I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello.

How are you doing?

Over the last several months, I've been quietly exploring work boundaries.

I've sent, I don't know, close to 30 newsletters so by email to a group of people who

wanted to know how to have healthier boundaries at work or with their work and

they are a mix of employees, freelancers, you know, managers,

yeah, people who are running their own business. And part of what motivated me to actually write this newsletter is that given that as humans as a society, we clearly have an issue with boundaries and so many of us quite simply do not understand what a boundary is and we also do not have a clear sense of what we are allowed to say no to. It makes complete and utter sense that we also seem to struggle with understanding what does and doesn't work for us at work and how to reflect

that in what we say or what we do or what we don't do. There is actually the sense that whoever pays us money owns our boundaries and our bandwidth.

So they own our time, our energy, our effort, and our bandwidth. So they own our time, our energy, our effort, and our emotions,

and that actually we should be grateful

that somebody wants to give us money

and we should do whatever that person, that company, expects of us so that we can continue

to earn money to live except for of course if we are working in a way that breaches

our emotional mental physical and spiritual well-being and including the boundaries

around that and that drains our bandwidth, our time energy effort and emotions, we will not

really feel as if we're in a position to live because yeah we don't have the

bandwidth to we will have increased stress levels high anxiety we will experience burnout, we will experience other stress-related illnesses,

and because of the way that we're working, our personal life is also going to be compromised as well so work can impact on our

interpersonal relationships. It might mean that we don't have time for friendships.

It might mean that even if we have our own family so for instance we have got a partner and

We may have had children even we have pets we don't have time for them either or barely

...