“Whatever you are willing to put up with, is exactly what you will have.” -Anonymous

It is never too late to learn about your boundaries. I am coming to believe that it is perhaps one of the aspects of living that most defines our maturity and facility for accomplishing our goals. Boundary issues are common to most of us, but for some of us, like me, their absence colors every relationship I have ever had, beginning with my relationship to myself. Lacking and unclear boundaries with ourselves take on all forms of self-sabotage, and in our interpersonal relationships runs the gamut from avoidance to codependency.

Boundaries reflect how we love ourselves and what we value most deeply. They impact our capacity at work, with authority, with our money and our sexuality. Knowing when we want to say yes, when we want to say no, what feels like self respect and where our own needs start and end are the foundations that build the sense of boundaries that control our lives. Mine have long been porous, which is a generous way of admitting that my lines between myself and others, in family and even more so at work have been fuzzy.

All the new developments at Good Clean Love, with a new CEO, that actually has clear and strong boundaries is where we are all feeling the ground shifting and starting to settle under our feet. This is one of the coolest things about boundaries, like the five % rule of change, which requires only small consistent change to shift your relationships; a single person with a clear sense of boundaries will impact the whole work environment.

I am excited, if not a little nervous to explore my ability to work with my personal limits and temper my abundant openness to a selective process of choosing who I share what details of my life with. I have spent decades in the confusion that complete transparency is the only way to make relationships work. Without too much remorse or guilt, I can bear testimony to the fact that, as a business owner, it is not an effective business strategy.

The big leap for me will be for me to learn to communicate without any emotion, which has never had much separation of space. I don’t know if I ever understood until today, how my communications often fall victim to the intensity of emotion that lives beside them. Amazing to be learning to see oneself with so much clarity in my fourth decade. A testimonial to the fact that we never stop growing up.

Thinking about boundaries now in my family of origin, with my growing children and with my employees and new management team seems like the action verb of self forgiveness. Learning to sense and articulate my own needs and choosing where and when to share them might well be the life changing 5% that I have been looking for.