MICHELLE ELMAN REVEALS HOW TO TAKE BACK CONTROL AT WORK AND RESET BOUNDARIES WITH YOUR COLLEAGUES
Being a workaholic is easier than it’s ever been. Now that we have technology, there is an unspoken expectation for us to constantly be contactable and available. If you lack self-love, work becomes the most accessible tool to fill the voids where self-esteem should be. In a society where being busy is glorified, it’s not a vice that society easily sees as unhealthy. If you are unable to boundary your work – whether that’s working more hours to impress your superiors or not being adequately compensated for your time and energy – it is extremely fragile to base your self-worth on your productiveness. If you don’t have boundaries in your work life, it inevitably will have an impact on other areas of your life. For example, if you are constantly typing emails on your phone when people are trying to spend time with you, or you are interrupting conversations to pick up the phone every time it rings, it’s going to make your relationships harder.
Someone being on the phone in front of me is one of my boundaries and I don’t tolerate it. If you are going to spend the whole dinner working, then we might as well not be having dinner. If the majority of workaholics were honest with themselves, the workplace provides the feelings they crave of being needed, and it makes them feel important. The urgent requests aren’t actually as urgent as they perceive them to be in their brain, but instead they love how that busyness distracts them.
Boundaries are difficult to lay down in all settings, but within the workplace, the fear of being demoted or fired is often used to validate a general fear of standing up for ourselves, and it’s therefore used as an excuse. Using this fear, we set up a false dichotomy between speaking our minds and losing our jobs, or swallowing our protestations and having to live with the continued resentment as we suffer in silence. There is a middle ground between those two choices.
Out-of-hours boundaries
There was a time when you could clock off from work the moment you left the office, but thanks to technology, most people never truly switch off. Not only is this not healthy, but it isn’t productive to constantly be on call, and in the long term it will lead to you being burnt out.
Depending on your job, there will be different levels of feasibility, but make sure you are being honest with yourself. Even if you are not able to decline outright, you can still boundary your time off. For example, let’s say you get a call out of hours, but d
