Thursday, December 11, 2014

Boundaries Are Beautiful

Rule #3
So, you've figured out your priorities and made some rules to help you actually make them priorities. But what about when real life happens? Let's use the example of family dinner time. Say you decide that you want to have a sit down dinner with your your 3 nights a week. You look at the activities schedule and decide Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays are the nights you have free so they will be sit down dinner nights. For a while this works great but then, of course, real life rears it's ugly head. One kid has an extra sports practice on Thursday.  And then of course the next week you are asked to attend a parent meeting on Tuesday. What do you do? My answer used to be that of course we would just skip sit down dinner that night because it was no big deal, right?  And guess what?  Every time I decided to skip it, just this once, I was demonstrating that family dinner really wasn't that big a priority. My family and I got that message and we stopped intentionally keeping that time free. Family dinner stopped happening in my house.  Instead, our weeks were filled with random activities that popped up rather than with the activities that I had said were my priorities. 
Don't fall into that trap of letting the random activities fill your time.  Make rules that work in your life and honor your priorities. If you are going to break a rule, make sure it is for a high priority reason.  Those rules create boundaries on your time and attention. Those boundaries are what will allow you to create the life you want rather than the life that sort of happens.
Rule #4 coming soon and I promise it's one you will want to do!


1 comment:

  1. Rules are comforting - if they're really rules. It's nice to have something to rely on - a framework for your schedule.

    Good post!

    ReplyDelete

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