A Mason's Work

A well-managed compass has huge positive impacts on your relationships in the world.

At a relational level, the compass becomes kind of the tool that you're going to use to

really drive trust and understanding amongst people that you interact with on a regular

basis.

What does that mean? It really means that with a well-curated compasses, you can create

healthy relationships that have sort of dignified and defined boundaries.

Without the compasses kind of well implemented, you have trust, will erode very quickly,

and resentment kind of builds all underneath the surface. So what does it really mean?

When we have a strong sense of our sort of relationship compass, we understand that there are

clear and obvious sort of limits and boundaries that you set with others so that you can essentially

build the predictable relationship. So when you have, for example, stuff that's sort of in

scope or out of scope or stuff that's off limits or stuff that's sort of well-tolerated or

you have behavioral sort of rules that you've established with how you want to interact around certain

subjects, that creates just a ton of structural sort of familiarity that makes people comfortable.

It is the beginning of that trust development cycle so that folks go, hey, I know where this person

stands. I know what's kind of in scope and what's out of scope or what's off limits and what's

what's great. It prevents folks from really trying to test those boundaries as much.

When people, when you're not clear about your sort of compasses here, folks tend to test boundaries

or they tend to overreach or, you know, again, force conflict out that comes as the result of

surprises in the process of just relating with others. When we talk about this sort of, you know,

a little bit more broadly, boundaries for a lot of us may have been established when you were younger

as kind of a punishment or it may seem to have been a punishment, but it is not. It is not,

you know, setting boundaries and setting up expectations in this way, using the compasses in this

way is really just saying, look, this is the kind of conditions, relationship conditions that I'm

going to need in order to be successful here, to give you what I am capable of giving

or providing what I'm capable of, providing in terms of vulnerability and all that kind of stuff.

And everything more than that is going to have sort of a meaningful relationship impact.

Either I don't have the energy and I'm going to, you know,

deplete my own sort of internal resources as a result or I'm going to create sort of problems

by overreaching. When boundaries fail between people, it oftentimes festers into resentment.

So, for example, if you're the kind of people pleaser that, you know, I have been over the course

of the vast majority of my life, I have a tendency to over-give, to give to others in a way,

approval seeking kind of stuff that comes off, really, you know, in the beginning quite nice,

but, you know, internally I will, in the long term, as that sort of relationship stays out of balance,

that will turn into resentment over time. And then when you have sort of an over-demanding kind of

personality when it comes to some of these boundaries, you have the similar kind of other people

view might view you as entitled. You also then encourage folks, if you're not clear,

to kind of keep score mentally and emotionally with, you know, who's doing what and all that kind

of stuff. And the other thing that really is super important is the earlier you can get in front

of setting boundaries in a relationship, the easier the relationship can go, long-term. It's

much harder to kind of establish a boundary after a relationship's developed where you've already

kind of over-given or overtaken or what have you, saying no becomes very, very difficult, right? It

becomes emotionally expensive to do. So establishing those limits in your relationships as early

as you can, and occasionally when you have to recreate those boundaries or establish them,

you can start asking me, no more questions like, hey, I think I've done a thing or I think you've

done a thing that it may have a long-term impact on the relationship here. Can we talk about this

as part of us establishing a meaningful sort of expression here? You know, I care enough about

the relationship. Let's have a conversation about what's going on so we can move the conversation

forward because I think I started over, you know, overdoing this or underdoing that. And it's

resulted in these x, y, and z behaviors. Again, this is all part of a healthy, healthy boundary setting

conversation that you can use the compasses to kind of help you define. As you take the time to

reflect on this, you'll find that there are kind of lots of places in your life where those undefined

relationship boundaries can really benefit from just, you know, putting a little bit of thought

into it and saying, hey, maybe I should pull back here or maybe I need to reestablish or sort of

renegotiate the way this relationship's going in this space.