In this episode of Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan, Michelle Chalfant shares strategies for effective boundary-setting and emotional intelligence. The discussion explores how boundaries function as polite requests that teach others how to treat us, and examines why connecting with emotions through bodily awareness can be more effective than trying to solve emotional challenges through thoughts alone.
Chalfant and Monahan explore the connection between childhood experiences and adult behaviors, particularly how early-life events shape our core beliefs and relationship patterns. The conversation covers practical approaches to personal growth, including daily check-ins with one's inner child and methods for identifying emotional triggers. Through personal examples and concrete strategies, they outline ways to develop stronger boundaries and emotional stability.
Sign up for Shortform to access the whole episode summary along with additional materials like counterarguments and context.
Michelle Chalfant explains that boundaries are essentially polite requests that teach others how we want to be treated. While many people struggle with setting boundaries due to lack of modeling in childhood, Chalfant suggests using the "sandwich" method: frame boundary requests with positive statements at the beginning and end to make them more palatable. She advises against setting boundaries via text, recommending in-person or phone conversations instead.
According to Chalfant, emotions become a superpower when we learn to connect with them through our bodies rather than trying to solve emotional problems through cognition alone. She notes that many people struggle to identify their emotions beyond anger, but developing emotional awareness helps understand personal needs and triggers better.
Chalfant and Heather Monahan discuss how childhood experiences shape adult beliefs and behaviors. They explain that unconscious beliefs, typically formed between ages three to six, can include feelings of being unlovable or insignificant. Through personal examples, Monahan shares how early experiences with abandonment influenced her adult relationships. Chalfant emphasizes that healing these core wounds through inner child work can transform relationships and help individuals overcome defensive behaviors.
Rather than judgment, Chalfant and Monahan advocate for approaching personal development through curiosity about one's triggers and beliefs. Monahan shares how this approach helped her transition from confrontational boundary-setting to a more effective, non-confrontational style. Chalfant recommends consistent practice, including daily check-ins with one's inner child, to replace limiting beliefs and create lasting transformation. These strategies, detailed in Chalfant's book "The Adult Chair," aim to help individuals develop emotional stability and stronger boundaries.
1-Page Summary
Setting boundaries is a crucial aspect of interpersonal relationships and self-care. This section explores how properly communicating boundaries can influence how we are treated and the common struggles people face when trying to implement boundaries.
Boundaries serve to instruct others on our expectations and desires regarding their behavior towards us.
Michelle Chalfant explains that at the heart of it, boundaries teach others how we want to be treated. They can be expressed through polite requests. For instance, asking someone to pick us up earlier for a party is a way to ensure punctuality. Chalfant emphasizes that healthy boundary setting should be direct and polite, contrasting it with confrontational methods, which often lead to unhealthy outcomes.
Monahan learned this through her experience in a negative work environment where she realized she hadn’t previously been setting boundaries. Recognizing the need for change, she began to practice speaking up for herself calmly and directly.
One of the main challenges of setting boundaries is overcoming the absence of appropriate role models and experiences.
Many individuals avoid setting boundaries due to feelings of guilt or overwhelm. This could stem from how they were raised, as people may not know how to set healthy boundaries if they did not witness them at home. For example, Chalfant shares her experience of growing up without seeing her mother set healthy boundaries, which contributed to her challenges as an adult.
Heather Monahan reflects on her learning process in this area. She used to resort to yelling to establish boundaries at work, but now understands that boundaries can be set in a non-confrontational way. Similarly, Chalfant points out the discomfort and vulnerability required in setting boundaries, suggesting that proper boundary-setting is an act of self-advocacy.
A useful st ...
Boundaries and Boundary-Setting
Michelle Chalfant discusses the power of emotions and the importance of connecting with them to understand personal needs and triggers.
Chalfant emphasizes that emotions become a superpower when individuals learn to connect and feel them. Recognizing the body's role in emotional processing is paramount.
Chalfant asserts that attempting to solve emotional problems through cognition alone is not effective. She advocates for a more body-centered approach, suggesting that a game-changer involves dropping into the body to discern what's happening there. This bodily awareness is key for accessing intuition and understanding one’s personal needs, rather than trying to fix things or make others change to avoid being triggered.
Chalfant observes that many people have difficulty identifying their feelings and often only recognize anger.
Emotional Awareness and Regulation
Heather Monahan and Michelle Chalfant uncover how childhood experiences can set the foundation for a person’s beliefs and behaviors in their adult life, revealing the abundance of unconscious fears and views that can stem from early life experiences.
According to Chalfant, people’s unconscious beliefs, usually formed between the ages of three to six, can include feelings of being unlovable, not good enough, or feeling insignificant. These beliefs tend to be in the unconscious mind because they are painful, and people tend to avoid confronting them.
Monahan shares how her early experiences with feeling unseen and discounted, first by her stepmother and then later by a charge nurse, influenced her adult behavior. She notes how she struggles with creating boundaries, particularly in romantic relationships, exposing her fears of abandonment and unworthiness that originated from her mother leaving her father when she was young.
Chalfant further explains that early life experiences like abandonment or feelings of neglect due to a parent's absence shape these beliefs and feelings of abandonment or unworthiness in adulthood. She emphasizes how triggers in our daily life can reveal deep-seated feelings of being unlovable, which are connected to our childhood experiences.
Both Monahan and Chalfant discuss the idea that romantic partnerships heighten fears of abandonment because partners can leave, unlike children. Monahan identifies this fear of being left in her relationships, while Chalfant links this fear to the inner child within us. Monahan recollects that her earliest memory of abandonment was feeling left behind by her father after her parents' separation.
Chalfant points out that the way we put up walls in our adult relationships can stem from a defense mechanism that began in childhood to protect oneself from the pain of being left. These mechanisms, Chalfant mentions, prevent us from being our authentic selves as our actions become driven by fear, leading to manipulation or control strategies to avoid abandonment.
One example Chalfant discusses is that of an individual who was an unplanned pregnancy and not wanted, which left him with a core wound of desiring to be wanted. This wound reflected in his relationships, often overdoing things for acceptance.
Feeling triggers allows a person to hea ...
Addressing Childhood Wounds and Limiting Beliefs
Heather Monahan and Michelle Chalfant explore the domains of self-reflection and consistent practice to nurture significant changes for personal growth.
Chalfant and Monahan emphasize the importance of approaching personal development through curiosity about oneself and one's triggers rather than through judgment. Monahan reflects on how her unexpected firing led her to reevaluate her role, the toxic environment she had been in, and her limiting beliefs. Rather than seeking external help, Monahan used life experiences as a guide to ask "curiosity questions" about herself. Chalfant insists that individuals turn towards irritations and share those feelings to better understand themselves. She underscores the necessity of self-reflection, exploring why one is triggered, and working on the belief behind the trigger without expecting others to change.
Monahan agrees that dealing with work issues through curiosity, rather than judgment, proved to be a more mature approach than her prior emotional reactions. This method of looking inward without negativity but rather with curiosity can lead to identifying core issues triggering one's responses. By understanding their origins, as one might discover they stem from childhood, individuals can differentiate them from their current reality, allowing self-growth and healing.
Chalfant promises simple transformation through a process she details in her book, "The Adult Chair," which involves applying one's issues within the outlined framework to gain insights and drive change. This paradigm shift focuses on building emotional stability and stronger boundaries by working with inner beliefs.
Monahan discusses her journey of becoming her authentic self, filled with love and openness. As she embraced her true self, she noticed a shift in her life with the right people and ideas gravitating towards her, allowing her a peaceful existence free from the pressures of wearing a mask. She notes the stark contrast between her former confrontational style and her current approach to setting healthy boundaries non-confrontationally, which has led to positive business outcomes.
Monahan’s personal advancement in communicating boundaries has brought about changes in business interactions, signifying how internal change can influence external circumstances. Chalfant also asserts that emotional engagement and altering limiting beliefs can promote concrete behavioral changes and outcomes. For long-lasting transformation, Chalfant argues that it i ...
Strategies for Personal Transformation and Growth
Download the Shortform Chrome extension for your browser