29 May Virtues, vices and personal boundaries run amok
Reading Time: 3 minutesOver a cup of tea one morning I was reading an article by The Good Place actor and activist Jameela Jamil when a passage stopped me mid-sip.
She said, “We abuse the concept of “boundaries” to justify not showing up for each other anymore, to no longer working through hard or stressful things. We just avoid and disengage and rinse and repeat.”
I commented that misusing boundaries isn’t limited to people’s personal lives. It’s equally corrosive to organisational cultures. My note striking it’s own (comparatively muted) chord.
The impact of batting away issues rather than addressing them is becoming a common refrain in my conversations with clients. People feel shut down and shut out of getting things done.
So what gives?
The phrase ‘personal boundaries’ first gained mainstream appeal in 1989. In an article for The Guardian, Lily Scherlis looked at the recent history. She identified motivational speaker Jeff VanVonderen as the modern messiah, after he used the phrase in his book Tired of Trying to Measure up. “Boundaries are those invisible barriers that tell other where they stop and where you begin,” he continues “personal boundaries notify others that you have the right to have your own opinion, feel your own feelings, and protect the privacy of your own physical being.”
Unleashed, the idea took off. As self-help authors galore lined up to add their own stamp and spin. Perhaps if instead, they’d looked back a thousand years or so, we’d have a more nuanced view than ‘speak to the hand’.
Around 350 BC, philosopher Aristotle was already thinking about how having a good conversation was vital for ‘a good life’. His book Nicomachean Ethics is both useful and essential to understanding how we can nurture virtues in ourselves and honour those held by others. Read that last bit again.
The modern idea of boundaries seems to forget that beyond what ‘I feel’, we live in concert. And without concern for contributing circumstances, my feelings, though real, can easily harden into facts not in evidence.
Taking a job means trading a chunk of time and effort on specific tasks for a pay check. Inconveniently for some, it also includes regularly conversing and entertaining opinions they don’t agree with.
Setting aside unacceptable behaviour, covered, if not always called out, under codes of conduct, policy and the law. Jamil’s point about ‘not working through hard or stressful stuff’ turns a simple misunderstanding over what something means into a Sopranos-worthy grievance.
Left unchecked, those behaviours feed and fracture teams. Trapping organisations in a maze of personal slights. But embracing Aristotle’s view of boundaries is a potential way out.
His idea that virtues are subverted by deficit and excess became known as the Golden Mean. And while you can apply the concept to anything requiring clarity, it’s particularly useful for gaining insight into how you do things. The examples below from Great Thinkers by The School of Life chart when different virtues are just right, and shift in deficit and excess.
What Aristotle called virtues, you likely apply as values. And while the table may not show yours, the approach still offers a way to map them.
Values misunderstood or not understood at all leave a vacuum. A space where personal boundaries run amok. Whether you’re wrestling with individual or collective behaviour. Giving people a framework for navigating their choices and behaviour is useful in restraining and moderating ‘I feel’ into ‘Let’s work together’. Especially when modelled by leaders. And the resulting social proof makes others more likely to follow along (more on that next week).
Cue less angst and a more harmonious and connected culture.
Thanks for reading.