Protecting your time, energy, and integrity.
Let’s Talk about Boundaries
While perhaps counterintuitive, boundaries are the number one predictor of a successful writing routine. If it isn’t sustainable or enjoyable, you STOP writing. Let’s avoid that!
If, ultimately, the purpose of hiring a writing coach is to help yourself, your next best step is to get clear on the boundaries that preserve and protect your
Time
Energy
Integrity
Let’s look at each of these in turn:
Time: Protecting boundaries around your time also means pushing back on other people’s ideas of what your boundaries should be! Protecting boundaries can feel like a long game of negotiation, but in the end, one set of boundaries matters: YOURS. You do you to the best of your ability. Nobody else has your best interest at heart. Nobody could know your interests as well as you…
…or do you?
So many writers have lost themselves in other people’s requirements and expectations that they cannot see the forest for the trees. Counterintuitively, putting boundaries on our time forces us to define our purpose. There are only so many hours in each day and days in a life. If our boundaries don’t support, protect, and push back on the forces pushing in on us, time swooshes away…
Energy: I know. You’re tired of people telling you to protect your energy, and yet, it is indeed the very thing that needs protecting. There’s so much to unpack here (we’ll save that for your personalized coaching plan), but what if I distilled it this way: Where your energy goes, your energy flows.
Is where your energy is going where you want it flowing?
Energy is a non-renewable resource. It’s limited. Each day, each of us has a capacity. Approaching energy flows from the perspective of “what do I have capacity for?” is different than “What do I have the energy for?” Capacity respects boundaries that don’t deplete our reserves.
Integrity: Integrity gets back to my previous pillar, Purpose. Assuming that you’re with me and recognize that your purpose for writing (in order to be sustainable and pleasurable) needs to be bigger than simply accomplishing lots of stuff. You need an internal driver; you need a clearly stated argument that compels you to compose a piece of writing that only you can write.
Protecting your integrity as a writer is about protecting your purpose as a writer, and as we previously considered, writing without purpose is NOT sustainable. It’s like throwing your resources down the toilet.
One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn in creating a sustainable and pleasurable writing process involved building boundaries.
I was working at an international school when the administration changed. Overnight, the entire demeanor of school culture shifted. Even the middle managers began acting in defensive, unhelpful ways.
Before I blinked, the class loads increased, The pay stagnated. The professionalism turned passive and toxic. Morale plummeted. Teachers became scapegoats for inept and unethical leadership. Curricular and pedagogical decisions were taken out of the hands of the professionals (ie teachers). In short, education was no longer educational.
All of this was happening as I was considering what next steps to take after defending my dissertation.
Fast forward a few years: Covid…that’s all I need to say there.
Significant health concerns to navigate.
Expats in a second home country, far from family and immersed in another language.
Academy and K-12 education pretty much changing into something unrecognizable, or as the case might
be, disappearing altogether!
As a PhD in Education, all of this was happening while I was trying to WRITE. Yep, you got it. Write. I STILL WANTED TO WRITE! I still had something to contribute to this very confused field we are in, and it needed to happen more than ever BECAUSE of everything else going on.
Finally, after learning more about boundaries then I ever wanted to know, I built one more: No more teaching job. If I was going to use what I had spent so many years cultivating, it couldn’t happen in schools any longer.
So, I began “composing” a business. I wrote my way into it. I wrote my way through the start-up process. I met with other academics from all sorts of fields learning to write while in the midst of unending variables standing in the way of the one thing they really needed to do: WRITE.
Why do I share this? In a nutshell, this hot mess taught me boundaries. My research has always pushed boundaries, but this was the very real and daunting work of self-protection and choosing between my purpose or a life left at the whims of others’ fancies.
Every one of us has to define our own boundaries. My lines became much clearer when I started ignoring others’ ideas about what my boundaries should be.
At Define Your Lines, your boundaries will be respected. Your boundaries will hopefully grow into the carefully cultivated space that sustains your beautiful writing practice.
How can I help push the boundaries in your writing process so that you can protect and preserve what is most precious to you in your personal, professional, and intellectual life?