241. Learning to Say No: Confidently Setting Boundaries with Barb Nangle

How to say no? How to deal with the guilt and shame you feel about setting boundaries?

How to deal with the push-back behaviors from others after set boundaries?

This episode will answer these questions and much more!

Guest Barb Nangle is a boundaries coach, speaker and the Founder and CEO of Higher Power Coaching and Consulting, LLC and host of the podcast, “Fragmented to Whole: Life Lessons from 12 Step Recovery.” 

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Barb Nangle is a boundaries coach, speaker and the Founder and CEO of Higher Power Coaching and Consulting, LLC and host of the podcast, “Fragmented to Whole: Life Lessons from 12 Step Recovery.”

In 2015 at the age of 52, after decades of therapy and tons of self-help work in a variety of areas, Barb found herself in 12-step recovery. She’s been in two such fellowships since then and has changed deeply and profoundly as a result. As a former addict and people-pleasing rescuer, she empowers people to thrive and take more control over their personal and professional lives by coaching them to build healthy boundaries.

She works with organizations in the helping professions, as well as women entrepreneurs to avoid burnout and reduce turnover. Her specialty is working with professional women who say yes when they really want to say no, and neglect themselves because they’re focused on others.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, hello, beautiful souls. This episode is for you. If you’re looking to set better boundaries in life, and learn how to say no without feeling guilt.

And for that I have my special expert today, Barb Nangle. She is a boundaries coach, speaker and founder and CEO of higher power coaching and the host of the podcast, fragmented to whole life lessons from 12 step recovery. Welcome to the show, Barb.

Thank you so much, Lucy. It’s really great to meet you. I’ve been excited about this.

Awesome. So let’s, let’s start from the very beginning. Go back to the basics.

What is boundaries to you?

Right. So I think of boundaries as standards that we have for our life, hopefully that we live up to. So they are limits that we impose on ourselves or other people so that we can live in alignment with those standards.

So health is a really good example. Like if health is a value of mine, then I’m going to have boundaries in place, place to support and promote my health. Like, I’m going to set aside time.

So I have time boundaries. I’m going to set aside money to pay for things that support my health, that sort of thing.

Yeah, from your experience, coaching your clients, why are boundaries hard for people to set?

So I think they’re hard for many, many people, but I think they’re especially hard for women because we have been socialized to be caretakers and to be helpful. And it’s almost like an epithet to call a woman selfish. And somehow they’ve internalized from the culture, the idea that setting limits with other people is selfish, that putting yourself first is selfish.

And it’s actually not. That’s why, you know, in the airplane, when you’re flying, they say, Hey, if you’re with a companion and the oxygen mask falls down, you put it on yourself first. What they don’t say is if you’re passed out, you can’t help the other person.

So I’m a fan of people filling their cup such that they pour from the overflow rather than from the cup or from the empty cup as many women try to do. Absolutely.

And I believe many times core boundaries have to do with past experiences or childhood trauma. Would you agree with me?

Absolutely. I mean, I would say, I feel pretty confident in saying a hundred percent of my clients grew up with some kind of family dysfunction, which could mean, you know, intergenerational family dysfunction. It could mean mental health problems, chronic illness, codependence, addiction, other kinds of dysfunction, hyper religiosity, militaristic families, people with, you know, parents with mental illness.

That’s typically where it comes from.

And how do you go about that for people who have these core experiences?

So, because of my podcast, which is geared towards people in 12-step recovery, an enormous proportion of the clientele that I get comes from 12-step recovery. So most people that come to me are at the point where they know they need to do something and they’re probably aware that it has to do with boundaries. So they get like, I’m the one that has to change.

I call them being ripe for change. So I don’t have to convince people that they need to do something and that boundaries are important for them. But the way that I start with all my clients, regardless of where they’re at in their journey of boundary setting, is I have them determine their top five values.

And many of them don’t really know what matters to them because they’ve been such chameleons or people pleasers or such approval seekers that they’ve just said yes to everybody around them and not really given much account of what they want, like, need, and prefer, and what’s okay and not okay. So by having them start with their top five values, they’re starting to put the focus on themselves, which is absolutely key. And then I have them use those as guideposts.

So I mentioned health before, right? So if they say health is my boundary, excuse me, health is my value, then we go about the work of helping them to figure out what are the boundaries that I need in place to support and promote my health.

Let’s go back a little bit. You mentioned the 12 steps recovery. Let’s talk a little bit more about that.

What is the 12-step recovery for those who’s never heard the term?

Okay. I’m glad you asked that question. So most people have probably heard of Alcoholics Anonymous.

It is a 12-step recovery program for people who are addicted to alcohol and want to quit. It was created in the 1930s, and it was the first time in human history that droves of people got sober and stayed sober and really were able to maintain their lives without alcohol. And since then, I think there’s something like 250 12-step programs.

The origin is that the 12 steps actually came from something called the Oxford Movement, which was a Christian movement. So there are spiritual roots. It’s not a Christian program.

It’s not a religious program. They were turned into 12 steps. It is a spiritual program, and the idea is that you need some kind of a power greater than yourself.

Some people call that God. Some people call it nature. Some people think, oh, it’s the power of the group that is greater than me.

So you don’t have to believe in God to participate, but there are 12 methodical steps that you go through, regardless of which program you’re in, that actually allow you to get and stay, like if you’re an alcohol program, for example, get sober and stay sober.

And what does the 12-step recovery look like?

So in most programs, you find a sponsor, which is someone who has been in the program longer than you and usually has completed all 12 steps, but at least has been several steps ahead of you. And different programs have different methods of working the steps. So for example, in AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, their main piece of literature, everybody calls it the big book.

The title is actually Alcoholics Anonymous, and it’s written in the text of there, but over time, people have come up with worksheets based on that. I happen to be in ACA, which is Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. That’s actually a trauma recovery program where you reparent yourself and you use the 12 steps to recover.

In that program, there’s a 12-step workbook. It’s about that thick, and it has just an enormous amount of questions to help you understand yourself. And then these inventory sheets, I’m also in Overeaters Anonymous.

I’m down over 100 pounds from my top weight. I’ve been at my goal weight for six and a half years. And in that program, I worked with a sponsor who came up, she has a set of questions she’s been using.

She came up with them over years based on AA literature, OA literature, different workbooks and stuff. And so most programs, you work one-on-one with someone who has you sort of go through each one of the steps in whatever fashion makes sense for that program. In the ACA program, it’s a little bit different because you don’t just do the steps.

You also engage in reparenting. Many people, because it’s a trauma recovery program, also go to therapy for trauma recovery. There’s often a lot of somatic healing, but that stuff happens outside of the 12-step program.

It doesn’t actually happen. And then the other thing that people do is they go to meetings, typically weekly. They’re support group meetings.

And so I go to a weekly ACA meeting. I go to a weekly OA meeting. I used to, in my early days, I went to much more frequently because I really needed it.

But now I kind of keep my toes in the program, not just through my meetings, but I’m a sponsor and I have a sponsor. So I do weekly or sometimes bi-weekly work with people in recovery. And it really actually strengthens my recovery.

So it’s like, for people in the business world, it’s like a mentoring model, but it’s a little bit more structured than mentoring typically is in the business world.

Wow. Amazing. Let’s tie back to boundaries.

So how does the 12-step recovery help your clients with setting better boundaries?

So I don’t have anything to do with the 12 steps in my business. It’s actually not okay to do that because the 12 steps are a free program. So I couldn’t take someone through the 12 steps.

So I personally learned to build boundaries in 12-step recovery, but I did it on this meandering haphazard path. It’s not like the steps were constructed to teach me boundaries. It just happens to be one of the things that I learned because I think of it as my core wound is codependence.

And in case people don’t know what that is, a person who is codependent is typically focused on everything outside themselves. What does he want? What does she want?

What do they want? What does the situation need? What does the organization need?

They seek other people’s approval. They often don’t feel okay in themselves unless other people around them are okay, especially unless those people are okay with them. Like, I need you to be okay with me so that I can be okay.

A classic codependent is in a relationship with an addict or an alcoholic, but that’s not always the case. So what happened for me, Lucy, was after two to three years in recovery and really establishing healthy boundaries and being like, wow, I can’t believe how different my life is, I started reading about boundaries. And while I was doing it, I took notes and I would draw these images that visually depicted what I was understanding about boundaries.

Those drawings turned into handouts, which turned into a workbook, which is the spine of my boundaries coaching program. So I came up with an accelerated method for people to be able to build healthy boundaries so they don’t have to do it on this meandering haphazard path the way I did. So I would say that my experience came from the 12 steps of recovery, but my knowledge came from books and sort of retroactively understanding what happened to me.

And then I’ve created a whole curriculum around how to do that. So I hope that answers your question.

Wow. Amazing. But I think most of the time, many times we see women, especially when they are codependent, when they do care so much about others, like you talked about around them.

So if they say no, they set the boundaries, they say no, they’re going to feel the guilt and the shame. How do we get rid of that?

Right. So it doesn’t happen overnight, but this is where the values come in. Because when you start making decisions and setting limits with people based on what matters to you, first of all, by making, by living your life in alignment with your values, you’re getting into integrity with yourself.

Integrity is another word for wholeness. And so when you feel whole, it’s hard to be shaken. This is one of the reasons why my podcast is called fragmented to whole, because before recovery, I had this notion that I was a bunch of fragmented pieces floating around in space.

Recovery helped me to integrate those into one coherent whole. So I can no longer be shattered by things that happened to me. I can be rocked by them, but I can’t be shattered by them because I’m whole.

So when we start by deciding what our values are, and we start doing more things to live in alignment with them, and we start setting limits with other people based on our values, we start to feel pretty good about that. Like I’m doing this for my health, for example, since I used health as an example. So let’s say, you know, I mentioned I’m a compulsive overeater.

So say somebody says to me, let’s go to this brunch buffet on Sunday. I’m going to decline. Number one, buffets don’t work for me.

Number two, I eat three meals and two snacks a day approximately the same time. 11 o’clock is not one of those times. And number three, I really try to do my socializing outside of meals with people.

It doesn’t mean I never do, but that’s, I’m like, let’s go for a walk or have coffee. So if I’m going to decline that invitation and they want to judge me because I’m taking care of myself, that’s a lot easier for me to tolerate now that I’m taking care of myself and I get the reinforcement of being taken care of. Because the part about boundaries that people typically don’t think about is the reward, the reward part of setting boundaries.

So if you continue to take care of your health, you’re going to be healthy and health is its own reward. And so in the beginning, it’s harder, but as time goes on, it gets easier. And I’m glad that you mentioned the feelings of guilt and shame, because feelings are the main reason people either don’t set boundaries or they cave once they set boundaries because they cannot handle their feelings.

So I do a lot of feelings work with my clients. And I will say in turn, and speaking of boundaries, an indication often that it’s time to either set or shore up a boundary is if you feel resentful. So I was a giver.

I was a volunteer aholic before I got into recovery. And I actually give more service to my community now that I’m in recovery in terms of hours per week than I ever did as a volunteer aholic, but it’s completely different. I’m never resentful.

Number one, I do it strategically, not at the drop of a hat. Number two, I do it by choice, not compulsion or a feeling of obligation. And number three, I do it only after filling my own cup.

First, I pour from the overflow rather than trying to pour from an empty cup. So I don’t ever get resentful. I used to get resentful and be like, I can’t believe she just asked me for the 50th time to volunteer for that blah, blah, blah.

Well, you know why she asked me 50 times, Lucy? Because I said yes, 49 times. But wanting to be helpful does not explain where we get to the point where we’re resentful.

What that’s about is some kind of focus outside yourself, perhaps approval seeking, really caring what other people think of you. I didn’t know that was going on for me. That was a huge revelation, one of many, many, many revelations in my 12-step recovery.

And that’s despite the fact that I was in therapy for 37 years, not continuously, but almost, and read all the self-help books and all the personal development programs. And I was a very introspective person, but there was so much I didn’t know that the 12 steps revealed to me, like that I was a people pleaser and a rescuer and approval seeker.

I resonate a lot with what you just said. I love it. I’m volunteering this weekend and I love what you said.

I don’t need the hours. I just love helping. It comes from within instead of, oh, you need the hours.

You need to be there. You need to, the need to, instead of I get to, right?

I love that. That’s what I say. I use that exact phrase from my clients all the time.

They say, I have to do this. I should do this. I need this.

I’m like, no, no, no, no. Get to, because get to is about choice and have to and should to and need to is almost like someone else is forcing it on you, or it feels like you’re compelled and you actually have choices and boundaries are actually about making choices and deciding what are the choices I want to make. And it’s astonishing how much control you have over your life that you don’t even know that you have if you have poor boundaries.

I was astonished. I felt like a strong, independent woman of agency before I got into recovery. And in some ways I was, but I had no idea how much I was waiting for the world to change.

I was expecting other people to change. I had victim mentality was the biggest paradigm shift of my recovery. I’m not the quintessential victim.

I’m not walking around. Never was going, what was me? The world is against me.

I can never win. That was not my attitude. So my victim mentality was much more subtle.

It was, well, you know, if he would only blah, blah, blah, or if she would only blah, blah, blah, or I would get like, here’s a good example. I was mad all the time in traffic, like traffic was happening to me personally. And what I was able to unpack is that subconsciously I had this belief that there shouldn’t be traffic, at least not when I’m driving.

Meanwhile, highways, they were built for traffic.

I love it. I love how far you’ve come and I’m the same way. I’m just loving how I get to make very committed decisions to live my best life now.

But if someone who’s listening is not quite at that point yet, they’ve set their values, right? They’ve set their boundaries, but they start feeling the pushback behavior of people around them. Right.

Because they set those boundaries. How do you deal with that?

So, yeah, that’s the, that’s the second question. Second, most frequent question. First one is how do I deal with the feelings?

And the second one is how do I deal with pushback behaviors? So most, I want to start by saying that assume the best of intentions on everybody’s part, there are some toxic people out there who just won’t take no for an answer. They’re in a whole different category, but those people you often need to be rude.

And that’s just the way that it is because they’re not going to take no for an answer for like 99 point something percent of humans. You simply repeat yourself. That doesn’t work for me.

That doesn’t work for me. I don’t know if you’ve heard me, but that really doesn’t work for me. So you just repeat yourself.

So assume the best of intentions means things like, you know, there’s a whole host of reasons why people don’t honor our boundaries. One is maybe they forgot because you’ve never done it before. Maybe they don’t really believe you because you’ve never done it before.

Maybe they have poor boundaries. So it’s really difficult for them to respect other people’s boundaries. And as I’m saying that, I want to make note that people who have poor boundaries typically know I let people walk all over me.

What they probably don’t recognize is they’re probably walking all over other people’s boundaries because boundaries go both ways. And if you don’t have them in one direction, you often don’t have them in the other. So, you know, I would say just repeat yourself, but then sometimes you just become a little bit more firm.

I’m a fan of politeness. But again, if someone is toxic, if they’re dangerous, if someone’s safety is at stake, you know, if they have a mental illness, then screw politeness and be a jerk about it. You know, you do whatever you need to do.

One way that I got support that I don’t think I really understood for a couple of years how important it was is that I did the 12 steps the first time in ACA with a small group of other women. And I didn’t understand how supportive they were of me. They said to me things like, you know, like you don’t have to respond to that email or you don’t have to go, or you can say no, or are you sure you want to say it like that?

One time they were like, keep your hands away from the keyboard, you know? So, and then they also said things like you deserve to set this boundary. You are not a bad person for doing this.

So getting the support of emotionally stable, mature other people who are not emotionally tied to the situation can be super helpful. I often call it bookending. So you connect with them before and after you set your boundary.

And so what they can do is they can affirm you and support you. And then they can also help you process those difficult emotions. So you’re not carrying them with you into the situation where you set the boundary, and then you connect with them right after.

That’s why it’s called bookending. And you again, process your difficult emotions, and again, have them affirm you. And that helps you feel like, okay, there’s somebody who knows where I am.

They know what I’m doing. They know what I’m going through. And one of the reasons why feelings are so difficult for us as adults is because as children, we didn’t have mature adults to be with us in our feelings and process them with us.

So they feel overwhelming. So as adults, if we get another adult, that’s why I said an emotionally mature person who is not emotionally tied to the situation is a great person to connect with when it comes to boundaries, because they can help you kind of process your feelings and come to some kind of resolution with them. So you’re not carrying them into the situation.

And you’re less likely to launch them at the person you’re setting boundaries with.

And this is exactly where coaching comes in. Because yes, your friends and family, they mean the world for you. They want the best for you.

But yet they are emotionally tied to you and right situation. So they are not they are not in a judgment free zone.

Right, exactly. And truth be told, if you have more boundaries, you probably have a number of people around you with poor boundaries. So it’ll be hard.

So you’re right, that is actually a very important part of, of coaching, like one of the things I do for my private client, well, I do, I guess, for group clients, too, is I have a telegram, so they can message me anytime they want. And they’re like, what do I say? Or how do I handle this?

Or what, like in the moment when something is going on. And that is so helpful. And I provide that because man, do I wish I had that.

Yeah.

Thank you for all your wisdom, Barb. When you need a picker upper, what is a favorite quote of yours that you resort to?

So as I mentioned, I have a 70 page Word document of quotes. So this is a tough one. But this is one that helps me a lot in my business.

And it’s go as far as you can see, when you get there, you can see further.

Oh, that’s beautiful.

Thank you so much for sharing. And where can we find you, Barb?

Well, I just came out with a boundary building starter kit, and it’s at boundaries starter kit.com.

If you go there, it will take you to sign up for the starter kit. And also we are on my webpage. So everything about me is there on my podcast, my Instagram, my newsletter, my coaching programs, my free stuff, you know, all that stuff is on that same on that same site.

So boundaries starter kit.com. It’s a multimedia kit with like some of my absolute best content, as well as three lessons from my 12 part curriculum. Beautiful.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

Awesome.