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Boundaries are good. They inform people what will happen if they cross a line, whether it is a physical, virtual, or psychological one. That’s all a boundary really is. It’s simply the border. It’s a line drawn in the sand that lets people know exactly what is expected of them and what they’ll receive if they cross that line. We looked at signs that you need better boundaries. If you want a better relationship with yourself and healthier relationships with others, here are 7 simple tips you can use for setting healthy boundaries right now.

1 – Become a Better Communicator – You must communicate your needs and feelings, or else how will people know what to expect from you? Communicate your needs with the people important to you, and ask them if there are any borders you’ve been overstepping.

2 – Start off Small – Establishing boundaries is about making change. Either you’re creating new limits you haven’t imposed before, or tweaking current boundaries. Either way, those changes can be difficult. They can be tough on you and the people in your life.

Begin with small steps, don’t attempt to alter the world in a single day. Then, gradually create additional limits. Make this a habit, and you can progressively take control of your life and grow stronger and healthier relationships.

3 – Set Boundaries for Yourself, Not Just Others – If your life needs improvement, it’s not just others who might be overstepping your borders. You can see a massive improvement in the quality of your life when you respect yourself enough to set boundaries for your own habits, actions, and behaviours.

4 – Prepare Yourself for Pushback – It’s going to happen. There is going to be some resistance to your newly established limits. This is normal. You should expect it to happen.

Incidentally, this also includes objections from you. You may be attempting to establish limits for the behaviour you want to follow. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself stepping over your own boundaries.

5 – Write Them Down – Don’t worry! You’re not writing them down to print them out and hand them to people. Writing them down makes the boundaries important to your subconscious. Read them daily. You might have to tweak them from time to time, and when you do, rewrite them. This is a powerful way to make yourself better at enforcing your boundaries.

6 – Get Some Help – Who do you admire? Maybe you have a friend who always seems calm, cool, and collected. Ask her if she can recommend some boundaries you could benefit from. This could be physical, emotional, at work, or personal life. Ask different people for the different areas if that’s more helpful.

7 – Review Once a Year – You wrote down your boundaries earlier, didn’t you? Great! Review them once a year. People change, and your values might change. This means that it’s a good idea to review and possibly change important boundaries you’ve established.

Start today. Put these 7 simple tips for setting healthy boundaries into practice. You owe it to yourself and the people that are important to you. You’ll find more emotional control and self-respect. The relationships important to you will also become healthier and stronger.

Healthy boundaries are essential for everyone, for maintaining positive relationships and protecting your well-being. We’re going to take a look at 7 signs that you need better boundaries.

However, first, we’ll take a look a who needs them. Some people may need them more than others. For example:

• People who tend to be people-pleasers;
• People who struggle with assertiveness;
• People who have experienced trauma or abuse;
• People who work in caring professions.

Many of my clients come especially from this latter group. Of course, I also fall into this group myself. If you work in a caring profession, such as healthcare or social work, you may be at risk of burnout if you don’t have clear boundaries. Building better boundaries can help you prioritise self-care and avoid becoming emotionally exhausted.

But how do you know whether or not you need to establish clear boundaries in your life?

Everyone is different, but there are often common signals that you need to establish control and lay down ground rules to have a better experience. Here are 7 signs that you need better boundaries to live your best life.

1. You struggle to say “no” to requests or invitations, even when you don’t really want to do them.
2. You often feel overwhelmed and exhausted because you’re constantly giving your time and energy to others.
3. You frequently find yourself feeling resentful or angry with others when they overlook your needs and desires.
4. You feel guilty when you take time for yourself or prioritise your own needs.
5. You find yourself apologising often, even when you haven’t done anything wrong.
6. You tend to attract people who are emotionally needy or demanding.
7. You feel like you’re losing yourself or sacrificing your own identity in order to please others.

Do you identify with any of the above? More than one?

These are warning signs that let you know you could enjoy a better life experience. They can help you improve your relationship with the people you care about and – ultimately – yourself, by building better boundaries. Over the next few weeks we’ll look at some ways in which you can do this.

Today’s article is part acupuncture news update and part self-care summary. It is Acupuncture Awareness Week 2023 this week and so you may have spotted a few more stories about acupuncture in the press. Wellbeing Magazine quotes some startling statistics about the number of people booking acupuncture appointments because of the NHS waiting time to treat their condition. I’ve certainly had my share of clients booking for help with pain management while they wait for a hospital appointment.

I specialise in pain management but acupuncture can be used to help manage a wide range of health conditions beyond pain. If you want to know whether acupuncture can help you, then have a look for your condition or problem in the A-Z fact sheets.

Acupuncture isn’t just about the needles. For example a treatment can incorporate moxa, ear seeds and also lifestyle advice. These are just some of the other ways that your acupuncturist may help you.

My clients know that I recommend self-care as part of their treatment. It can amplify the effects of the needles and help the body regain balance. I work with individuals to help them find a form of self-care that can fit with their temperament and lifestyle. For some, meditation can help. Many though find it too difficult to still their mind and need some other alternative. What we’re aiming for essentially, is some way to “wind down” and switch off from all the “doing”.

Back in October 2022 I began adding some self-care tips and techniques to this website. This is to provide a resource library for my clients and also to help those who can’t attend my clinic for any reason. Whilst I don’t believe that self-care can replace an acupuncture treatment, I do believe that it can help you to manage your condition to some extent and take back some control of your life and your health.

Each self-care topic has a series of articles giving a brief explanation and tips for having a go. At the bottom of each article is a link to the next one in the series. Click below to access the first article in each of the topics covered so far.

• Mindfulness
• Journaling
• Personal Vision Statement
• Concentration and Focus
• Strategic Thinking

I’ll be starting a new self-care topic on Monday covering setting healthy boundaries. Please join me then.

For our final article in this series, we’re taking a look at strategic thinking and learning. This is a really important area as it can help with all other forms of strategic thinking. Learning could relate to a formal education. It could simply mean filling a knowledge gap by asking someone else, or anything else in between.

Your learning and education, or that of your children, is one of the most important places you can apply strategic thinking. This is especially true in this time of sky-high tuition costs and student loan debt.

Education is an end in itself, of course, but most of us can’t afford it just for its own sake. If you are going to invest money or time in something, you need to have a reason and an end goal in mind. You need to think strategically, in other words.

As usual, start with your goals. What is the end goal? What do you hope to achieve through your learning? Are you studying for a career, like teaching or medicine, that requires a multi-year degree, or are your goals simpler? Do you want to learn a specific process or strategy to make your your life simpler or healthier? For example, do you want to learn how to practice mindfulness?

Your learning needs may be complex and require a great investment of time, or they may be simple and quick.

Many career paths do not require a degree or other formal qualification. Make certain that you are going after whatever educational level is required for your end goals before you commit. Also, make sure that the end goal is a realistic one. Not every field has jobs in it anymore and you do not want to be left high and dry!

Once you have found out what learning you need for your goal, it is time to design a path that will get your there using an optimal combination of time and money, whilst incurring as little debt as possible.  

Even if you want to do something that requires a lot of formal education and potentially a lot of debt, such as medical school, you can utilise strategic thinking to help you reduce the time and cost burdens.

For example, you can start by taking foundation level classes at evening school or online. Finance your education with cash or grants and scholarships if you can to reduce your overall debt burden.

There are all just examples of ways to think strategically about learning. You can use these ideas and the strategic thinking process to design the ideal learning experience for you.

Your health is another aspect of your life that can benefit from strategic thinking. This is largely because getting and keeping yourself healthy requires a lot of planning and forethought. You then need to take action to work the activities into your schedule. This makes them work well with strategic thinking. Of course this is my main reason for sharing this series of articles with you.

Strategic thinking about your health requires a slight modification of the process. When you sit down to make your plan, you need to include a list of both your goals and your challenges. Everyone has health challenges, whether that is a chronic illness, a high-stress job, hereditary issues, or something else. You could of course tie in the challenges with the “planning for obstacles“.

The goals are things that you want to achieve with your health. As with everything else, they should be concrete. A health goal can be something as simple as losing ten pounds. Alternatively, it can be as moderate as avoiding catching Covid (again). It can also be as complex as reaching age 80 in relatively good health.

The challenges are things that you have to pay special attention to in order to maintain your health. If you know that stress makes your health issues worse, for example, you may need to develop strategies to identify your triggers and manage stress better. All of this can go into your plan.

Your strategic plan for your health should be detailed enough for you to follow it and for it to help you reach your goals. It can be short in timescale, as in a year or less, or cover what you expect to be the rest of your life.

The type of things you should include in your plan include everything from your exercise plans (How? What? When?) to plans for getting your checkups and routine preventative tests. Many people do not do these latter two and end up at the doctor with a serious or even fatal problem that could have been resolved if they had been in sooner.

Applying strategic thinking to your health will not allow you to live forever. It will not stop you from developing cancer or dementia in your old age. Appropriate action can however help you reduce your risk factors for these and other life limiting conditions. It can help you be healthier for longer and help you catch health problems when they are early enough, for better, easier treatment.

Work and career planning are one of the best places to put strategic thinking into action. There are few better uses of planning and strategy than to chart out one’s desired career path.

The process is exactly the same as any other use of strategic planning. It does require multiple iterations of the process over time. You will also need to work either forward or backward to create an overall strategic plan to get where it is you want to go.

First, you have to get clear about what your career goals are and what it is you want to accomplish. This will naturally require more self-reflection. Are you happy in your current field or do you plan to change to something else? If so, what?

How high in your field do you want to get? Do you want to be in charge one day or will you be satisfied with a smaller role? There are no right or wrong answers – just the right answer for you.

This is the most important part of the process, though it may not be as difficult or take you as much time as other portions. You must be absolutely sure of your goals before you move on. You might change your mind later, of course, because it happens, and then you can change your plan, but you need to be as sure as possible at the point at which you create the plan.

Next, you need to look at the endpoint and what it will take to get there. What education do you need to have? Have you got the necessary experience? What are the requirements for the position you ultimately want to have? Write all of this down so you have the answers in front of you.

When you have finished identifying the requirements, move on and list the things you already have that are on the list. These are things you have already accomplished. Your plan is going to concentrate on getting you the rest of the way there.

Look at the gulf between the requirements you meet and those you have yet to attain and create a plan for getting there. You can either work backward from the goal or forward toward it. It does not matter, as long as you come up with a workable plan using the process outlined earlier in this series.

When you are done, you will have a workable plan to take you from the present day to what you want to be the highlight of your career. All that will remain is the hardest part – putting said plan into action and seeing it through. Adding strategic thinking to your work goals.

The first and most common use of strategic thinking in our personal lives, is in goal setting. This goes beyond day to day goals and encompasses our dreams for the future. The vast majority of people never see their dreams take shape in reality. They never accomplish most of their goals either. There can be many reasons for this. Much of the time it can be put down to a lack of proper planning.

People rarely plan well for the future. It is something that human beings just are not very good at. That is why strategic planning does not come naturally to most. But it can be learned.

Most people approach their dreams with little planning or foresight. You want this and this and this. You make whatever decision seems most likely to get you to whichever one you currently want most at the present time. Is it any wonder that this approach fails so often?

Strategic thinking presents an alternative that helps you reach your goals and make your dreams more likely to come true. Take a look back at the process for thinking strategically presented earlier in this series. It will help you come up with sound, logical ways of accomplishing your goals that are likely to succeed.

More than that, however, strategic thinking will force you to engage in some serious self-reflection about what your goals are and why you want them so badly. In the process, you might just discover that some of the goals you think you wanted, are not things that would make you happy after all.

Furthermore, it is not uncommon for people to hold goals that are outright contradictory. What do you do if you hold conflicting goals? It’s not possible to achieve them both. Most times, people do try to pursue both of them and end up reaching neither.

The process of strategic thinking forces you to think about obstacles and roadblocks that might appear in the way of your dreams. This reveals conflicting goals for you. You can then confront the conflict and deal with it by selecting the goal you want most, if you wish to move forward.

Strategic thinking will help you determine what your goals and dreams are and help you concoct a way to get them – which alone makes the skill worth learning. By developing strategic thinking skills, and taking a logical approach to goal setting, you can make your dreams come true. Start learning this skill today and see how it impacts your life.

We’ve looked at how you can use strategic thinking every day but which areas of your life will benefit from strategic thinking?

The answer is simple but might seem incredible: it can help with all of them. Strategic thinking can help you sort through the various parts of your life. It can help you whittle down the goals you think you want, to the ones you actually do want. Then it can help you come up with a way to accomplish those.

You now know that strategic thinking can be as helpful to your personal life as it can be to any large organisation. People are much more complex than businesses, schools, or governments. They tend to have only one goal or type of goal, such as making money or educating people.

Each person has a number of different aspects to their personality and their life. These aspects each involve various and sometimes conflicting goals and impose different requirements on your life. Your health goals might conflict with the requirements of work, for example, and work goals can conflict with personal goals. Many of my clients come to see me because they want to become pain free (health goal) but sitting at a desk all day (requirement of work) has resulted in back pain or shoulder pain.

All of this means that each person has a tremendously complicated life and must wade through the conflicts and contradictions. How can strategic thinking help with this? In which areas of life might it help?

Strategic thinking can help you in your career by helping you decide what you want to get from it and then helping you create a plan to do just that. You can use it to anticipate and deal with the inevitable frustrations that will come up along the way.

It can help you with your education by allowing you to tie what you want to study into what you want to do with the rest of your life. You can then make the best choice about what to study (or even whether to do so.) It can also help you develop a plan for how to pursue your education in the best manner.

What about your personal life, your relationships? Strategic thinking can help you decide if you want a partner at all and what qualities you want in one. That way you don’t approach the search haphazardly.

Other aspects of your life, such as community involvement, religion or spirituality, your hobbies, and things such as traveling can all benefit from strategic thinking. So when we consider which areas of our life can benefit from strategic thinking, the answer is simple. It’s all of them.

You can use strategic thinking every day, not just for big goals and the dreams you have in your life. Use it to make your everyday life easier and be more effective as well. You just have to adapt the strategic thinking process described in the last article to one a little more suited to daily life. This is one way you can do so.

What is your goal for the day?

Most of us have small goals – usually items on a to-do list – that you want to complete each day. It might be an appointment, or something as routine as laundry. It might be a goal to take more exercise. There is at least one thing you must do each day. Ask yourself what it is each morning. Make a list if you need to do so to help you remember.

What are the ways you can get it done?

Take a few minutes to consider the different ways you can accomplish the tasks you have to finish for the day. Getting more exercise could be done by going to the gym or it could be walking to the shops instead of driving. There are bound to be multiple ways you can do even the simplest task.

Which path is the best and most effective?

Go through your list. Decide which of the many ways is going to be the most effective and best solution to the problem. If it’s raining, then you might want to opt for the gym instead of walking to the shops. Don’t spend a lot of time on this step; you should only spend a few minutes on the entire process for daily use. You are trying to optimise your time – so don’t spend too much of it on something small.

What problems are likely to crop up during the day?

Think about the problems you might encounter that can throw off your schedule and get in the way of finishing your task(s). Maybe you have a doctor’s appointment and you know from experience that you will be in there waiting for quite a while. Maybe the appointment is at rush hour, so it will take you longer to get there. Anticipate these issues and plan for them. In this case you might want to schedule the gym visit before the doctors and call there on the way back.

Go do it.

That’s all there is to the process other than going out to accomplish the goal. At the end of the day, you can think about what happened, what worked well, what failed, and use the conclusions you draw from that to help you strategically plan the following day.

Remember that the more you practice strategic thinking, the better you will get at it. This means you will see rapid improvements in your life. You will make more progress toward your goals as you think strategically more often.

So today we’re going to look at the basics of strategic thinking. It doesn’t come naturally to most people. That might seem like bad news, but it isn’t. Since thinking strategically is a learned skill, this means that anyone can learn it. All you have to do is learn the basics and practice them enough to get the hang of the skill.

Let’s break it down:

1. State the goal or problem

What goal are you trying to reach or what problem are you trying to solve? It is not enough to simply know in your head what you are trying to do; write it down so that you can see it and shape it as necessary. Is that the real goal or is there another level down that, is what you’re really after?

2. Gather information on your options

What are the ways you can reach this goal/solve this problem? There is always more than one way to do anything. Think about all the different ways you could get what you want and write them down. Gather information on the requirements and pros and cons of each option. Is one cheaper, or quicker, or easier, than others?

3. Determine the best option

Look at all of your different options and choose the one that you feel is best. Don’t just pick at random – that’ is hardly ‘s only slightly better than not planning at all. Consider all of your resources, how best to use them, and which option is most likely to succeed.

Also, take your strengths and weaknesses into account. Above all, look at what you do have, not what you wish you had. Honesty is important in this process; without it, you’re more likely to fail.

4. Plan for obstacles

Obstacles and roadblocks are going to occur no matter how well you plan to avoid them. So, plan to run into them and determine in advance how you will deal with them. Thinking about your response will make it easier to deal with them and make you more likely to succeed.

5. Put your plan into action

You have now created a strategic plan to reach your goal or solve your problem. Congratulations! Even making the plan makes you more likely to succeed, but now comes the hardest part – putting your plan into action. A plan sitting on a shelf does no one any good. It is time to get to work.

These are the basics of strategic thinking. You can apply them to any goal or problem, in your personal or professional life. The more you use this process, the better your strategic thinking skills will become.