Hey, friend!

Let's start with this: I feel happier and overall more positive this week than I have in a long, long time. 🙌🏻 It's been a really encouraging few weeks, which I'll share a little about here, but a lot of y'all email me to check in on me any time I share anything in these emails that feels negative at all, so I figured I'd start it there. :)

I've spent most of my life being bad at setting boundaries. I have a history of being codependent, and as I've mentioned often, I'm a people pleaser by nature. I've worked very hard to learn to have healthy conflict, to be more candid, to focus less on pleasing others, but it's still been the primary work of much of my therapy for the last five-ish years to try to learn to set boundaries with others and stand up for myself when I don't like how an interaction is going.

There are a few reasons for this, including my family of origin, but I would say the hardest part to address has been this: when I went off to college and learned that other people often have had different experiences from me, I learned how important it was to shut up and listen. I come into each new situation with an opinion formed out of my own experiences, and I needed to learn to let that opinion sit quietly for a bit and just hear and respect other people's perspectives.

But... I took it too far. I got to the point where, no matter how unhealthy the interaction was, no matter how I was being mistreated, I would put on my empathy cap and work so hard to understand where the person was coming from, and I lost the ability to say, "Wait a damn minute, this is not ok!"

The funny thing is, I've had the ability to set healthy boundaries for other people and at work for years and years. But I didn't have it for myself in my personal life.

Until last week. Last week something clicked, after all these years of work and therapy, and I set no less than seven very strong, very necessary boundaries with folks in my life, including completely blocking and disconnecting from an old friend. And let me tell you... it feels. So. Good.

So that's my story. I wanted to tell y'all about it because it's so key to my sanity to be able to say "I will not tolerate this behavior" and stick by it. And if you have the same issues I do, I hope you make the same breakthrough I did. And if you don't have them, thank God for that, but I know you'd still celebrate my joy in this.

What Else?

Tighten YouTube

Kristin Collins: Why You Should Speak at Conferences

Matt Stauffer YouTube

Following Your Wonder, with Danielle Tubbs

Links

Things Worth Learning

Popular Tweets

#dadnerd #tidbyt @HelloTidbyt (Tweet) (image)
Request from some Ukrainian friends of Tighten: "Does anyone of you know an open source tool or other way to keep track of “alive” status of people? We often loose track of individuals which makes it harder to coordinate shelter, food and other resources." Any ideas? (Tweet)
I'm happy to share that we launched a redesign today of Onramp, our free tool to help anyone become a Laravel programmer. Thanks so much to @nolveraa for her incredible designs and @_sugarCoded for her diligent work coding it! (Tweet) (image)
@dsheetz & I, w/the help of @idoiagkikas at @FocusLabLLC & @keithdamiani, wrote a freaking *lot* for this site. Some chunks were largely Idoia, most were a team effort, & some (especially the manifesto) were 100% Dan & me. But no matter who wrote it, it all represents us deeply.(Tweet) (Quote Retweet)
I hope we can write about this a bit more shortly, but this brand new web site & brand launch was possible only with the project leadership of @keithdamiani, the incredible branding & writing & design skills of @FocusLabLLC, & months of amazing hard work by Tighten team members🙌🏻 (Tweet) (Quote Retweet)

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer