Setting and Respecting Boundaries in a Public Space
How does Toward Wellth approach building an inclusive environment when there are diverse set of spoken and unspoken boundaries?
Personal Boundaries as a topic has come up in my feed and life recently as a catalyst for me to take it on as a topic for this blog, in particular with how the topic relates to Toward Wellth.
There are two major types of boundaries - physical and emotional - which are currently in focus for the design of Toward Wellth.
Physical boundaries can be tangible barriers such as walls, fences, bodies of water, or even significant distance. They can also be personal space that is declared or culturally understood and unspoken declarations can be made through body language or positioning (moving away).
Emotional boundaries refer to the limits and rules we set for ourselves in relationships regarding our feelings and emotions. They allow us to have space for our own feelings to be separate from others’ feelings.
Toward Wellth staff will be trained to be empathetic, sympathetic, and firm in maintaining a physically and emotionally safe environment for all guests.
Specifically on emotional boundaries first, it’s important to be empathetic that each person is unique in what they have the capacity to tolerate, share, or experience. Each person is a sum of the impact of their prior experiences - that’s the fancy way of saying “we all have emotional baggage”. Some people have a threshold of tolerance for most any situation whereas some people may be easily triggered by a number of situations.
Toward Wellth embraces the psychological safety of every patron and staff member as a foundational expectation - no guest shall be permitted to harass another guest or staff member, period. Further, additional programming will be provided to help widen the empathy for guests to better understand differences in the ‘windows of tolerances’ that we each have for our own comfort.
For physical boundaries, we provide areas with differing levels of privacy — completely private rooms for sensitive conversations; semi-private rooms for group meetings; and, in the open public space, a variety of movable dividers, white noise sound masking, and sound absorbing materials. Overall there is a dual goal to provide levels of privacy and being environmentally friendly to persons where attenuating the sensory experiences are a key priority (absorb the background noise for groups such as persons with neurodivergent needs).
Semi-related to physical boundaries is the topic of noise pollution by route of ‘speakerphone’. There will be an enforced rule of “no speakerphone (no FaceTime calls)” with the exception of private rooms. [and further , the use of 'screens’ will be dissuaded in general, as being present within the space will be encouraged - see “Be Where You Are”]
There are other boundaries that further deepen the emotional boundary topic such as triggering topics, or topics that people do not want to discuss due to the discomfort they cause. Privacy boundaries in general are an interesting topic that has opportunity to set additional policy statements around - simple things like “will we keep patron drink history in order to provide a better future service or should we not store or track patron behavior? is it something that could be an opt-in service as an alternative?” - this is a topic that haunts me having thought for decades about the handling and stewardship of protected health information in my day job.
I would love outside perspectives on how you feel about service industry establishments keeping records of your purchase behavior. Unfortunately they’re doing it already - or at least your bank or credit card issuers are…