Managing Privacy in a Home-Based Business. Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about boundary regulation, territorial markers and how to avoid isolation (the other side of privacy) in order to manage privacy in a home-based business. These articles will include numerous tips and examples to help you to enjoy running your home-based business and to avoid unnecessary conflict. In the meantime, reflection on the information I have written in this article might already start a process of inner shifting and could help you to recognise some areas of privacy you could start attending to.
Privacy, like alienation, loneliness,
ostracism, is a condition
of being apart from others.
However, alienation is suffered,
loneliness is dreaded,
ostracism and isolation are borne
with resignation or panic,
while privacy is sought after.
Michael Weinstein
Running a home-based business is often a survival decision rather than a life-style decision. People entering the work force are faced with fewer and fewer job opportunities and the ever growing number of the jobless are rather creating their own jobs at home than seeking work in a dwindling job market. Here are a few comments by people who are running their own home-based businesses:
I actually enjoy my husband running his business from home from the security point of view. It makes our premises that much more secure during the day.
Ever since I have been running my own business, I have been earning twice as much as I used to when I was employed.
I enjoy being more accessible to my children. I can take them to their sports events in the afternoons, I’m at home when they’re sick but I can continue working without feeling guilty–I don’t have to choose between an employer and my children.
I had a very responsible position at work. I don’t think many people are aware of the restrictions on one in the corporate world. I found that I was always reacting to one situation or another. Since I have run my own business from home, I have become creative again and I am getting large contracts into the bargain!
Today, small business and home-based businesses are internationally associated with growth, with social and economic progress and their virtues are universally accepted. There are many benefits to the home-based business. Some say we have returned to the small family business or handicraft society of the past. But …
… we are the children of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We are the inheritors of the Industrial Revolution and of its subsequent effects on every aspect of our lives – on our lifestyles, our thoughts, feelings and our perceptions. Our days include antibiotics, electricity, television and the computer … the motorcar, the cellular phone and the space shuttle. We talk of relativity … of negotiation … of accountability, responsibility and mind sets. We encourage individuality and uniqueness. We speak of the global village. We are in fact so different that a modern home-based business has little resemblance to the home-based business of 200 or more years ago.
The Human Journey from a Public to a More Private Sphere. We are different because significant changes have taken place in the thoughts and feelings of large numbers of people in the developing societies over the centuries. As a result of these long-term mental changes, people’s conduct and their world-views have changed. For example, in earlier times, people’s lives were governed by extremes but because human conduct was more and more regulated over time, self-control was gradually introduced, which enabled people to control their emotions more easily.
As people acquired stronger personalities through self-control and regulation of conduct, so they became more conscious of themselves as individuals. It then became possible for them to consider the thoughts and feelings of others and to realise with respect to others that “this is a person just like me.” Privacy was an important development in mentality as bodily functions and many other aspects moved from a public to a more private sphere.
Privacy Helps Me to Define Who I Am. “Privacy mechanisms define the limits and boundaries of the self. When the permeability of these boundaries is under the control of a person, a sense of individuality develops. But it is not the inclusion or exclusion of others that is vital to self definition; it is the ability to regulate contact when desired. If I can control what is me and what is not me, and if I can observe the limits and scope of my control, then I have taken major steps toward understanding and defining what I am. Thus, privacy mechanisms serve to help me define me (Altman, 1975).
Some of the distressing experiences people in home-based business have expressed are:
At first, we had no privacy. What was very frustrating was people’s insensitivity to our privacy – they just walked into our house at any time, often without knocking. They used my things without asking …
What is home to you is simply the office or the factory to the employees of the small home-based business. Where they park their cars – parking you in; whether they walk into your home with clean or dirty shoes; whether they use your pot plant for putting their cigarette stubs in – all of these are of no concern to the employee. They invade your way of life remaining insensible to your feelings.
Privacy Is a Boundary Regulation Process. Privacy is the management of information about yourself. It is a process whereby we regulate how much information we disclose about ourselves to others and how much information about others we allow as input. Home-based businesses are particularly vulnerable because privacy boundaries can become blurred.
When the Choice of Regulation Is Removed and When Interaction Is Forced. Research has shown that people react in specific ways when they perceive a loss of control over the regulation of their privacy boundaries. Some of the reactions are:
- Almost giving up
- Performing poorly
- Stresses
- Avoidance
- Shutdowns
Research has shown that the greater the forced contacts between people, the more avoidance mechanisms will there be to prevent contact. Some views expressed when people were unable to regulate control over privacy boundaries at home were:
I was expected to like the staff. I was prepared to be polite to them but the more I was told I should “like” the employees, the angrier I got.
I started going out as often as I could and for as long as possible to get away from the people in my home and the lack of privacy at home. I stopped saying where I was going or who I was going to see. I stopped sharing many aspects of my life with my husband because I did not want to share my life with clients and staff who were always around him.
As a family, we were constantly interrupted. We never seemed to have a meal in peace. The children and I would go out for long periods. Our children began to spend more time in their rooms.
If we become aware of avoidance reactions in ourselves or if excessive stress becomes evident, it could be the result of forced, unwanted contact. It could be due to the loss of control over the regulation of our boundaries.
As the researcher, Altman said, “It seems that the ability to regulate interaction is necessary for individual and cultural survival, and unless people have figured out ways to control interaction, their status as intact human beings can well be in Jeopardy.”
Leslie Zimmermann, a Jungian Analyst based in Johannesburg, offers a range of services, which she integrates, to meet the needs and aspirations of people. In a word, her work is in the service of wholeness. Wholeness includes both our vulnerabilities and our strengths, becoming conscious of our own unique mix of these, honouring our own unique way of functioning and with this knowledge and confidence, contributing as only we each can in our own way, to this evolving world we find ourselves to be a part of.
Leslie specialises in Analytical Psychology, Voice Dialogue, Coaching solutions for business executives. Consulting and coaching for family owned and home-based business
For an appointment Leslie Zimmermann can be contacted on:
+27 (0)83 384 9812