. These bosses are not your mother and father, and if that is the case, and you’re taking your parents’ business OK, but even that needs to have a healthy boundary; it’s really just a job. At first, it can be a foreign concept to anyone who doesn’t know how to separate work from their personal life.

Have Hobbies <3

Being obsessed with your job automatically means you have nothing better to do. This means you aren’t passionate about anything else. One of the easiest ways to change that is by having hobbies. Make sure the hobby you have doesn’t have anything connected or related to your job, unless you feel called to it. Along with this, make sure you are not doing this hobby with your coworkers because the topic of work will make its way around your stress-free hobby.