Next Foundation Blog

Good Boundaries put us in charge by consciously allowing us to choose what goes on inside our life, what we allow into our inner circle.

Seth Godin said:

If you’ve got talent, people want more of you. They ask you for this or that or the other thing. They ask nicely. They will benefit from the insight you can give them. The choice: You can dissipate your gift by making the people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying ‘no’ often. You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work. Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

Saying no to trivial or non-important or non-essential things gives meaning when we say yes.

Saying no keeps our boundaries in place and allows us to keep our commitments.

So how can you keep boundaries?

1) Be clear about your boundaries.

Don’t allow others to demand things of you, allow people to make requests, however, no one has a right to make demands.

Now, if you hear request that are uncomfortable, your discomfort is a signal that there’s an attempt to invade or compromise an inner value.

They might not know it.

You may not be able to articulate it.

But there is something not quite sitting right.

2) You have a choice

When you feel like you do not have a choice, you have moved from being an aid to someone to being manipulated by someone.

You have to remember you have a choice and you have the freedom to say no.

3) Have courageous conversations.

Often when reorganizing and putting boundaries in place you have courageous conversations.

You have to sit people down and talk to them about changes you need to make to achieve the goals that you have set.

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In order to come to this place each of us has to be clear about what the important things are to us and we must also be aware that all of our decisions are leading us towards our purpose or away from it.

Toward a life of integrity or away from it.

Not one of us can be all things to all people.

We have natural limitation, naturally we are not omnipotent.

In order to stay centered, to stay focused we have to establish clear boundaries.

Boundaries are the borders we create around ourselves by the limits that we set.

Limits that again…and I am not trying to be redundant, just reinforce.

I am trying to show you that all of this is interconnected.

Limits that are based upon, and driven by your mission in life and the values that you hold dear.

Limits around time, limits around whom we allow to speak into our life and occupy our life.

Boundaries: are the imaginary lines that tell people how close they can get and what they can expect from us.

They are the points of demarcation that stop areas leaking over from one to another, or relationships or non-essential commitments pulling you away from what is essential.

Robert Frost put it brilliantly when he said:

Good fences make good neighbors.

Good Boundaries put us in charge by consciously allowing us to choose what goes on inside our life, what we allow into our inner circle.

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www.nextfoundation.org/nfblog

Let’s not sugar coat this, tough decisions and persistent effort are required of those who seek to live their lives…

Present

Purposeful

and Passionately.

Your ability to say, “Yes” depends upon your ability to say, “No.”

Again…your ability to say, “Yes” to the things that are important depends upon your ability to say, “No” to the things that do not contribute to that.

Often people don’t say no because they are overwhelmed with thoughts like:

“What will they think of me if I don’t do this?”

“What will they say about me?”

“I feel I have to do this.”

Or they don’t say yes because:

“I don’t have the time.”

“Can’t fit it in.”

“I have too much to do.”

What people are doing is that which they don’t need to do at the sake of that which they want to do.

But they no longer have the time, the money or emotional resources….. they are spread too thin.

When a life is rooted in the present, based upon purpose, driven by values, then either a yes or no can be given not on the basis of what others think or out of guilt but rather out of a sense of single focus and life vision.

I was able to help myself in this area by coming to understand that my saying no to something enables someone else to say yes to it.

It creates opportunities in the lives of other people.

It is just not meant to be my opportunity.

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www.nextfoundation.org/nfblog

When facing fear…

Accept the things over which you have no control.

Focus on turning your adversities into advantages.

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www.nextfoundation.org/nfblog

Continuing to look at this one by Scott Edinger, John Zenger, Joseph Folkman, found in their study of 200,000 people across different kinds of organizations and within different cultures. The Inspiring Leader is a great book and well worth the read.

Here are the final 4 most common mistakes people make when inspiring others.

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• They provide no coaching or mentoring. The least inspiring leaders lack interest in helping other people develop new skills or capabilities.
• They gunnysack critical information. These leaders prefer to control information and share as little as possible.
• They say one thing and do another.
• They have little or no interest in ideas or input from their direct reports.
• They rarely provide helpful feedback on.

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Here is another great book for you. This one by Scott Edinger, John Zenger, Joseph Folkman, the Inspiring Leader.

The book looks at how top leaders inspire teams to greatness. It discusses the behaviors exhibited by the most successful leaders and includes advice on how to implement them.

What I found interesting was towards the back it talked about the most common mistakes made when trying to inspire others.

The authors base their research on a four-year study involving more than 200,000 respondents.

I believe that few people are born leaders. An even those of us who find leadership a natural thing, it is always beneficial to look into the mirror and see how we can improve and how we can possibly grow.

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• They lack energy or enthusiasm. When these people walk into the room, you feel the energy leave. They absorb and consume energy, rather than injecting it into the group.
• They rarely provide clarity of direction or purpose. With these leaders, team members are not clear about their goals or how they contribute to the success of the organization.
• They avoid setting challenging goals or objectives. The lowest 10 percent of leaders do what needs to be done, but they always work hard to lower the expectations of others.
• They have no plan for personal development. These leaders assume that their skills are sufficient just as they are.

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www.nextfoundation.org/nfblog

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently, purposefully, and tenaciously.

Imagination

Faith

Enthusiasm

Decision

Persistence

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www.nextfoundation.org/nfblog

The fewer things we focus on, the greater our impact is in our life and the greater possibility for success in our chosen fields we give ourselves.

Most people live their life according to the Law of Strawberry Jam:

The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets, and the less you enjoy it.

Could you imagine going to a fight, a boxing match, with one hand tied behind your back or trying to play the piano with only every second key?

You would say, that is crazy, you would be insane to try and do that, yet most people spend their life like that.

They are not present in their life.

They are not purposeful with their gifts.

They are not passionate in their pursuit.

They have never stopped to examine their life.

They have never stopped to align their purpose, with their vision, their mission and their values.

So when it comes down to living a life of integrity, living a life being true to themselves, their calling and God given passions, they don’t.

They spread themselves around primarily because they have never felt they had the right to choose, the ability to say yes and the freedom to live with no.

If you are going to live a purposeful, present, passionate life you have to be engaged in the choices that construct your life.

Your life is the result of the choices you have made, the relationships you have built and the words that you speak.

Your choices yesterday have given you the fruit you are living off of today.

If you are going to be able to exercise the full gamete of choices over your present and future destiny, you have to:

a) Examine all the motivation and criteria you use to make choices

b) Become deliberate and fully conscious in your choices daily

c) Be responsive and not reactive in your choices

Avoiding making a decision about something is the same as making a decision about it.

There is a consequence to your inaction to the same degree that there would a consequence to your action.

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www.nextfoundation.org/nfblog

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you fully gave yourself to something?

If you just did it.

You didn’t question it.

You didn’t second guess yourself.

You didn’t allow yourself to get distracted.

You didn’t allow others to tell you if you were right or wrong in your dream, you just did it.

And what if you did it with such abandonment, such glee, such a sense of joy and expectation that even if it didn’t work out the way you envisioned, the journey was so exhilarating, the endeavor so worth it that the experience itself made you a better person.

Have you ever played a ball game, a match and got to the locker room, you have lost, and you sit there with your head down and you are thinking to yourself….man I really didn’t give it my best?

You play back the scenes, the shots, the plays and you know in your “knower” that you were holding back or distracted or lazy…and you regret it.

Or conversely…

Have you ever got to the locker room absolutely hammered, you still lost, but you know you gave it everything, you played full out and you left nothing on the field?

Life is like that.

I don’t want to step from this ring and have anything left.

I want to have lived it to the max. Done everything I can to have become all that I could have…

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