 I don't have any books for you to buy or any courses for you to sign up for. I just really love boundaries, okay. And I love teaching. I was an educator for a decade and I quite enjoy presenting at professional conferences. I started doing it during my teaching days in Japan and I figured this will be fun. I'll definitely write this talk early and not panic about it at the last minute. So I'm going to start out sounding a little bit like a pharmaceutical commercial, but just bear with me, okay. Do you feel tired before you even start your work day? Have you become irritable or impatient with coworkers, customers, or clients? Do you ever feel disillusioned about your job? Do you often find yourself getting angry unexpectedly? Do you numb out before, during, or after work? Or do you ever feel anxious when you think about having difficult conversations with customers or staff? I'm willing to bet after these past two years we've all had that many of you answered yes to at least one of these questions. But feel free to tell me how happy and relaxed you are at your center after this talk, but preferably in a quiet place where no one else will shoot eye daggers at you, okay. Floats and our owners and operators and many other small businesses in the wellness industry are highly susceptible to burnout, enabling behaviors, and compassion fatigue. I'm sure many if not most of you have heard these terms before. I'll briefly describe them and discuss my favorite way of preventing those problems so that you and your business can thrive. Spoiler alert, the solution is healthy professional boundaries. Burnout is physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress, sometimes also called a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that can involve a sense of reduced accomplishment or even a loss of personal identity since a lot of us wrap our identities up in our jobs and our careers as floats and our owners and operators. Enabling behaviors, you've probably heard that term for codependent relationships or loved ones of addicts, and those are behaviors that allow a loved one, an employee, a customer, a neighbor to continue self-destructive patterns of behavior. You can think about enabling as being the opposite of empowering, right. And lastly, compassion fatigue, the physical and mental exhaustion and emotional withdrawal experienced by those who care for sick or traumatized people for an extended period of time. Unlike burnout, this is different from burnout, which is caused by everyday work stresses. Compassion fatigue results from taking on the emotional burdens of a patient or loved ones stress and agony and pain, which we've experienced a lot of in our personal lives, caregiving for loved ones on a societal level this last year, and also at work in the wellness field. I know that all of us are operating in very unique circumstances. Some of us have dozens of employees and a variety of services that we offer and others run our center solo and specialize in just one wellness modality. Some of us have been operating for years or across the decades. And others are just now beginning to explore the idea of opening a float center. We operate in countries all over the world, and your idea of what's professional may be unrecognizable from that of the person sitting right next to you. Even though our businesses can be extremely different, I have painted the categories of boundaries and the scenarios in which we should implement them with a broad brush in the hopes that most of you will be able to take at least something away from this talk. So I have three categories of boundaries and three scenarios in which we consider those boundaries, which creates essentially a grid of nine boxes, right? I think that's the easiest way to get started if you don't know what your professional boundaries are. You've never thought about it. You've never written about it, but feel free to come up with as many categories or scenarios as your heart desires. So the three categories that I'm focusing on are physical or temporal boundaries, emotional, mental, intellectual boundaries, and material or financial boundaries. And then the three scenarios to consider those boundaries in are in relation to our customers, to our staff, and to the business as an entity, right? Because the boundaries that we have for our customers are going to be different from those of our staff, right? So I'm not going to tell you all of my boundaries because boundaries are really personal things. They're limits. They're the nose. They're the places and situations that I'm not comfortable with, where I don't want to go. But I will use a few of my personal boundaries and a few made up boundaries as examples in order to help you think about how you could word your own boundaries and what kinds of questions you should be asking, what kind of feelings you should be exploring when you're coming up with those. So a few of my examples, like I said, are my own and then some I've made up, but to be generally under the umbrella of wellness center owners and operators. So an example of a physical or temporal boundary in relation to your customers might be something like, I will not respond to customer inquiries outside of operating hours, okay? So just because your customer emailed you at 11 a.m., asking to book a massage the next morning doesn't mean you have to respond to it until it's at a time that feels safe and comfortable and right for you. Another one would be something like a physical boundary. Some of our float center owners are also massage therapists. I will only perform five massages per week in order to preserve my physical strength for other tasks. When you've decided your limit, it's obviously up to you to enforce that limit, right? So it's nobody's job but yours to make sure that you're not doing six massages, that you're only doing five massages because that's what you decided on and that's what feels comfortable and right and safe for you. Another one might be I will not compromise the physical health and wellness of my customers. When I was on the bus tour with Dr. Vor two years ago in Denver, we were talking about safety in the workplace and the three things that he said that really stuck with me were that every customer who comes in the store leaves healthier than they were before. Every employee who comes in your store leaves healthier than they were before and obviously make money. So those are the three directives that we use at our business. That's my sounding board for the things that let me know that I'm in alignment with our company's values. But things directives aren't boundaries. Boundaries are the nose, right? So they're both super important because you need to know what you do want to go towards, not just what you don't want to go towards. But the the directives are basically entirely separate talk altogether. So we're focusing on the nose, right? For staff, right? So those were boundaries for your customers. For your staff, I won't respond to the employee group chat before 8am or after 6pm or whatever your hours are. They don't have to be any particular hours. We're open 8.30am to 10pm, seven days a week. So we're open a lot longer. So we have several management staff who have shifts when it comes to responding to those kinds of things. But whatever the hours are that feel right for you are the right ones for your boundary. And again, I will not compromise the physical health and wellness of my staff. So those two, they're both important. They're both boundaries. But you have to think about them in each situation individually. Under emotional or intellectual, for customers, sometimes they can get a little bit manipulative. Sometimes they can ask you to do things that you're not comfortable with, right? Or you've stated a boundary and then they push and try to get something else. So if this is a problem you've had before, you might decide I'm going to make this a boundary now. I'm not going to offer specials or discounts that go against my personal values. You know, if you really have something against some particular issue and people come in asking for special favors because of that issue, it's perfectly within your right to decide that this is a boundary for you and that you're not going to be pushed on it. One thing that we had last year with our mask policy at work and we decided that this was a really important boundary for all of our staff. I will not engage in debate about my business decisions with customers and you can just kind of end it there. If they would ask a polite question about it, of course, sometimes we want to answer those questions, but it's not an issue that's open for debate and not one where they get to change it on the spot kind of thing. Material or financial, some people I know I've seen in the collective have a lot of trouble charging the card on file if a customer ruins a towel with pink hair dye or no shows for their appointment. And maybe that's because it's not a boundary for them, but if you find yourself feeling any anxiety about that, feeling upset about that, feeling angry or irritable or nervous about that, talking about it, obsessing about it, maybe it's a boundary and it's something that you need to decide where you fit on the yes or no and then just stick with it. If you're okay with not charging that card on file, just commit to that and release the anxiety about it. If it is causing a real problem for you, that maybe is a boundary for you and it's one you need to start being serious about 100% of the time. So I have some other ones, like for example, in relation to the business. Sometimes that's a difficult one for people to think about their boundaries. The business isn't a person, according to many people, businesses aren't people, right? And so when you're trying to think about your boundaries with your business, what is the business asking you for? What is the business taking from you that you're not comfortable with? For example, you might decide that it's a boundary for you. I need to be paid a monthly salary of X amount of dollars before I invest company profit into expansions or new services. I won't use my personal savings or retirement to pay bills at the business. Sometimes we struggle with things like, I see several people like, oh my God. Sometimes we struggle with things like that and if it's not a boundary, it's not a boundary. But like I said before, if you really get in touch with your feelings, you realize those things that you're just spinning over and over and you're agonizing over that decision, maybe it is a boundary and it's time for you to make a decision about whether or not you want to take a hard line on that in the future. Boundaries can come into conflict with one another and it can take some time to work out a solution that feels authentic and right to you. I'll talk briefly about a situation with our mask policy, not a controversial topic, right? But our mask policy and how we handled it based on our boundaries and our values as a company, which is not a persuasive speech. I'm not telling you how to write your mask policies or anything like that, but how to kind of think about it and how to weigh your different boundaries and how they talk to each other. And I hope you can see how we balance them with regard to our staff and found a solution that's on brand and authentic. So in the summer of 2020, when we reopened after the stay at home order was lifted, we came up with our mask policy that we maintained for an entire year without exception. We were very intentional about it. Luckily, the owner, SNI, are entirely on the same page when it comes to this and we were able to make sure that our staff understood how we felt and why we felt and we didn't have to change it for the entire year. So on June 7th of 2020, I went back through our group chat. I sent a message to everyone detailing the mask policy, what we were going to do, what we weren't going to do, how we were going to communicate it to the customers, that we weren't going to be debating anyone, et cetera. Exactly, almost exactly one year later, June 9th of 2021, we decided to change the mask policy. And I'd like to read to you the message that I sent to our staff so that you can understand how we communicated to them about the change in policy and where it came from and that a big part of it was to help the staff feel safe and protected and well. Hello lovely float oasis staff. SNI have been discussing the mask policy extensively and we've tried our best to come up with a balanced solution that's science-based and that takes into consideration the stress from confronting customers that weighs on the health risks to our staff. We have decided to continue to require masks for our employees for float and massage in the public areas of this spa and when interacting with customers. The update to our policy is that we will make masks optional for vaccinated customers in the public areas and for the face-down portion of massage. This means masks will be required for the face-up portion of massage only. We will not be asking for proof of vaccination as it's too easy to fake or fight over. This of course means that unvaccinated individuals may come in without masks to receive our services and we understand that increases the risk to our health even for those of us who are vaccinated. The stress that the desk staff and the massage therapists have to endure from mask policy pushback has built up over this past year. As a business that is centered around physical wellness and mental health we don't want to ignore the long-term effects of chronic stress on our staff. If you have any questions or concerns about this policy change please reach out to me or ESSA directly. So we made that change trying to balance our boundary about not endangering the physical health with our staff with not endangering the mental health of our staff. As we all know chronic stress is terrible for our health, right? Our physical health so they really become intertwined especially when you're enduring that for an entire year. The way that you know that you made the right decision about your boundary is how you feel after it's been made and how your anxiety about the issue or your stress about the issue continues to manifest or slowly fades away. Before the stay-at-home order was lifted our staff all wanted to come back to work for us. They were 100% on board with our policies all the way and they have been since. When we first started our policy nobody left and when we changed our policy nobody left and we've actually attracted more employees recently. I know that they know that we value their health that it's a top priority for us and the important thing about your boundaries is that they have to be enforced consistently and they really, really do have to be on brand with your business. If you're trying to enforce something that's the opposite of how you're acting in other situations it's not going to go over as well with your staff, right? So I guess in the end the last thing I want to say is that all of us here in the wellness industry are in it because we want to help people, right? We like taking care of people and we like helping people but the impact that it can have on our relationships with our friends and family, on our marriages, on the rest of the community because they might be missing out on you when you're over committing to things and saying yes to too many things. Those impacts are really important and valuable and even if you decide that you need to step down or close your center as long as you're doing it in your own best interest and that it's really true to your boundaries you're doing the right thing and nobody's entitled to your time and attention or your floats. We want to make them accessible to everybody especially at our spa a core part of our mission, accessibility but at the same time you don't have to give a float to every single person who comes in. We want to give it to them but at some point it becomes enabling bad behaviors and you're really not empowering those people you're not really doing them justice and it's not really in the best interest of wellness if we're helping people to do things that are really self-destructive and that they're just going to continue doing in the rest of their lives. All right, so I'm done. Thanks.