Setting Boundaries and Enhancing Communication: Building Strong Relationships

Effective communication and establishing clear boundaries are vital elements in building strong & healthy relationships.

When it comes to nurturing connections with others, understanding and respecting personal boundaries are crucial for maintaining mutual respect, trust, and emotional well-being.

Open and honest communication

By prioritizing open and honest communication, individuals can express their

• needs,
• preferences, and
• limits, while also actively listening to their partners or loved ones.

This promotes a safe & supportive environment where

• conflicts can be resolved and
• misunderstandings can be avoided.

Setting Boundaries

Additionally, setting and honoring boundaries

• cultivates a sense of self-worth,
• autonomy, and emotional security within relationships.

By embracing healthy communication and establishing boundaries, individuals can

• foster deeper connections,
• enhance intimacy, and
• create a foundation of trust and
• respect in their relationships.

Relationship building

Boundaries are part of the effective and healthy communication and relationship building.

This post might help those who interested about communication rules and boundaries in the same context and relationship building. Those who mever read or been taught about how important those are in the social context. Meanwhile we are connecting to other people, building friendships, relationships, creating business partnerships and networking.  

I was building relationships due to business, work, partnerships, networking and personal connections during travelling and meeting a lot of people throughout my life. Having good and bad experiences too. Had a chance to create and maintain relationships with people from different cultural background as well. 

To write about this topic and understand we need to start with the the topic of communication, then speak about boundaries not in reverse.  

The rules of communication

Know your audience!

Timing

The best time to connect with your audience. You might think this is important only in social media, but this is not the case. Personal and business relationships have rules as well, and timing are important there too.

Understanding from the other side

If you communicate, but the understanding is different from what you are expecting it means misunderstandings. This can be followed by impatience, tension loss of self-control etc. None of them are helpful during further communication as create more tension, which could be shown by louder voice, more misunderstandings, and as in some cases loss of self-control etc.  

To understand each other you need to think at least you are speaking about the same topic and understand the same definitions under the topics. Communication range can be varied and highly depends on which topic and field you are speaking about e.g.: business, personal, IT, diplomacy etc.

2-way communication

to solve misunderstandings you need to find out how to communicate more effectively.

Ask response and feedbacks from audience to be able to identify if the message arrived as you wanted to communicate or not. If not, it means you need to communicate more about the topic or specify it with more details.

For example, get to the point, where understanding could happen. In business partnerships the opposite sides can negotiate for weeks to get to the point to understand each other and they need to have very starightforward to get there.  

Self-control

if the attempt for communication fails, you need to understand why you have failed to deliver the message, even

• your communication manner,
• the timing you have tried failed or
• with the message had a problem.

Analyze what went wrong and try to improve and solve your failures.

What purpose do “boundaries” serve?

They need to be there for a reason.  

Boundaries, when someone hear that can associate boundaries between two or more countries first, so boundaries separate and connect countries geographically as well.  

What boundaries are for?

Boundaries show where one thing ends, and another begins.  

What are boundaries in communication or relationships?

They help each person figure out where one person ends and the other begins. Boundaries help you define what you are comfortable with and how you would like to be treated by others. 

Due to the above written statement boundaries are there to respect yourself and other people: colleagues, partners, family members, friends etc.

You respect the person’s identity, personality, and ideas, which means no one have the right to abuse or humiliate the other person just because f different opinion regarding an idea, business, or life, which shared.

It means no one should have to create an environment, where the other person is not in a healthy relaxed state of mind. Both sides need to work on the environment with compromise if that do not come naturally between the 2 sides.  

Having boundaries means, you and your communication partner create an environment where both of you are feeling good. If this cannot happen naturally that means both people have different experiences in life.

Both people need to communicate more to get to the point when understanding happen, if that cannot happen, then letting go is a promising idea.  

If you as a person not creating for yourself boundaries for the first time you meet someone and start to communicate with that person, then no one has any idea for what rules they should follow for themselves regarding how to behave and communicating with you.  

Initiate communication

Behaving with someone starts at the first introduction.

Introduce yourself and try to create immediately an environment, if possible, naturally, where you are feeling good and comfortable. If you cannot it might means you need to work on your communication or interpersonal skills:

Your non-verbal and verbal communication, behaviour, mentality, or introduction might not the best, not straightforward or you do not get to the point, where understanding happen regarding

• who are you and
• what do you want or
• what do you do not want,
• the message not clear and not delivered as it should have been or
• the other person has quite different behaviour than yourself,
• why you are there.

The behaviour might not better or worse, than yours, but different.

You need to get to the point of understanding about the other person or people. If that not happening, you may ask yourself, do I want to communicate further with that person or not worth the time?  

If you cannot communicate well or effectively, then obviously you need to practice it.

Boundaries can protect yourself, which means you protect yourself from external effects, but you cannot protect yourself from everything…  

Essence of communication

Protect yourself and still stay open to others

With a lot of communication only. Not just texting, but a personal communication. After texting obviously, you need to speak with someone first on a call or a video to understand who that person is and if you feel comfortable to meet with that person for the first place at all or not.

If that happened and you decided about the real meeting, then you can meet and speak with that person in real life, because in communication not only verbal communication means a lot.  Start this in a coffeeshop or etc.

“Experts in interpersonal communication have estimated that nonverbal communication constitutes approximately 70 percent of what is involved in communication. In other words, only about 30 percent of communication involves the actual words that we use.”  

To understand the other person motives, motivation, thinking and logic, you need to get out and speak with people in real life.  

How to speak people in real life if you are not sure about their motives?  

To be able to happen start to speak more within your family, then relatives, then circle of friends, then friends of friend, then expand the circle more. It is obvious as you grow up your circle is expanding. If you can then travel more and practice more.

To be able to expand the circle you as a person need to have more boundaries and need to share less and less information.

You need to find a good balance between sharing information, but not sharing everything, because people can use out others, who are sharing too much about themselves and their life.  

You never know the other person real motive first; it could take time until you find out if you find out at all. So, boundaries protect you in some cases from real danger.  

The Reality

This in a reality looks like:  

1. you meet with someone, then  

2. you share a tiny information first about yourself or something else and observe what the other person does with this information (reaction, response, etc.) if you don’t like the behaviour then you might share something not personal and you observe more…after a while you will get to a point when you  

– analyze the information you shared,  

– the reaction you got and  

– your feelings…,  

but you need to know yourself a lot to know others and to know if  

– you can share more or  

– you can’t share more information.  

To understand people motives for the first time you should have to be a top1 personality analyst, but because not everyone is a psychoanalyst, who works for FBI, that’s why you need to find out a strategy what works for you the best regarding what you want to share and not to be prepared ahead.  

It is good if you expose yourself to these experiences more often, which means you are practicing it.

With time you will understand what is “normal” talk for first and what might not. Obviously, experiences needed to practice this. Exposure for speaking with strangers might needed too except if you want to “live under a rock” in the rest of your life.

Strategies and good Example to follow

So, you need to have “layers” aka information layers, which means you don’t share all layers and details with everyone. To have boundaries means like having layers. The easiest example, when you are peeling an onion (if you ever did), you see there are layers on it. That is how you share information regarding yourself layer by layer meanwhile you are protect your own privacy.

That’s what for boundaries are and this is their importance in communication and in relationship building too. 

To learn more about self-development: read here about it.