How to set boundaries
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I’ve mentioned it a few times, and shared about this over on Instagram – but in case you missed it, I broke my wrist a few months ago back in April.
I’d never broken a bone before, and let me tell you, 0 stars – do not recommend. It was a pretty harrowing experience. I’ll tell the full story of what happened in just a bit, but the quick version is that I fell off of a stool while getting some off of the top shelf in my closet. One emergency room visit later and I was on my way to surgery and months of recovery.
In an instant, I lost the use of my right hand, and yes – I’m also right handed. In the weeks after my injury, I could fumble around on a keyboard, typing with my left hand… but it was rough. Not to mention, navigating everyday life, work and being a mom to my 3 and 5 year old girls all with intense pain and my arm in a sling was… well. It was a lot.
But you should also know by now that I’m always one to look for the silver lining in any situation – even a broken wrist. And now that it’s been about 4 months since my fall – I’m able to look back on this experience and recognize the important lessons I learned along the way. Lessons about my limits, about priorities, delegation and of course, time management.
In this episode, I’m sharing:
- How exactly I ended up with a shattered wrist
- The most important thing I had in place before my fall
- Why it’s absolutely okay to look for the easy way out
- The best way to ask for help during tough times
And let me point out that what I’m excited to share with you in this episode doesn’t just apply to someone recovering from a broken wrist. In fact, I wish I’d have learned these lessons without having to head to the emergency room with my arm in a makeshift sling made out of a pillowcase, but at least I can share what I learned so hopefully you don’t have to learn the hard way like I did.
How I Shattered My Wrist
I’d been out of town for a few days. Nashville to be exact for a speaking engagement with the Association of Corporate Counsels – Tennessee Chapter. I’d had the privilege of talking with their new members about making the time management transition from working in a firm to work in-house. I’d gotten in late on April 19th, and since Scott had work to catch up on, I’d offered to take the girls out of the house for the day so he could focus and get things done.
I had the best day planned. First, we were going to our gym so I could get in a quick workout while the girls played in the gym daycare. Then, we were headed across town to get lunch at Popeyes – my 5 year old Camilla’s special request. Love that chicken from Popeyes, amiright? Then we’d head over to this really awesome playground that’s located near Popeyes. And to cap off the day, we’d head back to the gym to spend a few hours at the pool. With it being April 20th, it’d be our first pool visit of the season.
We were all ready to go – well almost. The girls were dressed and had their shoes on, I had the pool bag packed with fresh sunscreen and swim goggles – I just had to grab one last thing before we walked out – a swimsuit for myself.
With it being the first pool day of the season, I hadn’t yet taken my swimsuit basket off the top shelf of my closet. That’s where they live through the fall and winter to stay out of the way. I grabbed a stool, stepped up and pulled the basket down. Grabbed a swimsuit and tossed it onto the ground. Then, as I stepped back, down off the stool it just… flipped out from under me. It was like being in slow motion. I slammed my right hip into a metal laundry basket, and then landed face down on the porcelain tile floor with my right arm twisted precariously beside me.
I saw stars, I thought i was going to throw up, my ears were ringing – it was intense. I yelled for my husband, Scott who was across the house helping the girls finish up before we left. And then I burst into tears. Hard ugly crying – not because I was in pain, but because I knew I had so much coming up on my calendar, May being one of the busiest months of the year with preschool graduation, end of the year events, dance recital and rehearsals, birthdays, mother’s day, speaking engagements. Not to mention that I could just see the next few weeks flashing before my eyes and it all looked really difficult. All I could think about was – how on earth am I going to get through this? We do not have time for this!
When I was ready, Scott slowly helped me up, and with just one half second glance over at my wrist, I knew a trip to the emergency room was on the agenda. I’d never felt anything like this before in my life. And Scott and I both instantly went into decision-making mode.
The day I’d planned with the girls was canceled, and we both started reaching out to friends – trying to find someone who could come to our house on a busy spring Saturday morning and stay with the girls so we could head to the hospital. Scott used a pillowcase and a chip clip to create a makeshift sling for me, and I took 2 Advil – like that was going to help anything, and Scott made me some sunny side-up eggs since we had no idea when I’d get to eat again.
Our sweet neighbor from two doors down left her granddaughter’s tee ball game to help us out, and Scott and I left for the ER. After x-rays, we learned that I had shattered my wrist in multiple places- a comminuted radial styloid fracture and an ulnar styloid fracture for my medical friends.
I’ll spare you the gory details, but it took multiple attempts to reset my wrist. The ER team finally knocked me out so they could get my displaced bones back where they belonged, wrap me up and send me home with pain meds. I couldn’t make it to the orthopedic surgeon’s office until Wednesday, and by Friday morning, I was rolled in to surgery. Oh, and to add insult to injury, I woke up from surgery with blurred vision and a scratched cornea which resulted in a groggy Friday afternoon at the eye doctor trying to get some relief.
In less than a week, I’d gone from everything being pretty normal to becoming the proud owner of a metal plate in my wrist, about a dozen screws, an anchor and now a bag full of eyedrops.
It was a whirlwind to say the least, but the changes to our plans were just getting started. One thing that I was incredibly grateful for during all of the chaos and pain of that week was the fact that I had clear priorities in place.
You’ve heard me say before that the first step to good time management is having a clear vision, and knowing your personal core values. Then, your vision and values shape your priorities. Since I knew my priorities, decisions felt easier during this super stressful time.
Let’s call that Lesson One: Having clear priorities, driven by your vision and values is key to navigating unexpected circumstances.
Lesson 01: Clear priorities are key to navigating unexpected circumstances.
On the personal side, taking care of my health and my girls was first and foremost. And on the professional side, the clear priorities I’d set months ago for my business came to the forefront.
Back in March, I set a goal to create and release a free course all about tackling overwhelm for y’all – Blueprint to Balance – if you haven’t taken it yet, click the banner below to learn more and sign up for it.
Creating and sharing that free course with yall was my top priority of Q2 and I was determined to follow through with my goal of releasing it on my birthday, May 29th. When I fell and broke my wrist, I was a little over a month away from the launch date, and still had a lot to do before we were ready to share it with everyone.
I knew that having a broken wrist was seriously going to slow me down and impact what I would and wouldn’t be able to do to hit my deadline. I definitely knew that plans would have to change, and I’d have to reevaluate how I’d hit my goal.
Fortunately, I had an amazing team in place to pick up the pieces that I had to let go of. I met with Kat Schmoyer, my Integrator and owner of the KS Agency and my project manager Samantha Haycraft and started handing off pieces of the project that I’d originally planned to handle myself. Kat and her team at the KS Agency were truly rockstars and I’m so grateful to them for taking this big goal of mine and helping me make it a reality.
But letting go also meant that the Monday after my fall, my executive assistant Erin and I had to go into slash and burn mode on the calendar. Every podcast interview, canceled. Every non-essential networking chat, canceled. The speaking engagement scheduled two days after my surgery? Not happening. We had to deliver a lot of unfortunate news in a short period of time.
And truth be told – it sucked. I want to believe that I can do it all as much as the next girl, but when doing it all involves losing the use of one of your arms and taking heavy pain meds, I knew my only option was to seriously cut back on 80% in order to follow through with the most important 20%. There was no way I could spend time truly recovering and still give the rest of my energy to my family and my top business goals.
So let’s call that Lesson 02: Sometimes you have to prune in order to let the good stuff grow.
Lesson 02: Sometimes you have to let go in order to let the good stuff grow.
That was probably one of the most important lessons, or reminders, I experienced. Even as a time management coach, I’m not immune to occasionally letting my calendar get out of control. I get excited about things and say yes, stacking my calendar with podcast interviews, coffee chats and Zoom calls. Not realizing that along the way, I’ve accidentally given away too much of my time and attention to things that don’t move the needle on my goals.
We live in a world where we have to constantly battle to stay focused and protect our attention. There’s a saying that goes, “If the Devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.” And how does that happen? With distraction. Breaking my wrist and clearing my calendar of all of the non-essentials made me realize just how distracted I’d become, and it’s made me more aware and vigilant about my yeses and no’s ever since.
So after going scorched earth on my calendar, and busing my clear priorities to decide where time would best be spent, I started learning lesson number three, which was to stop hanging on to tasks that someone else can do, and to stop hanging on to feedback that can help someone else do their job better.
Lesson 03: Stop hanging on to tasks that someone else can do.
Before breaking my wrist, I honestly thought I’d done a pretty good job of delegating tasks based on what’s in my Genius Zone, and whittling down my day-to-day responsibilities to the things that only I can do.
Quick refresher, your Genius Zone includes the tasks that you are passionate about and that you are proficient in. The stuff you love doing, and you’re good at it. Head back to episode 76 where I go into way more detail about what that means and why it’s so important to know what’s in your Genius Zone.
In addition to knowing what’s in my Genius Zone, I’m also a huge fan of Dan Martell’s DRIP Matrix for figuring out what to delegate in your business. Check out Dan’s book, Buy Back Your Time.
What I found is that there were still so many tasks that I was doing on the reg that I just didn’t need to do, that were taking my time, energy and attention away from where I was truly needed in my business.
The reason why I thought that I needed to be the person to do them or that I was the only person who could do them, was just because I didn’t have a system set up for effectively delegating those tasks to someone on my team. I had fallen victim to the lie that so many of us believe that “Oh, it’ll be faster if I just do it myself.” But what we don’t realize is how much time we waste long term by hanging onto these low impact tasks that someone else could do if we’d just take a few minutes to set them up for success.
So, with the help of Loom videos, audio messages and voice to text dictation – I finally forced myself to clearly communicate the how and the what of several tasks.
Along the way, I also realized that I’d been withholding feedback that would have been helpful for my team. In the past, if I were reviewing a document and noticed a mistake or that I’d prefer something done another way – instead of sharing that feedback with my team, I would have just fixed it myself and moved on.
Now that fixing it myself was a huge time investment because I could only fumble around the keyboard with my left hand – it finally made more sense to me to communicate that feedback. And now as a result, those mistakes that I’d been correcting myself don’t even happen anymore. I couldn’t help but think – Why haven’t I done this sooner? So now, I’m much more likely to just go ahead and share the feedback instead of correcting it and not saying anything or doing it myself.
If I really examine my mindset, I think that by not sharing feedback I was trying to avoid hurting my team’s feelings or seeming too high maintenance. Now I realize that not sharing feedback was just making success more difficult for everyone. That said, there is definitely a way to share feedback that is kind and constructive – and that can take some practice, too. It’s a muscle you have to flex, and practice doesn’t make you perfect, but it makes you better.
Lesson 04: When life feels hard, it’s okay to take it easy.
And speaking of fumbling around the keyboard with my left hand, the first few days after my fall were exhausting. It honestly reminded me of how exhausted we all were in the first few weeks of adjusting to Covid lockdowns. Basically when the world shut down, we were suddenly thrust into a brand new way of living life, and our deeply ingrained habits no longer made sense anymore. We spend a huge percentage of our days in default habit mode whether we realize it or not, so when we have to think outside of our habits and adapt to huge changes, we have to use way more decision-making brain power than we’re used to – which is why we feel so exhausted when we’re majorly out of our routines.
This really speaks to the power of habits in our daily lives, which is why the H in my HEART Method for time management stands for habits.
Knowing that my exhaustion was based on total habit disruption made the whole situation a little easier to deal with, because I fully understood why it was happening. But it was still really hard. Everything felt so hard. And I had to adapt and look to technology to help me out.
When I couldn’t type my podcast episode notes, I started using the voice dictation tool in Google Docs. When I couldn’t type out Slack messages to my team, I sent audio messages. When I couldn’t type out feedback on projects, I recorded Loom videos. When I couldn’t type my coaching session notes, I relied on Fathom, an AI notetaker to take notes for me.
And what’s really cool is that now I use all of these tools on a regular basis. I’ve become completely spoiled by my AI notetaker. So let’s call this lesson number four: It’s okay to look for the easy route when life feels hard. Iit doesn’t make you lazy. It makes you a problem solver.
And speaking of lazy – if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m going to bet that you know what it feels like to struggle with delegation, or to have trouble asking for help. I hear it a TON from members of the It’s About Time Academy. That they struggle with delegation because of trust issues, or because they’ve been burned in the past by someone not following through.
A lot of times we want to be seen as self-reliant, independent. That we can handle it all, backwards in high heels. Maybe we’re afraid of losing control, or even that we don’t deserve to be helped. There’s a lot between our ears that can hold us back from asking for and accepting help when it’s offered to us.
Not too long before my fall, I was reading an article about the best way to help new moms in those whirlwind weeks after having a baby. I didn’t realize that what I learned in that article would apply so well to my life with a broken wrist. And it’s this:
Lesson 05: When it comes to asking for and offering help, it’s always better to be specific.
The key to asking for help and accepting help when it’s offered is being specific. And this goes both ways.
If you need help, be specific in what you ask for.
If you want to offer help, be specific in what you offer.
Here’s why this is so important:
When we’re not specific about what we need, we put the work on someone else to figure it out or read our minds. We think that by saying something like “oh, whatever you think” that we’re being helpful to whoever has offered to help us out. We’re giving them options. But unlimited options can be overwhelming. And when we’re overwhelmed, we freeze and usually do nothing.
It’s kind of like the delegation issue. We don’t want to be specific because we don’t want to seem high maintenance or needy, but by not being specific we’re just making things more difficult for everyone. Ourselves included.
Here’s how we tried to be specific with the help we needed:
After my fall and before my surgery, we knew we needed someone to come and stay with the girls so Scott could take me to the surgery center and be there to help me recover. So we asked my mom to come stay with us for a few days. We were super specific about what we needed, can you please come on this day and stay until this day? While you’re here, can you help with groceries, meals and daycare drop off and pickup?
When my friend Michelle reached out and asked if she could take care of dinner for us the day of my surgery, Scott said – Sure, how about Olive Garden? (my guilty pleasure) and texted her our usual takeout order.
And like I said, if you truly want to be helpful to someone who is going through a tough time – don’t leave your offer to help open-ended. Because if you do, chances are the person going through a tough time is way too overwhelmed to figure out how you can help them.
My friend Amanda was a great example of being specific. She reached out and said – Hey, we’re bringing you dinner on Tuesday. Spaghetti, meat sauce and caesar salad. Do you have any dietary restrictions or allergies?
I appreciated that SO much because I literally didn’t have to think. That’s how to step in and offer help. Be specific and take the decision-making off the person having a tough time.
This episode is going live almost exactly 4 months after I shattered my wrist getting a swimsuit off the top shelf in my closet. Proof that swimsuit season is dangerous yall.
But really – four months later and even though I’m not wearing a wrist brace anymore, I’m almost constantly reminded of what happened and my limitations. I’ve got two gnarly looking scars from the surgery. I’ve got a weekly date with an occupational therapist and I’m still working to regain my strength and mobility. I can type and take notes again, but I’m not back to normal yet. I miss hot flow yoga so incredibly much, but I can’t handle planking, downward dog or anything that puts too much stress on my wrist.
Although I would never choose to relive this experience, in some ways I’m glad it happened, because I got to learn some important lessons and get very critical reminders.
Again – those five lessons I learned from shattering my wrist are:
- Clear priorities are key to navigating unexpected circumstances.
- Sometimes you have to let go in order to let the good stuff grow.
- Stop hanging on to tasks that someone else can do.
- When life feels hard, it’s okay to take it easy.
- When it comes to asking for and offering help, it’s always better to be specific.
Now, maybe you’re not recovering from a broken arm, but I can’t help but think that these five lessons can be applied to so many more situations. We’re always encountering new versions of curveballs and having to adjust, adapt, let go and ask for help. I hope this episode encourages you if you’re going through a tough time yourself, and if you know someone who could be encouraged by these lessons, please share this episode with them. You never know how something as simple as sharing a podcast episode can change someone’s life.
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