You've Been Setting Boundaries Wrong: 5 Myths About Boundaries and Belonging

Written By Eli Walker

The best boundary works like a trampoline.

In Drunk Yoga®, we had rules. Like, if you spilled on your neighbor’s yoga mat, you owed them a compliment. If you spilled on your own yoga mat, you have to give yourself a compliment. If you take a sip out of turn, give the teacher a compliment. An uplifting drinking game, essentially: Break the rule, pay a compliment, spark belonging.

People loved it. They started breaking rules on purpose, just to have the opportunity to express kindness (ahem, dopamine hit, anyone?) Which sounds like a drinking game design failure, until you realize what it produced: a class full of strangers laughing and telling each other nice things for the heck of it. The rule-breaking “punishment” generated exactly the behavior the class existed to create. 
 

I now use variations on this rule in every talk, gathering or experience I facilitate or design, and I teach leaders and individuals how to do it, too, because it is the clearest example I have of what a clear boundary is supposed to do. 

The trampoline effect

Think about the floor of a cage and the mat of a trampoline. Both stop you by marking the edge of where you can go. But, one holds you where you land, and the other sends you back up higher than you started.

 

Most people are working with cage floors. They set a limit and everyone within it feels smaller and more cautious. This manifests as people feeling entitled and disengaged. 
 

A “trampoline” boundary has spring in it. It uplifts you by catching you and recycling your energy. And, turns out, the design difference between the two boundary types comes down to a handful of misplaced, negative assumptions about what a “boundary” really means.
 

Here are the five myths about boundaries I see most often👇

Myth 1: Boundaries limit freedom.

There's a study showing that preschoolers on a playground with no fence clustered close to their teacher and were reluctant to wander. On a comparable fenced playground, the same age group used the entire space. I love this, because it speaks to something my yoga teacher says all the time: “Boundaries create freedom. Even the definition of paradise is a walled in garden.”

In other documented study on this phenomenon, Catrinel Haught-Tromp ran two experiments asking people to write short rhymes, with half the trials requiring them to include a randomly assigned word. The constrained rhymes were rated more creative. She named it the Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis, after the book Dr. Seuss wrote on a bet that he could not do it in fifty words.

The blank page is the least free thing in the world. In fact, limitless options are anxiety-producing. So is the unstructured gathering where nobody knows what is expected, how long it will run, or what the real purpose is.

Example at home: "We're doing dinner, no phones, everyone's out by nine." People relax when they can see the shape of the evening.

Example at work: open the meeting by naming the container. What we're deciding, everyone’s clear role, what we're leaving for later, when we finish. The agenda, basically. Watch how much more people contribute once they know where the edges are.

Myth 2: A boundary is how you protect yourself from other people.

Boundaries got rebranded somewhere around 2018 as a personal defense system in the name of #selfcare. “No is a complete sentence, protect your peace, cut off anyone who costs you energy.” Some of that is genuinely useful, particularly for people who were never taught they were allowed to decline anything.

Here is where it is not useful. A boundary held by one person, announced at other people, functions as a wall. It tells the group what you are unavailable for, rather than what you are building together.

A boundary held by a group functions as a floor, in the same way that the physical setup of a space works on everyone in it at once. Nobody is defending anything, because there is nothing to defend against. Everyone feels accountable for each other’s safety.

Similarly, I created the compliment-based rules in Drunk Yoga® to create gamified, playful structure to help people feel safe (not punished).

Try it at home: shift from "I need you to stop doing that" to "can we agree on how we handle this one better next time?" Same limit, completely different structure.

Try it at work: write group agreements with the group rather than presenting them. Remember: accountability is the opposite of entitlement.

Myth 3: A boundary needs a punishment to work.

Kipling Williams has spent decades studying ostracism, mostly through a simple online ball-tossing game called Cyberball where participants are quietly stopped from being passed to. Even a few minutes of that is enough to threaten four fundamental needs at once: belonging, self-esteem, control and the sense that you meaningfully exist. Brief, trivial, obviously meaningless exclusion still hurts. So, when the consequence for breaking a rule is removal from the group, you are spending the exact resource you were trying to build.

The alternative has a name and a research base behind it.

Restorative practices came out of the justice system, where the aim was repairing the relationship between the person who caused harm and the person who absorbed it. Schools began borrowing the approach as a replacement for suspension.

In practice it runs from light to structured. At the light end, people make direct statements about how a specific behavior made them feel. At the structured end sits the responsive circle: everyone involved sits down together with no table or barrier between them and works through what happened. The conversation stays trained on the harm rather than the character of the person who caused it, and it ends with that person making amends and rejoining the group. The founding premise underneath all of it is that people change their behavior most readily when the people in charge do things with them instead of to them.

RAND ran one of the first rigorous tests of whether any of that works. The team conducted a randomized controlled trial across 44 Pittsburgh public schools between 2015 and 2017, with half the schools adopting a whole-school restorative program and half carrying on as usual.

What they found: days lost to suspension dropped 18 percent in the control schools over the study period and 36 percent in the restorative schools. Students in restorative schools were less likely to be suspended repeatedly and less likely to be transferred out to an alternative school. Teachers reported better conduct management, a safer working environment and a clearer grasp of the conduct policy. Suspension rates fell furthest for elementary students, Black students, students from low-income families and female students.

Try it at home: the consequence for missing your turn on dishes is doing something for the household, rather than a week of pointed silence.

Try it at work: when someone talks over people repeatedly, the correction is a job that requires listening. Have them run the next round of check-ins.

Myth 4: Boundaries kill all the fun.

Every game you have ever loved is a set of arbitrary restrictions that someone agreed to follow for no reason. You may not pick up the ball. You may only move diagonally. You have to guess the word in six tries, etc.

Gamification is applied boundaries.

Rules become punishing at the moment they are enforced downward by one person onto everyone else, with the enforcer exempt, in attempt to self-protect and make others feel small. Rules become playful and productive forms of boundaries when no one is exempt and the consequence is something people would voluntarily choose.

Try it at home: a house rule with a silly cost attached. Last one to the table picks the music and has to defend the choice.

Try it at work: the meeting rule where whoever says "let's take this offline" owes the group a follow-up date on the spot. Enforceable, funny, and it fixes ambiguity problems.

Myth 5: You set boundaries once, at the beginning.

Amy Edmondson's foundational 1999 study on psychological safety defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Studying 51 work teams, she found that psychological safety predicted learning behavior, which in turn predicted performance.

Sit with the word shared. It's a belief a group holds about itself, which means it forms through repetition and gets revised every time something happens. One announcement at kickoff does not install it.

The test of a boundary is what happens the first time it gets tested, especially by whoever has the most status in the space. If the leader breaks the rule and nothing happens, the rule was never real. If the leader breaks the rule and pays the compliment, the whole group learns that the floor holds.

Try it at home: be the first person to take your own consequence, cheerfully and out loud.

Try it at work: name the agreement again at the top of the second meeting. Then the third. Repetition is what converts a stated rule into a shared belief.

The point

Boundaries got rebranded as “self-care” as something thing that keeps people out. (Not helpful.) Used well, however, boundaries can build belonging when they create structure, safety and a sense of play.

Remember: trampoline boundaries > cage boundaries.

The same logic runs through the physical container people are standing in, since how your environment shapes belonging operates whether or not you designed it on purpose.

Boundaries is one of the 12 Belonging Hacks in the P.L.A.Y. Method. Want to build a set with your team? Reach out to us to set up a Belonging Bootcamp workshop.

Sources

Eli Walker
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