Workplace Boundaries:When Being a Great Employee Comes at Your Expense

Issue 183, September 4, 2026 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

For years, I had some kind of serious drama or dysfunction at almost every place I worked.

At one restaurant, a chef screamed obscenities at me in front of a kitchen full of people, and I stayed and finished my shift. And I didn’t quit after that. At another point in my career, I worked at a restaurant where the owners’ son was sexually harassing women on the wait staff. When I told them about it, they eventually said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about that.” Before all that, I worked for a guy I dated who continually berated me for not knowing how to do things no one had taught me (which he knew). And I stayed, with him and on the job.

I worked for the same boss for 19 years and spent a lot of that time bending over backwards trying to get her to do things my way. I took on things that weren’t mine to do. I made excuses for her behavior. I buffered her from the consequences of her own actions.

And at the time, I thought all of this was about work. It wasn’t. I was bringing patterns I’d learned long before I ever got my first paycheck into every workplace I entered.

We all do this to some extent. We don’t walk through the office door, log onto Zoom or open our email and suddenly become people without histories. We bring our beliefs about authority, conflict, worth, belonging, responsibility and safety right along with our laptops.

And sometimes the qualities that make us fantastic employees are the very patterns that are costing us the most.

When your coping mechanisms get excellent performance reviews

One of the things I understand now that I didn’t understand for most of my career is that my codependence made me a fantastic employee in a lot of ways.

I could be counted on to get things done. I took initiative. I anticipated problems. I went above and beyond the call of duty. I was extremely accommodating. I often saw what needed to happen before anyone asked me to do it. And I got rewarded for those things.

That’s what makes workplace patterns particularly difficult to recognize. Some of the behaviors that developed as ways of protecting ourselves or earning our place can look remarkably similar to dedication, professionalism and leadership.

There’s nothing unhealthy about being conscientious, helpful or ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with caring deeply about your work.

The question is what’s underneath it. And what’s it doing to us.

Are you taking initiative because you genuinely want to contribute, or because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t?

Are you helping a coworker, or have you quietly taken responsibility for making sure they succeed?

Are you staying late because there’s an unusual situation that matters to you, or because you believe being a good employee means always being available?

Are you doing excellent work because excellence matters to you, or because criticism feels like a threat to your worth?

Are you accommodating because you’ve thoughtfully decided to be flexible, or because someone else’s disappointment feels intolerable?

The behavior can look exactly the same from the outside. But inside, it can be an entirely different experience.

Your boss may have more power, but that doesn’t make them your authority

One of my strongest workplace patterns was my reaction to authority figures. Bosses scared me.

Sometimes there was good reason for that. I worked for people who behaved terribly. Healthy boundaries don’t mean pretending that every workplace problem is something from your childhood. Sometimes the workplace really is dysfunctional.

But my history affected what I did when I encountered that dysfunction. I gave people in positions of authority far more authority over me than their jobs actually gave them.

A boss has legitimate authority in a workplace. They may decide what projects you work on, evaluate your performance, approve your time off or even determine whether you continue working there. But that doesn’t make them the authority on your worth.

They’re not the authority on what you’re allowed to feel. They don’t get to decide whether something that happened to you was acceptable. They aren’t automatically right because they’re above you on an organizational chart.

One of the most profound realizations I had after years of recovery and boundary work was this:
 

I’ve become my own authority figure.

That doesn’t mean I don’t respect legitimate authority. It means I don’t automatically abandon my own judgment in its presence. That’s a very different way to walk into a room.

Sometimes “I’m just being helpful” is over functioning

Another pattern I brought to work was taking responsibility for things that weren’t actually mine. If someone wasn’t doing something quickly enough, I might just do it for them. I often knew exactly how I thought something should be done. I believed my way was the right way.

For years, I thought this was competence. Sometimes it was. But sometimes it was control, or rescuing or anxiety disguised as helpfulness. Over functioning can be especially difficult to identify at work because organizations often benefit from it and we get rewarded for it. If you routinely pick up other people’s dropped balls, the balls don’t hit the floor.

That looks great.

Until you realize that nobody can see the actual problem because you keep preventing its consequences from becoming visible. 

I did this with my longtime boss. I buffered for her. If her behavior created a problem, I helped smooth it over. I made excuses. I absorbed the impact. I thought I was being helpful. What I was actually doing was preventing other people, especially my boss, from having the consequences of their own behavior.

That’s one of the biggest shifts boundaries have given me: I can be helpful without making myself responsible for things that aren’t mine.

“Why didn’t they know?” may be the wrong question

I once had a coworker I really liked who would walk into my office and start talking while I was working. So I started shutting my door. He opened it.

I put up a Do Not Disturb sign. He still came in.

And I said nothing.

Instead, I got increasingly annoyed and complained about him behind his back. I thought, What is the matter with this guy? Can’t he see the sign?

Here’s what I know now: it was my boundary. But I was waiting for him to enforce it.

I could’ve said, “When my door is closed, please knock before coming in.” I didn’t.

This is one of the reasons I don’t teach boundaries as simply finding the perfect words to make other people behave differently. A boundary requires me to take responsibility for my part. That means recognizing what isn’t working for me, communicating when communication is needed, and deciding what I will do if the situation continues.

It’s much easier to be resentful about someone else’s behavior than to risk the discomfort of directly addressing it. I know. I did that for decades.

Perfectionism can be a workplace safety strategy

I never thought of myself as a perfectionist. But I could write an email and reread it eight times before sending it. A spelling or grammatical error could feel like evidence of something much bigger than a spelling or grammatical error.

I also had difficulty asking questions. Growing up, one of the messages I internalized was that I was supposed to know things. Not knowing felt dangerous. Asking for help exposed the possibility that I might be flawed. 

Think about what that does in a workplace. You can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to make sure nobody ever discovers that you don’t know something. You overprepare, rehearse, reread or hesitate to ask for clarification.

Or maybe you try to figure things out yourself rather than risk looking incompetent. You may call it “professionalism.” But professionalism allows you to be human.

Healthy professionals ask questions. They make mistakes. They receive feedback. They learn things they didn’t know yesterday. They send an occasional email with a typo and survive the experience.

The farther I’ve gotten in my own healing, the more room I’ve made for being flawed. I call it being flawesome.

Criticism isn’t the same thing as danger

Criticism of my work used to feel incredibly personal. If you told me something I’d done could be better, my nervous system didn’t necessarily hear, This piece of work could be better. It could hear, There’s something wrong with you.

That distinction matters enormously.

It’s very difficult to receive feedback when feedback threatens your sense of self. You may become defensive, overexplain, obsess about the conversation afterward, work twice as hard to prove yourself, or decide the person giving the feedback doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Internal safety gives us another option.

I can hear something uncomfortable without immediately deciding it means something terrible about me. I can ask, Is there useful information here?

Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t.

But I can evaluate the feedback rather than automatically defend myself against it. That’s self-trust.

A high tolerance for dysfunction isn’t necessarily a strength

This was another major pattern for me. I could tolerate a lot. For years, I might’ve called that resilience. I could handle difficult people. I could work under pressure. I could make things work. But being capable of tolerating something doesn’t mean you should tolerate it. That’s something I wish I’d understood much earlier.

If chaos, emotional volatility, unreasonable expectations or disrespect feel familiar to you, you may be able to function remarkably well in environments that other people recognize much sooner as unhealthy.

Familiar doesn’t mean healthy. And your ability to survive dysfunction doesn’t obligate you to remain in it. 

Sometimes the boundary is speaking up.

Sometimes it’s no longer doing somebody else’s job.

Sometimes it’s asking your boss to help you prioritize instead of silently accepting another assignment when you’re already overloaded.

Sometimes it’s documenting what’s happening.

And sometimes the boundary is deciding you’re no longer willing to work there.

What are you bringing to work?

This isn’t about blaming your childhood for everything that happens at your job. And it’s definitely not about assuming every workplace problem is yours to fix by healing yourself. It’s about becoming curious about the patterns you bring with you.

Maybe you become a chameleon around powerful people or need praise to feel secure. Maybe you’re the person everyone can count on because being needed makes you feel valuable, or you’re terrified of disappointing your boss. Perhaps you avoid asking for help because you think competent people should already know what they’re doing.

Maybe you’re resentful that everyone keeps giving you more work, but you’ve never actually told anyone you don’t have the bandwidth. Or you keep rescuing coworkers and then get angry that they aren’t taking responsibility. It could be that you’re working incredibly hard to earn a place you already have.

None of this means there’s something wrong with you. It means there may be information here. It’s info, not ammo. Because once you can recognize the pattern, you have choices you didn’t have when you were simply reacting from it.

You can ask yourself: Is what I’m doing right now actually required by this situation, or is an old pattern running the show?

That question can change the way you work. It certainly changed the way I do.

And over the next few weeks, we’re going to keep exploring what happens when you stop automatically taking responsibility for everything around you, learn to speak up when something needs to change, and trust yourself even when someone at work doesn’t approve.

Because workplace boundaries aren’t only about learning how to say no. They’re about learning how to bring yourself to work without abandoning yourself once you get there.

This week, pay attention to one workplace behavior that feels almost automatic for you, especially one that earns you praise but costs you something. Instead of immediately trying to change it, get curious.

What am I afraid might happen if I stopped doing this?

The answer may tell you much more about your workplace boundaries than the behavior itself.