Boundaries

Boundaries help us to define what is not on our property and what we are not responsible for. We are not, for example, responsible for other people. In short, boundaries help us keep the good in and the bad out. Sometimes, we have bad on the inside and good on the outside. In these instances, we need to be able to open up our boundaries to let the good in and the bad out. Boundaries are not walls.

The Bible does not say that we are to be 'walled off' from others; in fact it says that we are to be 'one' with them. We are to be in community with them. But in every community, all members have their own space and property. The important thing is that property lines be permeable enough to allow pass and strong enough to keep out danger.

Boundaries are anything that helps to differentiate you from someone else, or show where you begin and end. The most basic boundary that defines you is your physical skin. The most basic boundary-setting word is no. It lets others know that you exist apart from them and that you are in control of you. Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices.

Setting limits on others is a misnomer. We can’t do that. What we can do is set limits on our own exposure to people who are behaving poorly; we can’t change them or make them behave right. The other aspect of limits that is helpful when talking about boundaries is setting our own internal limits. We need to have spaces inside ourselves where we can have a feeling, an impulse, or a desire, without acting it out. We need self-control without repression. We need to be able to say no to ourselves.

Henry Cloud and John Townsend
Boundaries

Embrace Uncertainty

Hard problems rarely have easy solutions. There is no single way to win a poker hand, and there is no guaranteed path to making money in the stock market. Pretending that the mystery has been erased results in the dangerous trap of certainty. You are so confident you're right that you neglect all the evidence that contradicts your conclusion. Of course, there's not always time to engage in a lengthy cognitive debate. When an Iraqi missile is zooming toward you or when you're about to get crushed by a blitzing linebacker, you need to act. But whenever possible, it's essential to extend the decision-making process and properly consider the argument unfolding inside your head. Bad decisions happen when that mental debate is cut short, when an artificial consensus is imposed on the neural quarrel.

There are two simple tricks to help ensure that you never let certainty interfere with your judgment. First, always entertain competing hypotheses. When you force yourself to interpret the facts through a different, perhaps uncomfortable lens, you often discover that your beliefs rest on a rather shaky foundation. For instance, when (poker player) Michael Binger is convinced that another player is bluffing, he tries to think about how the player would be acting if he wasn't bluffing. He is his own devil's advocate.

Second, continually remind yourself of what you don't know. Even the best models and theories can be undone by utterly unpredictable events. Poker players call these "bad beats," and every player has stories about the hands he lost because he got the one card he wasn't expecting. "One of the things I learned from counting cards in blackjack," Binger says, "is that even when you have an edge, and counting cards is definitely an edge, your margin is still really slim. You can't get too cocky."

When you forget that you have blind spots, that you have no idea what cards the other players are holding or how they'll behave, you're setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Colin Powell made a number of mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war, but his advice to his intelligence officers was psychologically astute: "Tell me what you know," he told his advisers. "Then tell me what you don't know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated."

Jonah Lihrer
How We Decide