You're listening to the Life Coach School Podcast with Brook Castillo episode number 490.

Welcome to the Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching.

And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brook Castillo.

Hi, my beautiful friends. Welcome to the podcast. I'm having an incredible day. I woke up this morning. I'm in San Diego right now.

We rented a house here for the month, and the pickleball here is crazy. Everyone is so good in this area. It's wild. It's so fun.

So I woke up this morning and went to open play by myself. And the way open play works at pickleball is you go and you put your racket in this little stand.

And then when there's an open spot, then you just jump in and you jump in with any partner that is also kind of single in the open play.

And so you end up playing with lots of different people getting to know lots of different people and playing with them on your team.

And I just went to did that for two hours. And I met the coolest people. And we had the most fun. I'm telling you guys pickleball. It's the answer.

It is such a fun social thing to do. You get a great workout. And we left the whole time. It was great. Great time.

So I came back and I'm actually teaching a class today in get coached. I'm coaching a class today. And one of the questions that came in ahead of time was so good.

It was about the difference between boundaries and avoiding. And it's such a great question because I think a lot of times people confuse the two.

And we use psychological language to justify our own behavior sometimes in a way that may not be healthy.

And so I think what's going on with this client, what was going on with her is she was basically using the word boundary, but she was actually just avoiding this person.

And listen, first and foremost, what I want to say about that is you are a grown ass adult and you can do actually whatever you want to do when it comes to your relationships.

And I think this is an important part that maybe I don't talk about a lot and I want to make sure I do.

If you want to avoid a certain person, if you don't want to be around a certain person, if you don't want to talk to any person in your life, you just don't have to.

And you can decide, no, I don't want this person in my life and I don't want to talk to them.

Now, there are times that I have done this and my students have done this, my clients have done this in a way that is very healthy and I think very positive for our lives.

And it's not an avoidance tactic. It's just this is someone that I do not want to have a relationship with because I don't want to work on my relationship with this person because it doesn't matter to me.

Or I don't want to work on myself as it applies to this person.

Now, the way that you know that it's healthy or the way that I would help you define that it's healthy is it feels clean.

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