# 92 | How To Establish Healthy Boundaries with Interior Design Clients

Welcome to the Designers Oasis podcast. I'm your host, Kate Bendewald. If you're tired of one-size-fits-all all advice to running your interior design business, you're in the right place. Join me each week as we dive into topics to help you run a thriving interior design business. Without the hustle. We'll talk about the business of design, but also mindset and mental health because I know when you thrive, so will your life and business. It wasn't that long ago that I stepped away from my corporate interior design job to build my own design business so that I could realize my own creative dreams, have more time with the people I love, and serve my clients at the highest level, while making more money than I ever could have working for someone else. It wasn't always easy, and I made my share of mistakes along the way. Fast forward to today. And I've learned a thing or two. Since then I've built multiple six-figure interior design businesses on authentic word-of-mouth referrals with many repeat clients. And I want to share it all with you the ambitious, inspired, and I get it occasionally overwhelmed interior designer who shares this dream of transforming lives through the art of interior design, You can do this. Thank you for letting me spend part of this day with you. Let's get to it.

Well, hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome back to the designers Oasis podcast. I'm your host, Kate Bendewald, and today we are talking about how to establish healthy boundaries with your clients. Now, if you've been around this, if you've listened to this podcast for for any amount of time, you know that mental health is really important to me. It's something that we talk about a lot on here. In fact, if you're curious and you want to go back and look at some of our other episodes specific to your mental health and protecting your well being. We've got a whole category of this which we can we can link to because we've got a lot on this topic. But today I wanted to talk to you about establishing healthy boundaries with your clients. It is essential for maintaining a positive professional relationship while protecting your energy, your time and your well being. Healthy boundaries are vitally important if you want to avoid burnout, ask me how I know. So I want you to think about this for a second. When you are in a conversation and you feel like there's something that you want to say no to, but you don't. What is it that you're trying to avoid?

Oftentimes we're trying to avoid uneasy feelings or or discomfort, right? So then I want you to also think about what happens if you don't say anything in that moment and you continue to let whatever behavior or action or words that are happening continue to go on what ultimately ends up happening. Over time, resentment builds up, which means your whole goal of avoiding uncomfortable feelings in the first place never really happened. Okay, when we avoid setting healthy boundaries with clients, we think we're avoiding uncomfortable feelings, but that's not what happens. We ultimately end up feeling feelings of resentment, anger and frustration. So you're not doing yourself any favors when you are avoiding setting healthy boundaries. So this is going to be a super quick episode, because this really just boils down to this simple idea, all boundaries are are establishing in a relationship, what's okay and what's not okay? Let me give you some examples. It's okay to call or email me, but it's. Okay to text, it's okay to text, or maybe you are okay with texting. You would say it is okay to text during office hours, but it's not okay to text me during family time. It's okay to ask questions about the products we've presented to you. It's not okay to go outside of our contract and purchase your own items. Right? You can think about all kinds of opportunities where we can establish the rules of our relationship Okay, and all it is is simply letting somebody know what is okay and what's not okay.

I want you to think about for a moment what are some of the areas where you might be experiencing a client, whether they know it or not, whether it's conscious and they realize what they're doing or not, where you might need to go back and amend some things and go back and say, here's here's what's going to work for us, and here's what's not going to work for us. And when, I don't know about you, but when I heard it put into these terms for the first time that all boundaries are is helping somebody understand what's okay and what's not okay. All of a sudden, setting boundaries felt so much easier, so much easier, right? It's not being mean, it's not being hard ass. It's not being militant. This is about protecting your time and energy and your well being. And when it comes to your client work, it's about making sure that they get the best results possible. Okay, a lot of times when I think about the boundaries that are important for establishing in a client designer relationship, so many of them can come back to what's going to be best for the client, what's going to be best for me as a designer, to be able to give them the best experience. And so often, if you can put it into terms with the client. Of this is why we do things this way, you know, so you can put it back into terms of, I do this so that you can have a better experience.

You can give them this gift right then setting those boundaries all of a sudden doesn't feel so hard, okay, when you are in this experience, though, of let's say you didn't set boundaries before, and now you're in this feeling of, perhaps, resentment. Resentment is one of the most common, I think feelings that we we get when we're in a situation where we've not set boundaries and now things feel stuck or sticky or little scratchy, so that that resentment is building. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to get curious. Resentment is just. A result of unfulfilled expectations. So get curious, what expectations were not being met, and why not? Was there something that needed to be said that wasn't said? Was there something that needed to be communicated that wasn't communicated clearly? Or maybe it wasn't communicated but it wasn't communicated at the right time or clearly. Okay, if this is resonating for you, I want you to go back and listen to an episode that we just published called three things that I obsess over with clients, because this kind of ties back to what I talked about in that episode. Okay, we'll link to it in the show notes, but clear and timely communication is super important, and if you obsess over having super clear and timely communications, you're going to avoid a lot of this mess. Okay? And then here's the last thing that I want you to know. Again, I told you guys this was going to be a shorty episode, which is something I'm working on. I'm working on creating shorter episodes. Sometimes I want you to remember that boundaries require risk, right? It requires risk knowing that you don't have control over how somebody might respond to something. Okay, you're not responsible for how they respond, right? As long as it's done lovingly and clearly and firmly, you can't be responsible for how somebody responds.

But most of the time, if it's a if it's clearly communicated, and the other person understands your reason why this is important for you, then setting boundaries doesn't have to be this, like, weird, sticky thing. It can just be very matter of fact, you take the emotion out of it, and you've you come to a new understanding, and you move on. So yes, it requires risk, but you need to know, if you don't get anything else out of this episode today, that you are worthy and deserving of those boundaries. Okay, it requires risk, and it requires you knowing that you are worthy and deserving of those boundaries. And I want to thank my therapist for helping me understand this. It's vitally important. And when you, when you when you feel that and when you know it in your bones, life gets a lot easier. My friend, alright, okay, so just remember this as you go on, you are worthy and deserving of boundaries. All it is is establishing what's okay and what's not okay, and that you're not avoiding negative feelings when you avoid setting boundaries. All right? And if you're interested, go back and listen to the three things I obsess over with clients. We got a lot of a lot of great information there on on establishing great communications that really ties in closely with with setting these boundaries. So thank you so much. I will see you back next week for another episode. Bye for now. Hey friend. Thank you so much for letting me spend a part of this day with you. I'm so passionate about helping designers like you, and

I believe in a rising tide that when one of us does well, we all do better. So if you share this attitude of abundance with me, I want you to do just one little thing. Please share this episode with someone using might love it. And if you're feeling extra generous today, go ahead and take just 30 seconds to open your podcast app and leave us a five star rating and review. It's free for you to do, and it helps me to be able to keep making more episodes and resources for you. However you choose to help, please know I appreciate you so very much. Thank you, my friend. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll see you soon.