Jennifer Cassetta dives into the art of setting boundaries to protect your energy and focus. Learn how setting boundaries can enhance your personal and professional life, helping you stand firm against negative influences and distractions. Jenn shares real-life experiences and insights to guide you in drawing clear lines around what matters most, allowing you to reclaim your peace and purpose. Whether it’s navigating challenging conversations or preserving your mental well-being, this episode offers practical tools to embrace your power unapologetically.
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Set Boundaries & Protect Your Power With Jenn Cassetta
We have a solo episode with me and you. I’m excited because we’re here to talk about boundary setting. These solo episodes are meant to be a boost of badassery for you and also inspired by real-life events that are going on in my life, in the world, in the country, or whatever’s happening. This episode is being recorded on October 29th, 2024. It’s not going to be released until a few more weeks. When you’re reading this, the elections will be over. We’re in that time a week away from elections. It’s also my anniversary. It’s my eighth wedding anniversary. Years ago, we were also a week away from election day. We all know what happened then.
This episode is timely because no matter what happens, about half the country will feel one way and about half the country will feel another way. There are going to be a lot of uncomfortable conversations and opinions that you don’t necessarily agree with. I am not going to share my opinion here on this episode. I’m sure you can all guess what it is, but this is not about that. This is not about politics. This is about protecting your peace through boundary setting.
It is October 29th, 2024 that I am filming this. I happened to set a really powerful boundary in my business that I’ll share with you. I felt like I needed to say no to a client who was asking me to do something for free. I am doing something for free for them. They then asked another thing. They wanted a 45-minute call with me to set up the free event that I’m doing for them. I am going to reference this bit in a little bit when we start digging into boundary setting, but I wanted to put that out there because it’s timely for me and it could probably be timely for a lot of you as well.
I also taught a workshop on boundary settings. One of my offerings is a one-hour workshop on boundary setting for companies and corporations. I did it over Zoom. I can do it in person. It’s really effective. All the comments in the chat were affirming that this work is so needed, especially in this time when this country is so divisive.
I can see in my backend on the show production site that there are folks tuning in who are not from the US. I have a lot of German readers. Hello. Guten tag. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here. That’s the first largest country after the US as far as readers and then Canada, the UK, and on and on. I’m not going to talk about that only, but in global news, it is very divisive as well.
Between what’s happening globally in the country or your small communities, I want you to tune in to this as if it were a workshop. Try on the ideas that I’m talking about when I’m talking about different areas of life. Go in your mind and picture who, what, and where you need some powerful boundary setting. Let’s get started, shall we?
How I do the Art of Badassery is to use a martial arts metaphor. The boundary-setting blocking technique is an entire belt level in the Art of Badassery framework. It’s an entire chapter in the book. Finally, on this show, I’m dedicating an episode to it. At the orange belt level, as a martial artist, I started to realize that if you don’t get good at your blocks and all the blocking techniques, high blocks, low blocks, inside blocks, and outside blocks, you’re going to get punched in the face, get kicked, and get taken down. You’re going to spend way more time on the ground, bloody, bruised, and beat up than necessary.
When we start to practice our blocking techniques, then we get to protect ourselves. On the mat, that might look physical, but in life, that translates to protecting yourself emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and financially. It is all the different ways. You are protecting your health and your inner peace. Don’t we need that? We need to protect everything that is good within us. We need to protect our authenticity. We need to protect our time, our energy, our resources, and all of these different things.
Mind Plug
With that said, I’m going to give you two definitions of boundary setting that I really like. The first one is mine. I came up with this when I was writing the book. It’s saying no to people, places, and things that drain you of your power and/or distract you from your purpose. To break that down a little bit for you, what do you think of when you think of the words your power?
Mind plug: saying no to people, places, and things that drain you of your power and/or distract you from your purpose.
I’m going to come up with answers that I’ve heard over and over again when I ask this all over the different audiences I speak to. It is the things that I mentioned. It’s your peace, mental well-being, physical well-being, health, and body. It is your power, confidence, and energy. If we are energetic beings, then we need to protect that energy, that chi, or that prana that lives and keeps us alive and vibrant. That’s your power.
There’s also your purpose. For the sake of this definition, we don’t need to get into, “What’s my life’s purpose? I don’t know what it is yet.” You do. You have a general idea of where you want your life to go. I’m assuming that. If you don’t, I’m going to need you to come in January 2025 when I offer again the Digital Vision Board Workshop, which I do twice a year. I do it in January so you can design your life and what you want it to look like three years from now. You can create the year ahead. We also do it in June. It’s a midyear realignment. It really is about setting up that vision and aligning your energy, where you invest your energy, your time, your resources, etc.
For the sake of this episode, think of your purpose as your North Star vision. What’s pulling you forward? What’s getting you out of bed these days? What does your life look like 1, 3, 5, or 10 years from now? You don’t have to have everything mapped out. How does it feel? How do you want to feel in your life? Is it empowered, powerful, confident, happy, joyful, or peaceful? What’s that like? Think about anything that’s distracting you from that vision. What is distracting you from your North Star vision, purpose, or mission in life? Those are the places that we need to start putting more powerful boundaries in place. Does that make sense? Moving on.
Golden Circle
The second definition that I like is by Elizabeth Gilbert. She is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, which is so good. I saw this written somewhere, so I didn’t hear her say it, but I’ve been quoting her. She says that boundary setting is drawing a golden circle around things that matter to you. You say, “Everything inside this circle is sacred.” Here’s where I’m going to riff on that, which is you have to protect it.
What do you consider sacred? The answers people usually come up with very quickly are family, relationships, friends, and loved ones. Maybe it is your work or your career if you care so much about it as I do. I want to protect that at all costs because it lights me up, gives me more energy, fuels me, and keeps me going forward. It is up there in my North Star vision. It’s the impact that I hopefully get to have on the world. I want to protect that. Maybe it is energy, time, peace, or confidence. There can be lots of similar answers to what I asked you before about what is your power. What do you want to protect? What do you need to put in that golden circle and make sure you protect it at all costs?
Hard Blocks And Soft Blocks
Moving back to the metaphor, in martial arts, we have two different styles. We have hard styles and soft styles of martial arts. The same goes with blocking or different blocks depending on which martial art you’re in or learning from. Also even in Hapkido, the martial art that I’m trained in, we use both. We use hard styles and soft styles of blocking. It depends on the attack.
For the hard block, an attack is coming at you full speed ahead. You meet that force with a force equal to or greater than the initial assault. You can visualize that. Think Cobra Kai in Karate Kid. The other style is the softer style. For the softer style, you meet the incoming assault at first and you start to blend with it, and then you get to deflect it away from you. It’s a circular motion.
Lots of circular motions that you get to deflect the initial assault. It’s that what a crap coming your way. You get to deflect it either back at your opponent or out into space with the goal of thinking of it as a transfer of energy. That’s all we’re doing. We’re in this dance. If you’ve ever watched Hapkido or Aikido or different softer styles of self-defense, you can see how powerful it is. You can watch it and it looks like a dance. There are these beautiful, blending circular movements. All that to say, a softer block can be as powerful and sometimes even more powerful than a hard block.
Where do we use these blocks? How do we know which block to use, etc.? For the most part, there are millions of different situations. I do encourage you to go back to your The Art of Badassery book and read this chapter because there are a lot of examples that you can really bite into. Here’s the deal. There are hard styles and soft styles. A hard style is going to be reserved for more toxic behavior that needs to be shut down at the moment. If I’m teaching self-defense and it’s a physical assault, we want to hard block and get away from it as soon as possible. Whether that be using your voice in a powerful way, shutting it down, saying, “Back off. Never again. Get away from me. Do not touch me again. I’m calling the police,” or whatever that is, those are your hard styles of blocks.
Examples Of Hard Blocks
When do you use these? It is when you don’t need to protect the relationship. If you need to preserve the relationship, then you’re going to pick more of a softer style of blocking. Back to the hard blocks, these are reserved for toxic behavior. They are reserved for things that you need to shut down right away. Maybe you’re on the street.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a professional or personal relationship unless you feel like the behavior that was tossed at you is so egregious and obnoxious that it deserves a hard block. Whether that be an inappropriate touch or someone speaking to you in a nasty tone, you can shut that down. You can say things like, “Never speak to me that way again.” That’s a hard block and white warranted in a situation.
In a hard block, you can use things like, “No. Nope. Never.” These are three one-word sentences that are complete as is. You don’t feel like you have to explain yourself after a no, a hard block. You use a commanding tone and commanding language. Commanding language is a verb. “Do something,” or, “Don’t do something,” or, “Never do this again,” is commanding language. There’s no black or white.
Examples Of Soft Blocks
Let’s move into soft blocks because this is a more fun conversation. Softer blocks happen probably a lot more than you would need a hard block, I hope, in your life. For softer blocks, this is where we need to preserve the relationship. We have lots of different options. I came up with about 5 or 6 in the book that I’m going to share with you as well as quick examples. This could work in personal relationships. Think family members, professional relationships, people you work with, even your boss if need be, people that work under you, or whatever it is. These are vendors, etc. Soft blocks will work.
An example of soft blocks, the first one is to create distance from said insulter or attacker. We’re calling them attackers because we’re using the martial arts metaphor. They’re not, hopefully. To create distance is easy to think about in the physical realm. If you were walking down the street and someone was after you, you would create distance from the attacker by crossing the street and getting away from them. In real life, we can’t always do that. We have to preserve the relationship. Maybe we have to work with them, etc.
How can we do that? We can create distance by making ourselves less accessible to people. How can you make yourself less accessible to people? That’s like drawing a boundary around how they communicate with you. Maybe someone is used to you answering the call every time they call you, texting back right away, or answering an email right away. By making yourself less accessible, you put more time in between the responses.
It could look like if you have a boss that is expecting you to work all weekend but you’re not getting paid for it and, frankly, you want to protect your mental health and well-being over the weekend, then it would mean not answering emails over the weekend. You may have to set a boundary by sharing that with them instead of not doing it.
Depending on the work situation you’re in, you can let them know. If you own your own business, for example, you can have an outgoing message, “I will be checking emails from Friday at 5:00 until Monday morning and I will get back to you within 24 hours or 48 hours,” or whatever that looks like for you. You can have systems built into how you respond to people and how accessible you are. Think about that in your life. Is there anyone or anything that you need to have some distance from?
A deflection truly means to change the direction of something. For example, if you walk into a conversation, and I’m going to give an example of politics that you think is going sideways, you don’t want to be part of it. You also don’t want to get into a confrontation with people. That’s the key here. We want to not go around making confrontations about this stuff. Can we maybe change the direction of the conversation? It’s going in one direction, politics. It’s getting uglier. Can you come into that conversation and deflect? That’s one way.
It’s people in your family who are always asking you, “When are you going to get married?” or, “When are you going to have kids?” It is all those inappropriate questions that people get asked so often. You can change the subject. The point is it’s energy transference and it’s whoosh in a way. I have people stand up and do this with the noise. They’re like, “Whoosh.” You can do that in real life and never let it stick to you. That’s when we start to feel drained and deflated. Our energy gets low and robbed from us, but we don’t need to allow that. We have the deflection.
Next, we have the clarification. This is a really good one when you feel like someone used a strange tone with you that you didn’t like. Perhaps they were passive-aggressive, which is very common. Perhaps they sent you a complisult. You’re like, “Was that an insult or a compliment? I can’t tell.” The clarification is to clarify what the person meant by asking them, “Can you clarify what you meant by filling in the blank?” It’s a great question.
We’re going to get into some questioning because this is where boundary setting can get fun. It’s like a dance. When you feel assaulted mentally, emotionally, and verbally, what happens? It’s the same as if a physical assault was coming towards you. Your amygdala is going to get hijacked. Your brain is hijacked by fear. We go into stress mode. The alarms are being sounded off for fight, flight, or freeze. Stress hormones are racing through your body. Cortisol, adrenaline, or epinephrine. Your heart is racing. Your hands can get clammy. There are all these things by somebody saying something to you. It has the same effect as if you were being physically threatened.
A lot of times when that happens, we’re either going to want to fight back right away, which is not always the best-case scenario, or we want to flee. We want to run away from this conversation but then later on, we’re like, “I wish I stuck up for myself. Here I am, I keep finding myself back again in the same type of situation because I didn’t take care of it the first time.” We have that freeze response where we’re sitting there stunned and going, “Did that really happen? Did they say that?” You’re blank. You don’t know what to say.
Before you choose any of these blocks that I’m going to finish for you, I want you to take a big deep breath in through the nose and out through the nose. If you can remember, count it out. That’s 5 in and then 5 out even if you have to stand there breathing in front of the person. Start to downregulate your nervous system because when you do that, then you’ll have access to the part of the brain, the frontal lobe, where there’s more logic where you could get to be more creative. All of that goes out the window when you’re under a fight or flight response.
You’re going to breathe and then you’re going to choose, “Do I want to create distance? Can I deflect? Can I ask a question back to clarify the person’s intent?” You’re like, “Can you clarify what you meant by that?” A fourth option is to tell them how it lands. You’re like, “I heard you say,” and you repeat back what they said, “It made me feel threatened, stressed, paranoid, and sad.” You can also follow that up with, “Was that your intention?” You are clarifying their intent behind the comment, behind the insult, or behind whatever it was that they threw at you. We’re talking about verbal attacks.
Last but not least, you can follow up with any questions. If you can’t remember, you can ask, “Can you clarify that?” or, “Was that your intention?” Ask any question because when you’re asking a question in a conversation, especially a difficult conversation, you have the power back. You’re asking for a response. Use a question sometimes to give yourself time to ask the question that you want to ask. Breathe with me. Let’s practice. Breathe in, breathe out, and then choose. Create distance, deflect, clarify, tell them how it lands, follow up with a question, hold their gaze, and wait for an answer. It holds people accountable for their words, their actions, or their behaviors.
When you’re asking a question in a conversation, especially a difficult conversation, you have the power back.
Setting Boundaries Around Your Self
That’s, in general, how I like to go through boundary-setting with folks. That’s against other people or defense against other people. A lot of the boundary setting that I’m doing in my own life which I’m working with my clients with is boundary setting around yourself. It’s about drawing those circles around yourself. I have a worksheet for you. If you go to Pages.JenniferCassetta.com/Boundaries, you’ll have journal prompts that you can fill out. Part of that is to really go through those things that are sacred to you and time blocking on your calendar.
Time blocking is a really powerful way to set boundaries around what you consider sacred, which is your time, energy, and all the things you invest into it. With that said, if we’re talking about your health, where can you put a boundary on your calendar that is about your health, taking care of your health, or self-care? For example, if it’s your mental health, physical health, and well-being that you want to work on, is there 1 hour, 30 minutes, or even 10 minutes of your day?
I talk about this all the time. It could be small parts of your day that you can put in your calendar, like a walk outside in the neighborhood, your meditation, or your journaling. Have it on your calendar and time block it out. Therefore, you adhere to your calendar like, “This is the time I’m protecting. It’s for myself. I need to fill up my cup before I fill into others.” I have an episode on morning routines that you can go back to. It’s the Three P’s to a Badass Morning Routine. Head back to that and start thinking about how you can start your day off really powerfully with a boundary morning. Have strong boundaries around that practice.
Last but not least, I want to remind you what happens if you do not set powerful boundaries. If you don’t, it’s likely because you’re putting everybody else’s wants, needs, and desires above your own. It’s called people-pleasing. Approval whore is something that one of the audience members taught me one day. I know what that is. I know whory boundaries. That’s like being an approval whore. You’re always seeking people’s approval. You’re doing whatever they want versus filling up your cup first, doing what you want, and being true to yourself.
Over time, when you’re a people pleaser, you start to feel drained of your energy because you’re filling up other people’s cups. Everything starts to be drained away from you, like your energy. When that happens over time, and some people live decades like this, you start to feel resentment and sometimes even anger. What can we do instead? We set powerful boundaries before we burn out.
Set powerful boundaries before you burn out.
That’s my reminder for you. I would love for you to go get that boundary worksheet at Pages.JenniferCassetta.com/Boundaries so you can set better boundaries in your life, feel more powerful, protect your peace, and do all the things that make you feel badass in this world because it is your birthright to feel like a badass. Thank you. Please make sure you subscribe and leave us a review because these reviews really help spread the word about the show. Thank you so much. I’ll see you next time.
