Native Navajo weavers understood something long before anyone wrote it down: a boundary is not where two things stop touching. It’s where they meet and become one. Stronger, instead of dividing.

Look at a traditional loom. The upper beam is the sky. The lower beam is earth. Two things that seem to have nothing to do with each other become, together, the very structure that holds the weaving up. The boundary between them isn’t a wall. It’s the frame. Without that meeting point, there is no loom at all.

Most of us are taught to think of boundaries as division — a line marking where you end, and I begin, where mine stops, and yours starts.

The weaver sees it differently. No conflict. Bring the threads together — different colors, different tensions, different origins — and where they cross is exactly where the cloth becomes strong. Not in spite of the crossing. Because of it.

Some weavers leave one thin line of a different color running from the center of the piece to its very edge — a deliberate opening at the boundary, so nothing is sealed shut. Even the edge is built to stay open.

This example illustrates what good coaching does. A coach’s real work is helping someone move from where they are to where they want to be, and that almost always means loosening a limiting belief, questioning an old assumption, finding a connecting thread, trying on an idea that doesn’t fit yet. Still, the person is open to opportunity and change. That can feel like breaking a boundary. It isn’t. It’s weaving within one.

The boundaries of your life and work — your values, your history, your responsibilities, your skills, your life experience — don’t have to shrink you. Held rightly, they’re the loom itself: the frame strong enough to let you create and expand inside it.

A boundary is not a wall. It’s where you get woven into something larger and still remain entirely yourself. Integrity.

My heartfelt gratitude to my friend, artist Michael Reilly, for inspiring this Daily Blog.

Thanks – Michael (he, him)

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This matters too – Collaboration – Separate and Together.

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