boundaries: it's easier to go from tight to wide than to go shrink from wide to tight
28 Jul 2024humble proposition: i believe it’s easier to take a tight boundary and widen it and harder to take a wide boundary and shrink it.
this shows up over and over in my work and personal life.
some examples:
- it’s easier to say you offer a service to womxn and femmes and then also open it folks of all genders. it’s harder to offer a service to all genders and then stop offering it to some.
- it’s easier to commit to visiting family for 3 days and then, if it goes well, stay an extra day. it’s harder to commit to visiting family for 6 days and then leave on day 4 or 5.
i could go on but i imagine you get the general point.
there’s probably many psychological principles at play here (for example: people like perceiving they are gaining something way more than perceiving they losing something, even if it’s a very small loss). there may also be some non-human mind-based science here.
but the reason i’m writing about it is because a huge number of times i get in trouble with my boundary setting is because i’m trying to shrink a boundary that was initially made too wide. instead, if i had set out with the mindset of “start small and expand from there,” not only would i not be in trouble, i’d probably be experiencing excitement and positive energy rather than the negative energy often associated with loss. it feels so much easier to have a tight boundary and make exceptions. it feels so much harder to communicate to a person or group that something previously available is just not anymore.
i will say that it’s likely a cultural residue that shrinking a boundary feels so bad (american culture is paradoxically necrophobic and conflict averse even as it is necrophilic and conflict-prone). but since this is where i live, that’s a real factor here.
anyways, i’m going to continue to try and practice this. lmk if this resonates with you.
ps - ever since learning the saturn is my chart ruler (thank you, constance!) and my saturn return (which happened around the same time), i have taken my historical fascination about boundaries and turned it into a near obsession.
pps - even though i believe this phrase to be true, i also think that sometimes it’s great to aim for the moon and still land among the stars. my gut says that there are meaningful distinctions to make between types of situations where each one of these approaches might be useful. but i haven’t done that work yet. maybe another day.
ppps - now that i’m writing, this also sounds like a different version of the “underpromise, overdeliver” approach.
words / writing / post-processing
441w / 16min / 3min