Boundaries for Bosses: How to Overcome Your Overwhelm With Strong Boundaries for Your Staff
If you’re feeling overwhelmed in your business, what do you think is really responsible for it?
You’ve built up your business to make the kind of money you want it to make. But you’re always working the business and have no real free time to yourself, so that life you’ve envisioned still seems like a vision out of reach.
Nine times out of 10, the reason you’re feeling overwhelmed is because of the faulty boundaries you’ve set for yourself and your business. That’s why, starting today on the podcast, I’ll be spending the next few episodes talking about how to establish strong boundaries in your business so you can actually have a peaceful life.
In this episode of Pleasurable Profits, you’ll learn about the signs that demonstrate whether you have healthy or weak boundaries with examples of how that can show up in your business. I’ll also reveal something you might mistake for boundaries that detrimentally affected my business when I started hiring outside my family.
6:29 - What boundaries are and how to know if you need better ones
9:29 - Defining leaky boundaries and how they harm you
12:21 - The other side of the coin when it comes to boundaries (and how it lost me 50% of my clients at one point)
17:11 - What healthy boundaries look like and the difference between oversharing and vulnerability
20:45 - A note for pole dancing studio owners
Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.
As Mentioned In Boundaries for Bosses: How to Overcome Your Overwhelm With Strong Boundaries for Your Staff
Episode 44: “How to Identify If Your Boundaries Are Actually Barriers”
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Transcript for Boundaries for Bosses: How to Overcome Your Overwhelm With Strong Boundaries for Your Staff
Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.
Hey party people. It’s Leslie, your embodied sales and leadership coach. How are you doing? I'm doing amazing. Thank you for asking. Can y'all believe that Q1 is over? My mind is just blown that Q1 is over. This year is just flying by and I'm just like, “I don't want to know the year like 2022 that it felt like I blinked and it was over.” I'm just like, “Can we slow this down a little bit? Can we stretch this out?”
But then there's some other stuff though that I'm looking forward to, especially in June this year, my sabbatical is going to be in June. I'm going to be doing quite a bit of travel so I guess I should be excited and wanting it to hurry up and get to June. But man, when I look at my business goals, I'm like, “Slow down, player. You need a little bit more time.” Anybody else feel like that or is it just me? Let me know.
Well, I thought this would be a great time as we go into Q2, to talk a little bit about things that wear us out when it comes to leading in our nontraditional businesses as reluctant leaders. It’s the sh*t that just wears us out. At this point, y’all, I have literally personally coached about 150 women. It’s insane to me when I counted it up.
Most of the time, I heard someone say this maybe about a month ago in the coaching world and they were talking about creating programming, they always said that you know you have a good program when you solve one problem and it creates another.
I was like, “Oh my god. I didn't think about it that way but this is so true.” When I first started coaching, mentoring, teaching, training, whatever label you want to put on it, five years ago, my big focus was my selling. My big goal was to help women take home $150,000 a year, minimally $100,000 a year. That's what I wanted you to take home.
I didn't focus so much on top-line revenue because based off of your expenses, somebody might need more money to make $150,000 depending upon their business model. But my goal is when you come and work with me, it has always been, “I need you to make a livable wage so that it makes sense for you to do this business.” Not-for-profit is a tax status, not a business strategy. I say that all the time.
Well, what I found was that that was a much easier problem to fix. Now some of y'all are sitting out there saying, “What? Speak for yourself.” But if you're in a non-traditional business like pole dance, tattoo, dispensaries, plant medicine, that sort of thing, that ain’t nothing to make and to come up with that type of money if you know the right framework.
If you follow the framework, you can take home $100,000, $150,000 easy peasy. But the new problem that was created was now I'm making all this money, I gotta have a team or this business is going to freaking kill. This business is going to suck the life out of me if I don't get help.
The initial problem was I need to make money to make a living wage, and then it became, “Okay, I'm making all this money, but I still haven't gotten any time back. I'm chained to my business.” That's when I shifted into the leadership space.
Now, I didn't shift into the leadership space just out of necessity, I have a background in that. For those of you who don't know, I spent over 20 years in corporate America. I started in human resources so the business of human resources, the business of people, organizational psychology, that was my life. Then I moved into selling.
I spent a chunk of time in leadership roles in traditional spaces before I started my pole dance studio. When I shifted, it wasn't like it wasn't an area that I could not mentor or teach in, I just didn't think it was the priority. But boy, did I find out, it’s truly, truly the priority.
In talking with those people, what I found is that if someone was feeling overwhelmed in their business, 9 times out of 10, it was because they were experiencing faulty boundaries. I think in the next three episodes, I'm going to talk about how to establish strong boundaries in your business so that you can actually have a peaceful life.
There are three types of boundaries that I'm going to focus on. The first is going to be boundaries with your staff. The second will be boundaries with your clients. Third, boundaries with social media, your free time, that sort of thing. It’s boundaries around your mental health.
At the end of this, I'm hoping that you'll feel more equipped to use your voice and protect your peace. This episode is going to just give you an overview of what boundaries are. I've done an episode before where I talked about boundaries versus barriers, but I think it's helpful to revisit it specifically in a leadership setting. A lot of my work and conversation around boundaries come from the work of Dr. Nedra.
I just love the definition that she had for boundaries. She had several definitions, but the one that I retain was when she was like, “A boundary is really a cue to others about how to treat you.”
I always say you teach people how to treat you. How you communicate your boundaries just lets people know, “This is what I stand for and this is what I stand against. This is what I allow and this is what I won’t put up with.” You know that you need better boundaries if you’re always exhausted, if you're always tired, if you always feel depleted, it's probably because your boundaries are leaky.
I really want us to talk about what's the benefit of boundaries, especially for those of you who are like Enneagram 2s, 3s, 7s, y'all sometimes, in your desire to be in relationship with people, will betray yourself. That will make you exhausted. It will make you lack focus. It will make you lose the zeal for your business.
Some of the benefits if you think about boundaries, if you think about them as a self-care practice, when I talk about self-care with leaders, I'm not typically talking about spa days and taking yourself to Bali. While all those things are amazing, one of the most beautiful things that you can do to nurture your heart, to nurture your mind is to put boundaries in place.
You communicate what's acceptable and what's unacceptable. When I think about boundaries, I also think about, “This is how I communicate my needs.” The easiest way to think about that is in my marital relationship like, “This is how I communicate my needs.” But this also shows up in my business, how do you tell your people that you need support? How do you ask for support? Those are strong boundaries.
How do you know if you got leaky boundaries though? I already told you, you're exhausted, you always feel like somebody is taking advantage of you, that sort of thing. Let's define what a leaky boundary is. They're weak or they're poorly expressed like you just are really not clear. You might communicate a little but you don't give the full story.
It's really unintentionally harmful when you have leaky boundaries. They're harmful to others and yourself. You feel depleted, you feel like you’re always overextending yourself, and worst case scenarios, you might have clinical depression or anxiety. It's just all these unhealthy relationship dynamics that pop up when you have leaky boundaries.
If you're looking for maybe a warning list or a symptom list, and you're like, “Man, d*mn, Leslie, do I have leaky boundaries?” Do you find yourself oversharing? Have you set up some codependent relationships with you and your team?
I see this a lot, especially with reluctant leaders, when we hire that first employee and for so long, it's just you and that employee, and so you share too much and you inadvertently, unintentionally, set up this codependent relationship where that person feels like they can't function without you and you feel like you can't function without them, you have a tough time saying no, you might even feel like you're always adapting, adjusting, or changing policies, so that your people are happy, low key, that's just people-pleasing in general.
Or maybe this is you, every time you come up with an idea, you gotta get a f*cking consensus, you can't come up with an idea on your own, you got to ask your team what they think, everything is a democracy, you can't move forward until you brand your idea by everybody involved, then you wonder why you feel confused. You wonder why you feel like nothing's moving forward because you bring in too many people into the decision-making process.
Or you might be paralyzed that your team is going to quit. If you say the wrong thing, if you don't give them what they want, they're going to reject you or they're going to shun you. They're going to start looking for another job. All of that is because you have leaky boundaries.
That's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin, we're still talking about boundaries, is when you caught yourself having boundaries, and I see this personified in the boss chick narrative, like you're the boss, you’re booked and busy. Don't nobody come to you. You don't take sh*t from nobody. They better think twice before they step on you.
You’re probably an Enneagram 8 or a Counter Phobic Six, that energy, and why do I know that energy so well? Because that used to be my energy. I remember when I first started hiring outside of my family, because when I first started my business, it was my sisters and I, when they moved on and I started hiring employees, I was like, “You know what, I am going to be very clear about what I'm going to deal with, what I will tolerate, and what I'm not going to tolerate. I'm going to keep it business.”
I was very much so under the thought process of “This is business, it ain’t personal.” My energy was very rigid. It was very barrier-like. What I thought were boundaries was really me building walls, brick by brick. It was embarrassing to even say, but I probably went through like four employees, right away, churned, burned them out, mistreated them, they were gone, and I probably lost maybe 10, 15 clients because of the same energy.
You might be thinking 10, 15 clients, that's not much but hell, when you opened up and I probably only had about 20 students at that time, to lose 50% of them because of my boundaries that were really barriers was problematic. You might be thinking, “Well, that's you. That's not me.” Well, let me ask you, you know you might be having barriers if you'd never share.
Remember, leaky boundaries are when you overshare. If you never share, yeah, you've probably got a boundary, meaning you never look for input, you never tell anybody anything that's going on in the business or about you, that's a barrier. If you avoid vulnerability like the f*cking plague, you get sick at the thought of sharing something personal about yourself, that's probably a barrier.
Here's my favorite one: when your cut-off game is strong, I know people, y'all, I know people who say things like, “My cut-off game is strong. You cross me, I'm done. You can never come back. You only get one time to make a fool out of me. I'm going to deal with you no more.”
Or as a woman who was in my church, she passed away recently so some of her sayings are fresh in my mind, but she used to always say, “Look, Leslie, I'm too old of a cat to get pawed in the ass by a kitten.” Yeah, Mother Pearl, I love you. I miss you. But you have some barrier issues there.
Here's another sneaky one. This is something that I got from Dr. Nedra when I was studying her work. She talked about barriers also being, she didn't call them barriers, I think rigid boundaries is what she called it but for me, it's like a barrier because it's like a wall. But I remember her talking about another way that you can know that you have barriers is based off of you have these super high expectations for other people.
You're a perfectionist and you expect everybody else to be a perfectionist. You always enforce strict rules, policies, and those sorts of things. That is a rigid boundary setting. That is built on the d*mn wall, that is building a barrier between you and your team.
Really, what I want to do is help you find that middle ground so that we get to healthy boundaries with our team, with our clients, and with our mental health. I want us to be able to have healthy boundaries. A healthy boundary looks like self-care, a healthy boundary looks like being clear about your values, your principles. We talk about that all the time.
It’s listening to your opinion before you listen to us. It's esteeming your intuition and your inner knowing before you farm it out to public opinion. It's sharing with others appropriately. That's what vulnerability looks like.
This is something I'll talk about separately with that, but as I'm thinking about it, Auntie Brené got us all about vulnerability. I'm like, “I really wish people would get that oversharing is not vulnerability.” What I tell my clients is you can tell the difference between an overshare and being vulnerable by how the other person responds.
Vulnerability should increase empathy. It should let your team see that you're human. They can see the humaneness in you and recognize the humaneness in themselves. There's increased empathy for one another. Oversharing makes your employees, staff, clients feel like they need to take care of you. You shared something and now they're like, “What do I do with this? Am I supposed to take care of her? What do I do?” That is a great litmus test to determine if I'm being vulnerable or if I'm oversharing.
But back to a healthy boundary, you know you've got healthy boundaries when you can say no kindly, not harshly, because if it's a no that's harsh, that's a barrier because you're trying to keep people away from you. But when you can just say no and not feel guilty about it, and you can say no with a smile on your face, and encourage people to go on without you, that's when you know you have healthy boundaries.
The opposite of that, or the inverse of that is when someone tells you no, you don't take that sh*t personally either. Because to have healthy boundaries, it's not just about setting them for yourself, it’s also honoring the boundaries of other people.
It's my hope that you'll stick with me through the series. Like I said, next week, we will talk about how to set up good boundaries with clients, then we'll talk about setting up good boundaries with your employees. Then finally, we will talk about putting together good boundaries around your mental health.
I want you to win at this game of leadership because you can. You've built a business because you're smart. You built the business because you are unconventional. You've built a business because you're a risk taker. But I don't want you to die in your business. I don't want your business to kill you.
I know this seems very dramatic. But all you need to do is sit down and talk to a therapist or doctor who talks about the number of stress-related deaths and you will take this more seriously. I don't want you to be blown but I want you to win. So stick around.
Now, on another note, if you own a pole studio, I am starting a private podcast. Yes, I am. Because there are some things that are happening in the pole industry that are not applicable to those of us who listen to this podcast who own tattoo shops, who own dispensaries, who are in other industries, but pole will always be near and dear to my heart and I got some sh*t I want to say.
If you are interested in getting access to it, because it's going to be a private podcast, it will not be listed on public players, you won't be able to Google it and find it, you won't be able to go on Apple, iTunes and find it, if you're interested in it, I'm going to need you to go to talktoleslie.com.
I never got some visions for this, wouldn’t it be cool if you could call into a number with a question and just leave an anonymous question and I turned it into an old-school radio show? Don’t that sound fun? You can just answer questions and it just makes it super interactive. We'll see how it goes. But right now, there's just some stuff that I need to say to my pole peeps that we can't say on this podcast.
If you own a pole studio, you own a movement studio, like a burlesque studio, you own a 567 twerk studio, that sort of thing, this podcast will be good for you too. Head over to talktoleslie.com. Alright, my loves. My voice is going in and out. I apologize for that. But I will see you guys next week. I hope you have a great week. Be well. We'll talk soon. Grace and peace.