 Hi everybody, I'm Ginny Schuster and I am so excited to have on Ginny Panour, who do you know, Mary Brown today. Mary's story is so powerful that I am eager for her to share about boundaries. And boundaries is really a tough subject for people and how to conquer it. So Mary, would you tell people how did all start? Well, I became a boundaries coach mostly because I had overcome my own journey of the disease to please and learned some tools and strategies and wanted to be able to help people pleasers to be able to have healthy boundaries and build confidence and say no when they wanted to say no without feeling bad about it and say yes to the things they want to say yes to and really have meaningful self-care. Oh, I definitely want to hear the background because I'm sure there were hardships that you had to go through in order to reach this point and make it into a business. Take us back and how did it all start? So I grew up in a big, huge family. We had five boys, four girls, two parents and no boundaries. Oh, wow. So living in such a large family and we lived in the South and my mother grew up in a religious home. A lot of people pleasing tendencies were just part of our family culture. Right? And I was taught from a very young age that we did our best to help make people feel happy. We took care of each other, but also we took responsibility for each other's feeling. So if someone in our home was upset, then we were taught to stop what we were doing, go see about that person and stay with them until we made them feel better. And so I just became a people pleaser very early on. I was the best friend to everyone. I was the caretaker in every relationship. I had a lot of leadership already in me when I got to college. I met a guy who liked me and I liked him and he wanted to get married and he asked me to marry him. And I said yes because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. So we got married and I was told like the marital advice I received was like do everything you can to make him happy. It's your job to take care of him. He grew up in a very different family and he was taught to advocate for himself. And what I found was that I was taking care of him and no one was taking care of me. And the problem with being a people pleaser and not having boundaries is I ended up hating him and a lot of the people around me because I had built so much resentment. So the turning point for me was when I had my first child and people who've been around a new baby like maybe you understand there's this serene feeling. It was like I was looking at this tiny baby and I thought wow how did I get this valuable human being? He's so precious. He's so valuable. And he was born valuable. He hasn't done anything to earn his worth. He hasn't helped anybody do anything. I left the hospital with a weak old baby knowing that if he was born valuable so was I and I needed to change the way that I was treating myself and that I was allowing other people to treat me. So I had this new baby and I had this you know kind of aha moment there about my own self-worth and then I needed to figure out like what do I actually like? What do I want? What are my needs and how do I meet them and and then I needed to figure out how to talk about it because I didn't have the communication skills to speak about it in a way. I mean the first few times I tried to set a boundary it sounded like like a defiant teenager. I was like you can't do that to me or one more time and you're out you know like I didn't really have a way to communicate it and and then once I learned how to say it I was like okay now they have to do it. Well no it's still my job to follow through and so then I had to learn how to follow through and actually have self-care and it's been a journey and it's been you know rugged and lovely and professionally kind of simultaneously you know I became a social worker and I managed teams of caseworkers and kind of moved up and up and up and up that social work ladder but I saw the burnout of the caseworkers and so I developed a coaching program for them to help support caseworkers so there was that and then the next um when I had my youngest child and I took a break from social work um I just had this beautiful time to really reflect on what are my gifts what are my talents I knew what my skill set was and what I was capable of doing and I came to this like realization that I had written hundreds and hundreds of treatment plans for people who struggled with mental illness and addiction and abuse and neglect and all of those things um and what I noticed was there was always a woman around that person who was struggling and I would see there would be like a mom maybe a mom of somebody with a you know an adult child with a mental illness or there would be a wife or a girlfriend or partner of someone who had an addiction or there would be um like a sister or a neighbor or someone there wasn't support for her because she she's not the one with the addiction or she's not the one with the diagnosis and so initially that's how I became a coach was to support women who had a difficult relationship and over time of course it's a bubble well I saw that you started a course and why don't you talk about that yeah so I've been coaching one on one for a few years and um and that's been lovely and wonderful and I kind of noticed that the the journey of learning boundaries from being a people pleaser to being a boundaries pro really went in three steps and the first was building confidence and deciding from that place of confidence what's okay and not okay for you the second one is learning how to communicate so when we're communicating our boundaries let's just say say no for example right that's the the obvious one that people think of when they're trying to learn boundaries right so if you want to be able to say it concisely in one sentence expressing an appreciation for the person and the relationship or the common goal that you're working towards and saying no to the request you can combine that into one beautiful sentence that's very powerful and works it works really really well and another tool I teach is like the boundary sandwich idea right but the idea is like you start with a sentence expressing a piece appreciation for the person or again the cause or the relationship and then you say no to the request very clearly no to the request and then follow up with a sentence about and I still really appreciate our relationship our relationship and I look forward to seeing your next time or you know whatever that is so that was two communication yeah and number three is falling through so women come to me every day and they say okay I told him to stop calling me names and then he still called me name and so he didn't respect my boundaries he didn't he didn't follow my boundaries right and I'm like oh sugar here's the deal it's your job to follow through with your boundaries I use a tool called an if then statement right so if this boundary violation is to happen again then this is what I can and will do to protect and respect myself right so that might sound like if you call me a mean name I'm gonna hang up the phone or end our conversation or leave the room or whatever that is to protect and respect myself and so we use a tool called boundary charting right so if you just think of like a simple t-chart like just make a t-chart on your page right and one side says this is what's okay for me and this is what's not okay for me right or you could say I will do these things and I will not do these things right and just a simple t-chart and that is the personal growth work that we do before we start communicating our boundaries we do all of that work where it's introspective you do that work alone or with a coach or a trusted person in your life and really you have to be empowered enough to decide what's okay and not okay for me from a place of self words from a place of confidence and from a place of love and compassion for the people in your world right right and that it's absolutely possible it's possible to have self-respect and respect for your partner it's possible to have compassion for yourself as a human being on this journey on earth and also have compassion for every other person who's also born valuable right um and it just boundaries is a learned skill nobody comes to the world learning it and if you didn't grow up in a family that taught it to you or you haven't had you know experiences on earth that have taught it to you that it's totally okay wherever you're at because you can learn the skill of boundaries oh wow how powerful let's talk about your 12 week course yes and just that start mm-hmm uh january 12th is the kickoff call um our first uh coaching call is january the following week january 19th i made this workbook i'll show you i made this workbook can you see it oh oh loving boundaries i love it yes so it's a workbook um it's got you know lots of places for journaling and note-taking and each week um it's a curriculum based course okay so each week we have a specific um lesson content that we that i teach and the first half of our time together each week is teaching and then the second half is coaching and so um you get to learn your skills and then you get to implement those skills and it's in a small group and are you doing it on on zoom virtual okay on zoom i've got folks in every time zone and of the united states and uh yeah and it's on zoom i mean i have done it on zoom before and i found that it works really well we use some breakout rooms so that we have some smaller group discussion and you know break out into pairs when there's something a little more deep to talk about and i found that it works just great it gets pretty personal and people feel trusting over the 12 weeks i can imagine that they there's really a lot of camaraderie there absolutely absolutely yeah it's an environment of trust of learning of growth um it's based on the idea that we're all valuable and that we're working on these things together as a coach that's where i get really excited and really proud of the work is um i mean every person who has participated in this consistently is reporting more confidence better decision-making skills ability to set boundaries ability to have hard conversations and do it with love better self-care i mean all the all the results that we're going for we're right on target with how rewarding that's amazing so it sounds as though you've got a timeline of how often you're going to do these classes so yeah i mean i'm launching now and i'll actually have two groups i'll have one that meets wednesday mornings and one that meets wednesday nights um because i had some folks who really wanted to do it last time and i only had a daytime availability and so i'm going to offer two different time slots this time yeah and um i'm i'm really excited i'm just i'm just thrilled that that it's been so effective and that um i get to watch women grow and progress and transform and it's such a it's such it's so fun and it's that's so rewarding and speaks highly of your leadership mary thank you well this is so valuable and i hope that everybody comments likes and subscribes to the who do you know i love learning about entrepreneurs and why it's their passion i mean that's just the backbone of our country and look at the passion that mary has for it when you find the ideal business it just makes you want to lead and give back so much value to so many people so thank you mary for sharing all this great information and i look forward to having people comment and sign up for your class oh thank you so much i appreciate our discussion jenny