The holiday season: a time of joy, connection, and celebration. And also, if we’re honest, a time when stress levels spike and our best intentions sometimes crumble under the weight of impossible expectations. Whether you’re hosting the family gathering, traveling to see relatives, or simply navigating the packed calendar of events, the holidays have a way of testing our ability to be our best selves.
I want to offer you three powerful tools that can transform your experience of this season. These tools—boundaries, letting go of manuals, and gentle expectations—work together to create the space for genuine connection, joy, and yes, even peace amid the chaos.
- Boundaries—Your Gift to Yourself and Others
One of the most loving acts we can do for ourselves and those around us during the holidays is to create clear and firm boundaries. I know what you’re thinking: “But the holidays are about giving! Boundaries sound selfish.”
Let’s start by clearing up that myth right now.
Is it selfish to wear a coat when it’s cold outside? To take your vitamins? Wear sunblock? Brush your teeth? Not at all. You do all of these things to keep yourself well and healthy, which enables you to contribute to your world and be there for those you love. Boundaries are self-respecting, not selfish—they are an essential way we take responsibility for ourselves and our well-being.
Boundaries are decisions—firm and loving decisions about yourself, your priorities, your time, and your capacity — what you will and won’t do in given situations. Boundaries don’t expect anyone else to change.
When you set a boundary, you are deciding with yourself and for yourself what’s important to you, what’s harmful to you, and how you will show up for yourself—no matter what—based on these decisions.
Holiday boundaries might look like:
– Deciding how many events you’ll attend in a given week
– Choosing not to engage in conversations about contentious topics
– Setting a budget for gifts and sticking to it
– Protecting time for rest and self-care amid the busyness
– Leaving a gathering when you’ve reached your limit
You can let people know your boundaries if you want, though this isn’t always necessary. If you decide to share your boundaries with someone, it often works best when done in the spirit of connection and clarity. For example: “I want to spend time with you this holiday season, but I need to protect my evening routine with the kids. I’d love to meet for coffee one morning instead of doing late-night get-togethers.”
While there can be discomfort when setting boundaries, think of it as the same kind of discomfort felt during a good workout or when tackling a goal—there is so much positive emotion on the other side of the discomfort.
Boundaries are actually a prerequisite for connection. It’s hard to genuinely be present with others when we are disconnected from ourselves. When we say “yes” to everything and everyone, neglecting our boundaries, we are often simmering in so much resentment toward others and ourselves. Resentment prevents connection and over time, damages relationships.
In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown notes that people with strong boundaries are more able to generate and feel compassion for others. A boundary is a way of filling our own cup with love and self-respect. Without that for ourselves, we will not have those things available to give.
Boundaries make room in our lives for the things that really matter to us. When we allow ourselves to say no to what doesn’t align with our truest values and desires, we can then say yes more fully, less grudgingly—because we’re not living life like a pat of butter spread too thinly across toast.
2. Letting Go of Manuals
Sometimes the most powerful tools in our personal development are the ones we must unlearn. Let me introduce you to a concept that transformed my relationships: Manuals.
It is our human nature to attempt to control all that we can in our environment—often and especially, other humans with whom we have close relationships. We create intricate rules for these particular humans about how they should feel, act, and behave in order for us to feel certain emotions. In effect, we create manuals for them. Then, we decide what it means when they do or don’t follow these manuals, and worse, we create rules about how we should feel based on their actions.
Sound familiar? During the holidays, our manuals go into overdrive:
– The whole family should spend loads of “quality time” together
– Dad should compliment the meal I spent all day preparing
– My sister shouldn’t bring up politics at dinner
– My partner should know what gift I’d love — without me telling him
– The kids should be grateful for all we do
Notice the word “should” in all of these statements? This word is a key signal that you’re writing a manual, and setting yourself up for disappointment, resentment and guilt. When we create manuals for others, we essentially outsource our emotions to them. It’s crazy, right? In our attempt to control someone else, we inadvertently give away all our power. These thoughts about how someone should or shouldn’t behave and what we should therefore feel or not feel—these thoughts pretend to protect us, but instead actually create a lot of struggle and negative emotions.
Here’s the thing: our emotions are an inside job, created by us through our own thoughts. No one else “makes us happy”—or sad, or mad, or anything else. Our emotions come from the thoughts we think. Period.
I get it—this is hard to take. I’ve written many, many manuals in my time, and suffered accordingly.
This holiday season, ask yourself: What unwritten rules do I have for my loved ones? How much are my emotions predicated on the actions of others? Notice your manuals without judgment, and then practice releasing them. You might be amazed at how much lighter you feel.
3. Gentle Expectations
It’s helpful to think of our minds having both a zoomed-out, macroscopic setting, and a zoomed-in, micro setting. While a generally optimistic mindset serves us well in many ways, high expectations about upcoming events can calcify into a kind of playbook about how things should be, creating frustration, disappointment, and what Byron Katie calls “arguing with reality.” Our expectations, if set too high and too rigidly, front-load pressure into our experience of anything—especially those events we’ve deemed to be positive, special, or fun.
Have you ever noticed that it’s often harder to be your best self with the people you most adore? Have you noticed a certain tension or strain when you’re finally in the situations you’ve anticipated and looked forward to? Holidays, birthdays, family gatherings—there is a fine line between the pleasure of anticipating these cherished events and the tendency to write a playbook for How This Should Feel and How Everything Should Go. And of course, How Everyone Should Behave. (Notice how this connects to our manuals?)
Whether you’re preparing a holiday dinner or unwrapping gifts on a cozy morning—what’s for certain is you will be having a human experience. Human experiences contain a mix of positive and negative emotions. You will bring your imperfect humanness to it, and the other humans sharing this experience will bring their humanness to it as well.
Expectations are powerful, and they are, in fact, just stories we are telling ourselves. These stories have the power to enrich or to poison any experience. What is the story you’re telling yourself about how things should be as you anticipate the coming holiday season? Are there places where your expectations are amplifying pressure, and how might you loosen that valve?
As you plan and look forward to the holidays—the family gatherings, the special meals, the gift exchanges, or even just getting through a typical December workday—the tool I offer you is this: Let your expectations be gentle. Gentle expectations are not low expectations. This is not “Let me predict the ways this could end up being a disaster.” That thinking sends our brain into primitive, protective mode, hunting for evidence.
Gentle expectations are held loosely. Gentle expectations allow for the mixture of positive and negative emotions in any situation. Paradoxically, when we allow for the negative, we are more open to the positive when it comes around. When we are preoccupied by a narrative about how things should be, we miss out on what is.
Gentle expectations allow things to be what they are and the people you love to be who they are—because they will. Your two-year-old will be a two-year-old. The weather will be less than cooperative. Your outspoken relative will share their unsolicited opinions, as they do every year. Much of your experience will not, in fact, resemble what’s documented in your friends’ Facebook and Instagram posts. You’ll get tired, angry, hungry, short-tempered, even on the days that the calendar tells us should be special.
Let yourself be human anyway. Meet all of it—your own humanness and that of others, and the unpredictable messiness of this human experience—with openness, compassion, flexibility. No matter what we plan and anticipate, so much of this life is out of our control. Our expectations are in fact a tool that we can control, that we can calibrate. Let your gentle expectations be a kind of raft that allows you to ride the waves of whatever life brings.
How These Tools Work Together
You may have noticed as we’ve gone through these three tools how they interweave and support each other.
When you set clear boundaries, you’re already practicing gentle expectations—you’re acknowledging that you can’t do everything and be everything to everyone. You’re accepting reality as it is, including your own limitations.
When you let go of your manuals, you’re freeing others to be themselves, which naturally leads to gentler expectations about how the holidays will unfold.
When you hold gentle expectations, you’re less likely to write detailed manuals for others, and you’re better able to recognize when you need to set a boundary to protect your own well-being.
Together, these tools create space for what the holidays are truly meant to be about: genuine connection, presence, and love—the messy, imperfect, beautifully human kind.
This holiday season, I invite you to experiment with these tools. Start with whichever one resonates most strongly with you. Notice what shifts when you implement it. Be patient and compassionate with yourself as you practice—these are skills we develop over time.
The goal isn’t a perfect holiday season. The goal is a real one, where you can show up as your whole self, love the people around you without conditions, and find moments of genuine peace amid the chaos.
