Holly Toscanini: Tell me if this sounds familiar. Someone asks you to do something, maybe take out a project or cover for a colleague, show up for a thing, be available for a conversation you just don't have the energy for. And somewhere in your body, quietly and very clearly, a no shows up. Not a loud no, just a feeling, a heaviness, a very small but certain, I don't want to do this. And then your brain gets involved. Well, they're really counting on me. It's only a few hours. I don't want to seem difficult. I'll rest later. It's just really not a big deal. And by the time you have finished negotiating with yourself, you've talked yourself into saying yes, and you're feeling pretty resentful, and you're already tired from a thing you haven't even done yet. That moment right there is where self-trust gets lost. And not in big dramatic ways, but in the small, quiet negotiations where you override what you actually know and do what feels safer instead. Today we're gonna talk about how to stop doing that. And it's not by having to become somebody else. It's not by cutting people off or delivering monologues about your needs, but through what I call micro boundaries, which are small, sustainable choices that let you stay connected to yourself without abandoning yourself in the process. Welcome back to How to Lose the Weight. I'm Holly Toscanini, and around here, we talk about all the ways that women have been trained to abandon themselves and put themselves last, and what it really looks like to stop doing that in real life with actual relationships and the responsibilities you have. Today's episode is specifically for the woman who hears the phrase set boundaries and feels this mixture of, ⁓ yes, I need that. And I have absolutely no idea how to do that without everything in my life falling apart. But here's the version of boundary advice that gets shared online. You're either protecting your piece with total conviction or you're a doormat. You're either cutting people off or you are endlessly available. And there's just no middle ground for that. And for most midlife women, especially the high achieving, emotionally intelligent ones who have been the reliable person in every room for decades, that binary is not useful. and it's certainly not accurate. So today we're gonna talk about something a little more practical. We're gonna cover why that internal negotiation is where the real problem lies. Why big dramatic boundaries often backfire on us and what micro boundaries really look like and the three areas women tend to lose most energy, time, communication and emotional availability. and how to get through the guilt and the discomfort that comes right after you hold a boundary. And then at the end, I'm going to tell you about the Unwaiting Audit, which will give you a personalized picture of your confidence archetype and where you are in your self-trust journey what your most useful next step is. All right, let's start with the piece that doesn't get talked about enough. Negotiating. When most people talk about boundaries, they talk about them as if the problem is other people, like somebody out there is the boundary crosser and your job is just to stop them. And yeah, sometimes that's true, but some people do push. Some relationships do take more than they give. That's a fact. But in my experience, the more common and invisible problem is this. You are your own biggest boundary problem. Not because you're weak, but because you've gotten very good at talking yourself out of what you already know. Your body gives you the signal. The no shows up in your chest, in your gut. It's that low grade dread, right? A sudden exhaustion at the thought of having to do the thing. And then your mind, which has been trained since childhood ⁓ prioritize harmony and helpfulness over honesty, starts building the case for why you should do it ⁓ They're counting on me. It would be so selfish to say no. I should be able to handle all of this. I'll deal with how I feel about it later on. Later, of course, has a way of never arriving. And this is what I mean by negotiating against yourself. And it's worth sitting with that phrase for a second because it really reframes this whole conversation. You're not just being nice. You're actively arguing the other side of your own instincts. You're taking your own inner knowing and building a case against it on somebody else's behalf. And you've probably been doing it for so long that you don't even notice it happening anymore. It just feels like being responsible, like being a good person. And the piece that matters so much is that you can set all the external boundaries you want, but if you keep overriding your own signals internally, nothing's gonna actually change. So I'll tell someone I'm not available and then spend the next hour feeling guilty and checking my phone. Or maybe you say, I'm gonna rest and then find a reason to do that thing anyway. You'll declare that you are done overwriting and overgiving and then you over give because your nervous system doesn't yet believe it's safe to stop doing that. So the first boundary, the first foundational one has gotta be internal. It's the decision to stop treating your own no as a starting point for negotiation. not overnight, not perfectly, but as a practice. Think of it as a returning to. When my body says no, I stop building the case against it. That's where it actually starts. So I wanna talk about why big boundaries often backfire. So before we get into the practical part, I wanna say something about why most of the boundary advice we get just doesn't stick, especially for women who have spent decades being the reliable, available, emotionally present person. When you've been over giving for a long time, the feelings that have built up are real and valid. The resentment, the exhaustion, the sense of somehow having lost yourself somewhere in the middle of taking care of everything, right? That's real. But when those feelings finally reach a breaking point, the boundaries that come out of that moment tend to be big, dramatic, and fueled by accumulated resentment rather than clarity. And those boundaries, the ones that come from the bottom of the tank, are hard to sustain because they were built on a feeling, not a decision. Now the other thing that happens with big dramatic boundaries is that they shock your nervous system almost as much as they shock everybody else's when you say no. So if you've spent 40 years being the person who says yes, the first time you say a hard no, your body's gonna panic a little and not because you did something wrong. but because you broke a very old pattern and your nervous system interprets pattern breaking as a threat until it learns otherwise. So you set the big boundary. Your nervous system freaks out a little bit. The guilt comes in hard. Someone expresses disappointment and you fold. Not because you wanted to, but because the discomfort was more than you prepared for. Microboundaries work a little differently. They're small enough so that your nervous system doesn't go into full tilt, full alert. They're real enough that they change something. And because they're small, they're repeatable, which is actually what builds the confidence to hold the bigger ones later on. So think of it this way. You don't build strength by maxing out your weights on the first day in the gym, right? You build it by showing up consistently with something you can actually manage. Micro boundaries are the consistent reps. And over time, they add up to a woman who trusts herself to hold the line because she has proof that she can do it. There are three main areas where I see women really lose the most energy to unguarded access. Their time, their communication, and their emotional availability. So I want to go through each one of these, starting with time. Your calendar is not a community resource. Now that sounds obvious, but when I say it out loud and yet for a lot of women, it functions like one, right? Someone needs something and your time is the default solution. your lunch hour, your evening, your weekend, your mental bandwidth at 11 p.m. All fair game, because you never said otherwise. Time boundaries don't have to be confrontational. They can be as simple as, let me check my calendar and get back to you, but said genuinely, followed by an actual pause where you check in with yourself before responding. And not to find an excuse, but to find out what you actually want to say. The problem is that most women say, let me check and then immediately start negotiating with themselves on the other person's behalf. ⁓ they really need this or it would have only taken an hour. I don't want to be the person who said no. And by the time you respond, that check-in never happened. So the micro boundary here is in two parts, the pause and then actually using the pause, delay your yes. Let it be a real yes, not a guilty one. Now the second area is communication. We live in a world that has quietly decided that being reachable 24 seven is a virtue and not responding immediately is something that needs to be explained. And for a lot of women, this is translated into near constant states of availability that is exhausting and entirely self-imposed. You don't owe anyone. instant access to you. That's not a radical statement either. That's just true. Communication boundaries can be practical and undramatic. Responding the next day instead of the same night. Letting a call go to voicemail when you just don't have the energy to hold a conversation well. Telling someone, yeah, I saw this and then I'll reply when I have a few minutes to give it real attention. These aren't cold. These are honest. They protect something important. your ability to show up with actual presence rather than just reflexive availability. The hardest communication boundary and the one that matters really most for a lot of women is around emotional processing. Specifically being the person that someone always comes to with their difficult feelings and never getting to decide whether you have the capacity for all that in a day. I'm not the right person for this right now is a complete sentence. and it doesn't require reason. It is a reason, which brings me to the third area. Access to your emotional energy. We talked about this in last week's episode. So check it out if you want to find out where your energy is really going by taking the energy Audit. is the one that tends to feel the most charged because let's face it, for many women, being emotionally available is central to their identity and rewarded in their relationships that limiting it feels like a character failure. It isn't. Emotional energy is finite. And when you give it without any awareness of your own capacity, you don't become a more caring person. You become a depleted one. And depleted people don't actually show up well for anybody, including the people they love. A simple, non-dramatic way to start here, before you say yes to being somebody's sounding bored, check in with yourself first. Not loud, just internally. Do I have something to give right now or am I already running low? If you're already running low, I love you and I'm at capacity today is an honest answer. It's not a rejection, it's information. Now the goal in all three of these areas isn't to become unavailable, it's to become available on purpose, which is a completely different thing. I want to spend just a little time here because this is where most women abandon the whole thing. You hold a micro boundary, check. Maybe you say, let me get back to you and actually pause, check, check. Maybe you don't respond until the next morning. Maybe you tell someone you don't have the bandwidth today, perfect. And then almost immediately the feeling hits. Guilt, anxiety. A low hum of, did something wrong. Maybe a replay of the moment, wondering if you were too cold, too abrupt, too much, too little, maybe an urge to go back and soften it, explain it, or just undo the whole thing. This is the wobble. And I want to normalize it completely because it is near, it's a nearly universal experience for women who are changing a long standing pattern. And here's what the wobble is not. It's not a signal that you made a mistake. It's not your conscience telling you to go back. and it's not proof that the boundary you set was wrong. It's a withdrawal response. You have trained your nervous system over many years that making yourself available and keeping everybody comfortable is what keeps you safe. And the moment you do something differently, even something small, your system sends up a flare. Warning, pattern broken, threat detected. The discomfort you feel isn't danger. It's just... newness. And the way through it is not to go back and undo the boundary. It's to stay with yourself through the discomfort for long enough that your nervous system learns, I can hold this and nothing catastrophic happens. That's the actual work, not the boundary itself, but the staying with yourself after you set the boundary and held it. Two things that help the wobble. First, distinguishing guilt from discomfort because guilt Real guilt is what you feel after you've done something that conflicts with your actual value system. Discomfort is what you feel when you've done something new that your nervous system doesn't quite recognize yet. See, there's a difference. They could feel similar in the body, but they're just not the same. So ask yourself, did I actually do something that violated my values or did I just do something unfamiliar? The second is letting other people's disappointment exist without making it your energy. someone may be annoyed that you didn't respond right away. Someone may be surprised that you said no. That response belongs to them. You don't have to absorb it or fix it or make it mean something about you. Their disappointment is not proof that you were wrong. It's just proof that they expected something you are no longer automatically providing. Every time you stay with yourself through the wobble, every time you hold the line, Even when it's uncomfortable, your self-trust grows. Maybe not dramatically, but quietly. But it compounds. And eventually, you look back and realize you're a woman who keeps her word to herself now. And that, my friend, is not a small thing. Here's what I want you to take away from today. Boundaries don't start with other people. They start with you. Specifically, with the decision to stop negotiating against yourself every single time your body sends a clear signal. You don't need to burn anything down or ruin relationships. And you don't need to become a different person. You just need to start catching the internal negotiation when it happens and practice not automatically siding against yourself. Your one challenge this week? Pick one micro boundary in one category. Let's say it's time. Let me get back to you and then actually pause. Communication? Respond tomorrow instead of tonight. Energy. Tell someone, I'm at capacity today and let that be enough. Practice it once. Not perfectly, but once. And when the wobble comes, because it will, ask yourself, what would it look like to have my own back here for 10 more minutes? Not forever, just 10 more minutes. That is how you stop negotiating against yourself. One small repeated choice at a time. Now. If you wanna get clearer on where you are in your self-trust journey right now, I would love for you to take my free Unwaiting Audit. It'll give you a personalized picture of your confidence archetype and a personalized plan to map out your next steps, all delivered straight to your inbox. Five minutes, free and genuinely useful. That link is in the show notes or in the comments and description below. Thank you for spending this time here. Please protect your energy like it matters, because it does. Trust yourself sooner and remember there is nothing left to wait for. Until next time, bye for now.