It is important to know your boundaries, to be able to build and defend them.
What are the boundaries
Hard boundaries are considered the most comfortable, because with hard boundaries, with a long distance with other people, it is more difficult to offend and hurt us. But it is also more difficult to build good, trusting relationships: it is difficult to open up to a person.
When the boundaries are soft , we go into fusion; every opinion of another person about us is perceived as truth. This is an unsafe situation both for us and for the team, because it is difficult to build healthy relationships with a person who always falls into your opinion: where you send him, he will go there.
In this article, I talked about impostor syndrome and burnout. If I have impostor syndrome, my boundaries are usually very tight and my distance from other people is long. If the distance is short, they will know that I am an impostor, they will understand that I know nothing. Therefore, I need to separate from them. I will not go to events; I am asked to speak, but I will not, I do not go to meetings where they can ask my opinion, I constantly separate myself from the team.
Often, burnout results from the fact that we do not know the limit of our capabilities, do not understand that we are tired now, and we need rest. We cannot say to ourselves in time: "Stop!" And we cannot say to the manager who sets tasks: "I already have a lot." I take on tasks over and over, because I am afraid that otherwise everyone will know that I am an impostor.
So what to do with all this?
Come to a psychologist. Of course, this is one of the options, and you can always resort to it. But everyone will have to realize and defend their boundaries, calm down the impostor and prevent burnout or recover from it. Here's what will help.
Focus on self-development. Decide what I want in my career and profession. What next rung of the ladder am I going to, what steps are needed for this. With impostor syndrome, the ladder is abstract, I just constantly throw tasks for myself, without a concrete plan. And we need a development plan.
Learn to accept yourself and objectively assess your achievements.See what brings you to the point where you are. You may have graduated from university. Or, on the contrary, they left the university and decided to start working. Both took effort. Don't discount what you've done. Analyze your steps. After all, no one made them for you.
Communicate with colleagues and get their opinion . It helps a lot to unite with colleagues and talk about how you feel in your profession, get feedback and take it objectively. If someone says to you, "Look, you're a good developer, you're doing great," accept that. Even if it is an effort of will. It can be difficult, it requires abandoning some installations.
Find counterarguments to your attitudes.For example, you have a belief that you are an incompetent developer, and your colleagues simply do not know about it. But if you think your colleagues are competent, you trust them, then why don't you trust their opinion of you? And if you think that they are also incompetent, then why do you even work for this company? If your answer is “well paid here,” is that perhaps your core value?
If I am dissatisfied with the situation, the team, I understand that I am not going to be a plus here, then the big question is why I am here. If I cannot change jobs now, or there is no other company in this city for my tasks, and I want to work with these tasks, then I would suggest looking for advantages, at least some. And go out to talk with the team: what can we do? Ask their opinion, their values, maybe they feel the same way, but they cannot discuss among themselves.
Start planning your tasks. Maintain a task tracker: what you have planned, what you are doing, write down in a notebook, mark what you are doing. And when you get the feeling that you have not done anything, that you are very lazy, it is useful to look into this notebook and see how much you actually did.
Keep track of your balance.This is about sleep, food. If you know that you are going very deep into the stream and forget to have lunch, surfaced, and it’s already evening, set yourself an alarm or ask someone to twitch you. It is necessary to take breaks, go to lunch, change the focus of the task, we are all alive. And please don’t sacrifice sleep for work.
We can talk about psychological boundaries for a long time. I often bring up this topic on the blog of the telegram channel PSYvIT. It will be great if you ask questions so that I understand what you are interested in, and share your experience in solving such questions.
Take care of yourself!