What tips do you have for employees?
But I want to do it in a situation where supposedly
I'm the one who's being bullied.
Maybe my boss is a bully.
Maybe my supervisor is a bully in a way
where they're continuously nagging me
about doing stuff right or something of that sort
in a non-healthy environment.
How would I deal with it?
Okay.
When you're applying boundaries,
the first thing you need to recognize
is what belongs to you and what does not.
So I like to use the yard analogy.
So you think about your yard.
What's in your yard are your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
What is on the other side of the fence
in your neighbor's yard, which does not belong to you,
are your neighbors, which could be anyone
that you're in a relationship with,
could be your boss, could be your coworker,
in their yard are their thoughts, feelings, and actions,
which you are not responsible for.
So when you're looking at this scenario,
you look at your feelings and your thoughts,
knowing you have a right to these.
And if you cannot let them go,
let's say it's happened as repetitively
and you're just really bothered by it,
these come in form of intrusive thoughts.
So then you have the responsibility to yourself
and quite frankly, to your boss and to the office as a whole
to approach your boss who's being a bully.
And when you're practicing healthy boundaries,
you know that however he, let's say he,
could be he or she, but let's just say he,
however he responds, it might make you uncomfortable,
but it does not belong to you.
It is not your job to manage his emotions.
It's not your job to make sure that he doesn't get upset.
Those are his feelings on the other side of the fence.
So when you acknowledge these things,
it gives you the ability to diplomatically
and respectfully approach your boss and say,
can we please have a brief conversation?
There was, we had a discussion the other day
that really bothered me.
I would just like to share with you my thoughts on it.
And so when you're going into that scenario,
when you know number one,
you have a right to your thoughts and feelings.
If you can't let them go,
then you have a responsibility to communicate them
in a respectful way because your behavior belongs to you.
And also when, like I said,
we are not owning how the boss is gonna respond.
And so if he responds,
if he starts yelling and screaming and carrying on,
we can simply watch him as if you would watch a neighbor
in their yard on the other side of the fence
and you just watch them.
Okay, those aren't your feelings.
You're not responsible for those.
You didn't cause those.
You can't control them.
You can't cure them.
They don't belong to you.
Technically his feelings are in his brain, just saying.
So when you do that,
then you can have your conversation.
Then he knows how you feel.
Then you can, and you repeat that
and then you kind of go back
because a lot of these problems in the workplace
happen repeatedly because we're too scared
to tell the person how we feel.
We're terrified they're gonna come screaming at us.
They're gonna yell at us, call us names,
cuss and carry on.
We're so scared of that
that we just keep it all to ourselves.
They can't read our mind.
They don't know how we feel.
So it's our responsibility to communicate it
if we can't let that go.
Yeah, that is very powerful, Dana.
What would you say in this scenario
if someone is afraid maybe for,
they might get fired or they might,
and they don't know if they wanna feed all those things
if they don't wanna confront someone about it,
how would they get out of that situation?
Well, and I like that you use the word confront
because a lot of people assume that setting boundaries
and practicing healthy boundaries
involves being confrontational
and it absolutely does not.
As a matter of fact, the most peaceful, calm people I know
are the ones that are very clear
about what belongs to them and what does not.
So when we understand that,
we can approach someone very calmly
and you'd be surprised or maybe not
how often when we approach someone very peacefully
and very calmly, we keep our tone down,
we slow down the volume
and we slow down the tempo of our speech.
The other person, their body calms down as well.
Like as I'm talking to you right now,
I'm bringing my volume down,
I'm slowing the tempo of my speech down.
Do you feel the change in your body
as I'm changing how I talk?
When we approach people like that,
it's very difficult for them to come back
in a very angry defensive stance
because your voice modulation has impacted their body
to relax it down.