How to Set Boundaries at Work Without Becoming the Difficult One
Updated: 1 day ago
Three Places, One Question
This is an article about setting boundaries at work.
The project you take on because refusing felt impossible.
The message you answer at eleven at night.
The thing you agreed to in a meeting and regretted in the corridor.
I want to start somewhere unusual though, because I think most advice on this subject skips the part that matters most. It tells you what to say but not why it is so hard to say it, or why it's harder for some people than others.
I was born in Romania and have spent the first 20 years of my life there. Then I spent almost two decades at sea in international operations, and now I live in the Netherlands. Ta-daaa!
Three places with three completely different ideas about what a boundary is and how to treat them. Living through all three is how I came to understand this subject, and it's the most useful thing I can give you before we get to the practical part.
In some places, having a boundary is not always good
My country, Romania is a country with warm people. It is also one where boundaries are somewhat blurry from our infancies — and those two things are connected, not opposed.
The crossings arrive as generosity, care, love. You fight your friends over who pays the bill at the bar until one person wins by being louder or more forceful. You keep eating when you're a guest even after you're full, because stopping would insult the host who is relentlessly pushing you to have another piece every time you stop chewing. You accept the many gifts you didn't expect or deserve, because refusing them signals you not accepting the person who is giving them. You never put yourself first until you're about 80, because it is not proper. Even more so if you are a woman. One must always serve, sacrifice, give, spend of yourself. You receive back as others spend themselves for you even when you don't need it or ask it.
None of this is hostile. That's precisely why it's hard to push back on. You can't decline kindness without becoming the rude one.
Underneath it all is a continuous exchange. Transactional Analysis (TA) has a term for what's being traded — strokes, meaning units of recognition, the everyday confirmation that you exist and matter to someone. If you weren't raised to generate that for yourself, you have to get it from other people, and giving more than was asked for is an efficient way to do it.
I give you more than you wanted. Now you owe me something. Now we're connected, and I feel topped up because you were also raised to over-give to others.
It works in Romania, It also means nobody is ever quite enough on their own, and everyone stays in a running account with everyone else.
Growing up in that, you learn something without anyone ever saying it: that the proper thing is to hold loose personal limits. That catering to your own needs and wants is wrong. You must let others do so, and in turn try to tend to others.
You also learn a strange version of self-awareness. Not what do I actually want here? — but how am I coming across, and am I fitting in??! Compliance sold as self-awareness. And it is very hard to set a boundary at work if you were trained only to check what's expected of you and never to check what you can actually carry.
The ship: where boundaries are so diverse
Then I spent almost two decades working on ships, with crews drawn from more than sixty nationalities.
That's a problem before anyone does anything wrong, because we are so different that we cannot agree on what a boundary is without awareness.
How close you stand to someone.
Whether a question about your family is warmth or intrusion.
Whether disagreeing with a senior person in front of others is honest or unforgivable.
What silence means.
Two people can both behave impeccably by their own rules and one of them still ends up offended.
On land that mostly resolves itself, because you have buffers. You go home at five. You avoid someone for a week. Time and distance sand the edges off and nobody has to name anything.
On a ship there are no buffers. You work together and you live together, in a space with a fixed perimeter, for months at a time.
You can't walk away and you can't stay away.
Every difference that would quietly have dissolved on land has to be handled openly by people who will see each other at breakfast tomorrow or even in the same cabin, at the end of the shift.
What that teaches you is that assuming we are the same doesn’t work. If it isn't said, it isn't shared!
Ship life taught me curiosity and communication.
It taught me that my version is not the only one!
The Netherlands: where holding your boundaries is how you fit in
The Dutch have a reputation for bluntness. Cold, rude, some people call it. That wasn't my experience — my first reaction was relief, and it took me a while to understand what I was relieved about.
It's this:
Being disagreed with in this country is unambiguous, and it's rarely aimed at you as a person. Someone will say I don't understand what you said, or I don't agree with that.
Where I'm from, the same underlying position often arrives as you're an idiot for thinking that. There is something wrong with you if you don’t comply.
Both are disagreement. But one describes where the speaker stands, and the other passes judgment on you. That difference is the whole subject of this article, and I'll come back to it properly in a moment, because it's the key to setting a boundary that doesn't blow up.
The other thing I noticed was how much less tiring it was!
When people say what they mean and state their boundaries with ease, you don't spend the evening replaying a conversation trying to work out what was really meant, whether the warmth was genuine, whether the yes was actually a yes. That work is invisible and it's constant, and it draws on exactly the energy you needed for your job.
Being told something plainly can sting. But not knowing where you stand costs more, and it costs every day.
Where the Discomfort Actually Comes From
Some of these will be familiar:
The meeting that could have been an email but you go anyway.
Answering a message at eleven because not answering felt worse.
Saying yes before you'd checked your week.
Eating lunch at your desk again.
Covering for someone who won't cover for you.
Sitting on an opinion you actually hold because it isn't the moment, and it's never the moment.
None of those is dramatic. That's rather the point — nobody notices a boundary being crossed by two centimeters.
Here's the thing I want you to consider - We talk about work as though it's inherently draining. A chore. Something to be endured for five days so you can have two free ones.
But think about the times work hasn't felt like that. A project that absorbed you. A stretch of days that were long and left you energized anyway. A hard conversation that left you taller and happier. That happens more than the "work is a chore" story allows, and when it does, it's almost always because you were operating inside your own limits.
Doing something demanding within your boundaries is nourishing. No matter how hard it is!
Doing something easy outside your boundaries is exhausting. No matter how easy it is!
So the drain usually isn't the work. It's the crossing of your lines.
I want to be honest about that, though - Some crossings come with the job. You don't choose your colleagues, or the deadline, or which meetings exist. There are boundaries you genuinely can't hold, and pretending otherwise would be useless advice. But there are far more you could hold than most people hold — and the difference between those two numbers is where nearly all the recoverable exhaustion sits.
The signals are ordinary: tiredness that sleep doesn't fix, resentment you'd rather not deal with and a flat lack of enthusiasm for things that used to interest you. Motivation is usually the last to go and the first thing people blame themselves for. It's rarely a character flaw. Nobody is motivated to walk into a room where their limits get crossed! It's ok to accept that about yourself!
Three stages, and I did them in order
Getting good at this happens in three steps, and they have to go in sequence.
First, awareness. You can't hold a line you don't know you have. If you were raised somewhere that treated limits as improper, this stage takes real work — you're learning to ask what do I actually want here for the first time. That's Romania for me.
Then confidence. Knowing your limit and believing you're entitled to it are separate things, and the gap between them can last years. What closed it for me was the ship: sixty nationalities in a space nobody could leave, where every difference had to be handled openly because there was nowhere to put it. You find out fast that your version isn't the only one, and that stating yours is survivable.
Then, early. This is the one people skip. A boundary stated at the start is just information and nothing more. The same boundary stated after six months of quiet resentment arrives as a complaint, or a fight. Same words, completely different event.
That third stage is what I found here in the Netherlands, and it's why the reputation for bluntness misses the point. It isn't confrontation. It's that limits get mentioned early, as an ordinary part of agreeing how to work together — closer to a contract than a conflict. Nobody has to escalate, and nobody has to decode.
What a Boundary Actually Is
Now the distinction I promised.
A boundary is a rule you keep about yourself. Not a rule you impose on someone else.
That sounds like a small difference but it changes everything.
You're an idiot for thinking that - is a rule imposed on someone else. It tells them what they are. It invites a fight, because the only available responses are to accept the verdict or reject it.
I don't agree with that - is a rule kept about yourself. It reports your position. There's nothing to fight, because nothing was demanded.
This is also why the fear of becoming "the difficult one" is misplaced. Difficult people impose rules on others. Stating your own position isn't difficult — it's just clear.
Most people fail at boundaries because they've been taught the first kind and are frightened of it — reasonably, because it does cause conflict. So they don't do it, and then the pressure builds until one day they do it badly.
The second kind is available to you constantly, and it barely registers as confrontation.
Which is also why announcing a boundary usually doesn't work. Announcements invite negotiation — what if just this once, what about Fridays, can we try it for a month. You've handed someone a rule about them and they're entitled to argue.
Keeping one doesn't invite anything. You simply behave consistently, and people learn. The manager who has never once replied at midnight doesn't need a policy about after-hours messages. Everyone already knows.
It's the difference between a standing order or signal and a reaction in an emergency. One is agreed in calm water so that everyone — including you — knows what happens under pressure. The other is what you reach for when it's already late.
Three Situations, and How to Set Boundaries at Work
The words matter less than the position underneath them. But words help, so here are some.
With your boss
Not refusal. Make the trade-off visible and hand the decision back.
Happy to take that on. I've got X and Y both landing Thursday — which of those would you like me to push so this goes first?
You haven't said no. You've said that you're not able to do everything simultaneously, which is a fact about reality, not a position they can argue with.
For a request that arrives at eleven at night:
Just seeing this — I'll pick it up first thing tomorrow. Shout if it genuinely can't wait.
Notice this announces nothing. It's the rule being kept, not stated. Three or four repetitions and expectations reset without a single conversation about it.
If it's a pattern rather than one request, that needs its own conversation, in daylight:
I want to flag something. Over the last few months I've picked up [specific things] on top of my role. I'm managing, but I'd rather talk about it now than have something slip. Can we look at what stays with me?
With your team
Your boundaries and theirs are the same conversation, which people miss.
I don't expect replies outside working hours. If I send something in the evening it's because that's when I got to it, not because I need an answer then.
I can't get to this properly before Thursday. I'd rather tell you that than say yes and disappoint you on Wednesday.
The second one is worth practicing. Managers over-promise to avoid a small disappointment now, and buy a bigger one later.
With peers
Usually the hardest, because there's no authority in either direction and you have to keep working together.
I can't take that on this week. What I can do is [smaller thing] — would that help?
I'd want to look at what that would take before I commit. Can I come back to you this afternoon?
That second one is the most useful sentence in this article. Buying a few hours in public is almost always better than an on-the-spot yes you'll regret, and it reads as considered rather than resistant.
Two things to avoid throughout.
Don't invent a reason — fabricated conflicts get discovered and cost far more than the awkwardness you avoided.
And don't apologize for capacity. "Sorry, I'm swamped" frames a workload reality as a personal failing. "I'm at capacity this week" states a fact.]
Your Team Is Learning From You
If you manage people, there's an argument here that matters more than any of the above, and it isn't about self-care - Your team is working out what's normal here, and they're working it out by watching you:
If you answer at midnight, they learn that's the standard — whatever you tell them about work-life balance.
If you never say no, they learn that saying no isn't available in this team.
If you absorb every unreasonable request without comment, they learn that unreasonable requests are simply what work is.
A manager with no boundaries doesn't only exhaust themselves. They build a team that can't have boundaries either, and then wonder why good people burn out or quietly leave.
You are the working conditions. That's not a metaphor — for the people who report to you, your behavior is the environment they operate in.
So this isn't self-indulgence, and it isn't soft. It's part of the job.
When You Can't Walk Away
I want to finish where I started, because there's one thing the ship taught me that neither Romania nor the Netherlands could.
Most advice about boundaries quietly assumes an exit. That if the conversation goes badly you can go home, cool down, and try again tomorrow with a clear head.
At sea there was no exit. You said the difficult thing to someone, and then you had dinner in the same room, and then you passed them in a corridor at seven the next morning, and then you did that for another six months.
That teaches you something specific: the words are the easy part. What actually matters is whether you can hold the position calmly afterwards.
Not defend it. Not re-explain it, or soften it, or go looking for reassurance that you're still liked. Just carry on — normally, warmly, as though nothing dramatic occurred. Because nothing dramatic did occur. You stated where you stood.
Most boundaries don't fail at the moment they're set. They fail in the hour afterwards, when the discomfort gets too loud and you take it back.
You don't need to be blunt, and you don't need to be brave. You need to be clear once, and then be ordinary about it.
That's all the Dutch are doing, really. And it was worth moving here to find out.
Pick one boundary. Decide the exact sentence before you need it, because you will hold a line you have already chosen far better than one you invent under pressure. The harder part is working out which limits are genuinely yours and which you absorbed from someone else. That's difficult to see on your own, which is where working with a coach earns its place.
Stefania Codarcea is a leadership coach for managers and leaders navigating the moments their experience hasn't fully prepared them for. She spent two decades leading teams across 60+ nationalities in 24/7 live international operations, where a limit that reads as reasonable in one culture reads as insubordination in another — and where people who set no limits at all did not last. She holds ICF Associate Certified Coach accreditation.
Comments