Prosilience #13: Not My Circus...
Personal boundaries, protecting your energy, and making choices
The Polish expression Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy translates literally to “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” It’s become part of the American lexicon, and one of the things I love about it is that it doesn’t require a lot of explanation. The first time I heard it I knew it described a situation that was a bit of a mess and that belonged to someone else to deal with.
Priorities
One ingredient in the process of resilience is priorities—making choices about how to apply our time and energy to the things that are most critical to our effectiveness and well-being. When we don’t set and stand by priorities, we can take on too many things, get distracted by interesting but unimportant pursuits, and have a difficult time saying “no” to others’ requests for our energy and attention.
Each person’s internal compass—the purpose, values, and goals that guide them, is a starting point for setting priorities. It’s sometimes difficult to find the time and energy to set this compass and to align our actions with the direction we have set, but doing so allows us to reduce the energy we spend dealing with external challenges and focus on the life-giving activities and challenges we choose to pursue.
What are some of your personal priorities? As you think about how you spend your time and energy, what are the things that you always make room for?
Boundaries
Boundaries are the lines we set to protect our priorities. As an example, consider how you feel when someone crosses your “personal space” boundary and comes too physically close. Most people have a visceral reaction and take action to move apart or push the other person away. We set boundaries in many other areas as well—agreements about how much time we will spend at work; decisions about what is acceptable and unacceptable in close relationships; arrangements of physical space to allow personal privacy, and other lines we draw in the many zones of our lives.
For some people, enforcing boundaries can be difficult. Because we want to help or please others, we can “give away” space, energy, and time that we had intended to use for other things. And for some people, respecting boundaries can be difficult. Because we want something from another person, we may press them to do things that fall outside their own set of priorities. In both cases, we can become more skillful in managing interpersonal boundaries by learning to clearly communicate them and to respectfully assert ourselves in saying “no” when needed.
What are some of your own boundaries? What are some of the words you use to honor your own boundaries? Here are some examples:
“Not right now; let me think about it; I can’t do that but I can do [something else]; h*#@ NO!!; please give me a little space; that makes me uncomfortable; I’m sorry, but I have another commitment…”
However, there is another zone that we don’t often think about. Sometimes we fail to set or honor our own boundaries, and we engage our energy in things that are not aligned with our own effectiveness and well-being. This is where the circuses and monkeys come in.
Circuses and Monkeys
As I started thinking about the circuses & monkeys metaphor, a number of associations came to mind:
Three-Ring Circus—”something wild, confusing, engrossing, or entertaining”
Monkey Mind—"unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable"
Monkey on Your Back—”to have a terrible burden that one can not get rid of, to grapple with a problem that will not go away”
I also found a couple of interesting articles that applied the metaphor to depression management1 and effective leadership2.
Circuses and monkeys are great symbols for the things that have the potential to distract us, to catch us up in turbulence, drama, excitement, and to draw our energy away from our own priorities and boundaries. Most of the time they are things that are out of our control, are someone else’s responsibility, and would not benefit from our intervention. Nevertheless, they draw us in and tempt us to engage.
Not My Circus…
Which brings us back to where we started. One of the reasons I love this expression so much is that it captures so much wisdom in so few words. Recognizing the things in the world that have the potential to take us off course, acknowledging that we feel them tugging at us and seeking to distract us from our own priorities and purpose, honoring our own boundaries and limits, and doing it all with a sense of humor seems to me an exceptionally effective way to honor and build our own resilience. I’ll leave you with a few questions to consider:
—What monkeys have you encountered lately?
—Any three-ring circuses you’ve been tempted to run away and join?
—What are your favorite tools for recognizing these potential energy drains before you get caught up in them too deeply?
—How do you support others who are facing their own challenges without abandoning yourself and dishonoring your own boundaries?
—How does protecting your boundaries in this way allow you to use your own energy for the benefit of the things you most value and care about?
A 2-article series from Psychology Today: First article and second article
A classic article from HBR