Ready to evaluate your boundary system?

Here’s how to develop a few simple things to track your Boundaries and methods to track them …

Below is the seventh video in the 10 part Business Boundaries series on Track Your Boundaries:

Here is the pdf guide mentioned in the video and below is the full transcript:

Day 7: Track Your Boundaries

Now we’ve made it to the third part where we’re going to look at these boundaries that you’ve set. Now see what happen, because you’ve set boundaries, you started to enforce these boundaries, and they’re going to be tested.

Not necessarily respected by you, [laughs] and not necessarily respected by everybody else. Things aren’t going to always go exactly as planned.

I want you to be psychologically prepared for this. This isn’t terrible. This is an experiment. This is something to play with. This isn’t something that you’re going to, “Set it and forget it,” OK? This is something that is not going to be done.

I probably have said this a gazillion times already and I’m going to keep saying it because it’s really important to remember to set expectations throughout this, so you’re not disappointed and frustrated.

This is a little experiment. This comes from my background in science so it’s easy for me to characterize it that way. We’re testing this, and I don’t mean testing as a grade, I mean testing as a science experiment.

We’re going to have a hypothesis of, “Here’s what we think your boundary is, here’s how we think its going to work to establish this boundary, communicate it to you, communicate it to them, and communicate what the ramification is going to be if it doesn’t work and see if that works for everyone. The thing is, sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t.”

Here on Day 7, we’re going to actually track your boundaries. What I want you to do is to start evaluating your boundaries.

Really using the metrics, which metric sounds really scary and fancy for those of you who aren’t really analytical kind of numbers people, but I don’t necessarily mean “numbers‑y,” “spreadsheet‑y” kind of things, unless you’re into Number and spreadsheets. [laughs] I’m talking about just keeping track of your boundaries and what are the results of tracking these boundaries.

We’re going to look at picking a couple boundaries that you set up. One, two, three boundaries that are really important to you that are going to make a big difference in your life, and tracking one, two, three pieces of information that would make a difference that would be good metrics to track. What would be good metrics to track?

I would suggest you track at least one piece of information that’s totally objective. For example, for me, one piece of information that’s really an objective measure to track is how many hours of sleep did I get last night. That’s an objective number.

Did I get three hours of sleep? Did I get five hours of sleep? Did I get nine hours of sleep? That never happens. [laughs] I get stuffed and I was just like, “That would be a crazy lot amount of sleep.” That how many hours of sleep I got is going to tell you so much information.

There’s also some quality of sleep, other data that goes with that. Did it all happen in a row? Did I wake up a gazillion times? That kind of thing, but just the plain old numbers can give you a lot of data.

“How many hours did I work? Or how many hours did I bill the clients?” You could have, “How many hours did you coach clients last week? How many paintings did you paint this week?” You could have, “How much money did you earn last week?” It could be a great number to track, right?

Things that are numbers, hours. Things that are pieces of…I’m looking at my list of brainstormed things, time, money, deliverables. “How many things did you make, how many people did you help,” kind of stuff.

We’d also look at subjective pieces of information. For me, I track things like, “How did I feel last week? Both, how did I feel emotionally? What are my thoughts about last week? Did I feel resentful about my clients last week?”

“Did I feel resentful about my loved ones last week? What did I feel joyful about last week? What did I feel frustrated about last week? I always felt frustrated about something. [laughs] I always felt joyful about something.” I track those things.

I actually put all that stuff in a spreadsheet, which some of you that may not work, some of you may be really resistant to spreadsheet. In that case, you may…I’m looking at artsy kind of things that go all over here.

Instead of a spreadsheet, you might want to get a nice art book to track things in. This doesn’t have to be spreadsheet looking. You can have each day can be a nice page in your art book where you track, or you can be like me and put it all on a spreadsheet.

These things don’t have to be “Spreadsheet looking” even though you’re tracking data. Even if the data happens to be, numbers they can be very artsy looking. Or, if you’re someone who loves numbers, you can make it as data‑ish as you want.

However, I still do recommend tracking how you feel and how you think about things because those are incredibly important pieces of data. Now, if you are someone who has a tendency to have too much, we often all do that, I do recommend reining it in.

Don’t track too many pieces of data, it’s very easy to do that. You might want to track three pieces at max, of objective number data, three pieces at max, of subjective data. Start with that.Track that for once a week for a month, or something like that. See what that gets you, and then re‑evaluate and start tracking some more information.

Simple so it get you much better information, and compact. Start reviewing that and tomorrow, we’re going to talk more about you.

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