Two Degrees on the Rudder
For when it feels like nothing's different and you're going nowhere.
Hi! This week I’m sharing an adaptation of a A Year of Healthy Boundaries post, as I think it’s SUPER helpful to everyone!
I grew up in a boating family, on the water. I was even in a waterski show, which is a sentence I don’t get to say often enough. But I was never the sailor. That was my dad. He really was a sailor, the real kind, and he once told me something I’ve never been able to stop thinking about: two degrees difference on the rudder, and in time, you’ll end up on a completely different shore.
Two degrees.
You wouldn’t even feel it happen. If you were standing on the deck, you wouldn’t notice the shift. The horizon would look the same. The wind would feel the same. The water around you would be indistinguishable from the water you were in five minutes ago. You’d think nothing had changed.
But something has changed. And over distance, over time, over the accumulated effect of that barely perceptible adjustment, you end up somewhere entirely different from where you would have been.
I want to talk about this because I think some of you are standing in the middle of your own two-degree shift right now and you can’t see it. And because you can’t see it, you’re telling yourself it doesn’t count.
The Rudder Moves Before You See the Shore
Many of you come into your personal work, perhaps into a conversation about boundaries with a certain understanding of what boundaries are. Maybe you thought they were walls. Maybe you thought they were ultimatums. Maybe you thought they were something other people got to have, people with louder voices or thicker skin or fewer obligations. Maybe you thought they were inherently unkind, or confrontational, or selfish, or something that people like you just don’t do.
As you take a retrospective view of your own personal work, you might find your understanding of the work you have set off to do, has shifted. Maybe not dramatically. Maybe not in any way you could point to and say, there, that’s the moment everything changed. But the definition has moved. The word “boundaries” for example, means something different to you now than it did when you started.
If that’s all that’s happened, if that’s the only thing that’s shifted, I want you to hear me when I say: that is enough.
Not “enough for now.” Not “enough as a start.” Enough.
Because a shifted understanding of what boundaries are is not a small thing dressed up to sound important. It is the rudder. Everything else—every conversation you’ll have, every decision you’ll make, every moment where you’ll choose between abandoning yourself and holding your ground—all of it will be steered by what you believe boundaries to be. And if that belief has moved even two degrees, the trajectory of your entire life has just changed. You won’t see it today. You might not see it this year. But the shore you’re heading toward is no longer the shore you were heading toward before.
The Thing You’re Calling “Not Enough”
I think about this when people tell me they feel like they haven’t done enough. In the beginning, they tell me this a lot. They’ve been trying, thinking they are advocating for themselves and/or sitting with the questions, but they haven’t had the “big confrontation”. They haven’t drawn the dramatic line. They haven’t had the cinematic moment where they stand up at the dinner table and say the thing they’ve been swallowing for thirty years while the camera slowly zooms in and the soundtrack swells. (And they don’t really want to, to be honest.)
They think progress is supposed to look like that. Like a before-and-after. Like something visible and unmistakable and Instagram-ready. And because their experience doesn’t look like that, they assume nothing is happening.
Everything is happening.
It’s just happening at the level of the rudder, not the sails.
What Two Degrees Actually Looks Like
Let me give you an example of what two degrees looks like in practice.
Before: you say yes to something you don’t want to do and you don’t think twice about it. It’s just what you do. It doesn’t even register as a choice.
After (two degrees): you say yes to something you don’t want to do and you notice. That’s it. You notice. You think, huh, I didn’t actually want to do that. And then you do it anyway, because you’re not ready to do anything different yet, and that’s fine.
That noticing? That’s the rudder moving.
It doesn’t look like anything from the outside. Nobody’s going to throw you a parade for silently observing your own pattern. But that moment of awareness has just changed the angle of your entire trajectory, because you cannot un-notice. Once you’ve seen it, it’s seen. And the next time it happens, you’ll notice a little sooner. And the time after that, you might notice before you say yes instead of after. And the time after that, you might pause. And the time after that, the pause might become a different answer.
None of those moments, taken individually, would make for a very compelling story. There’s no single scene that feels like transformation. But line them up over months, over a year, over the long patient arc of actually living differently, and you’re standing on a completely different shore. Not because you made one huge dramatic change. Because you made a two-degree adjustment and then you let time and distance do what they do.
Why I Get Twitchy About Breakthroughs
This is why I get a little twitchy when people talk about boundary breakthroughs. Not because breakthroughs don’t happen. They do. But the worship of the breakthrough does two things that bother me.
First, it obscures the real mechanism of change, which is almost always quieter, slower, and less photogenic than we’ve been led to believe. The breakthrough, when it comes, is usually the visible result of dozens of invisible two-degree shifts that preceded it. It’s the shore coming into view. But the rudder moved a long time ago.
And second, and this is the part I really want you to hear: the dramatic, sweeping change isn’t just harder. It might not even be better.
We tend to assume that a small shift is the consolation prize. That it’s what you settle for when you don’t have the capacity, the courage, or the readiness for the big move. We feel like we’ve come up short if the change wasn’t drastic, wasn’t cinematic, wasn’t the kind of thing that makes for a good story at brunch.
But here’s what I’ve seen, over and over, across 25 years of this work: the rudder approach doesn’t just get you there eventually. It often gets you somewhere better. Because a two-degree shift is something your nervous system can integrate. It’s something your relationships can absorb. It’s something that doesn’t blow up the structures of your life and leave you standing in the rubble trying to figure out what to do next. A dramatic change demands that everything around you reorganizes at once. A two-degree shift lets the reorganization happen gradually, naturally, in a way that tends to actually hold.
The people who come up short aren’t the ones who made small changes. They’re the ones who decided the small changes didn’t count and kept waiting for the big one.
The Thinking IS the Doing
I also want to say this to the people who feel like they’ve “only” changed how they think about boundaries but haven’t changed what they do yet: the thinking is the doing. I know that sounds like something you’d find on a tea tag, and I apologize for that, but it’s true.
How you think about boundaries, and who you believe yourself to be, determines what’s possible for you. If you still believe, deep down, that boundaries are mean, then no amount of scripting or rehearsing is going to help you set one without feeling like you’ve done something wrong. But if your understanding has shifted, even slightly, toward boundaries are how I take care of what matters to me, then you’ve just opened a door that was previously bricked shut. You might not walk through it today. But it’s open. And open is everything.
Two degrees doesn’t feel like much when you’re standing at the helm.
It feels like everything when you see where you’ve landed.
Something to Sit With
What has shifted in how you understand boundaries, even slightly, since you started this work? Can you name the old definition and the new one?
Where in your life have you started noticing something you used to do automatically? What changed to make it visible?
Where have you been dismissing a real shift because it wasn’t dramatic enough? What if the undramatic version is the one that actually lasts?
What if the thing you’ve been calling “not enough progress” is actually the rudder moving?
Context. Nuance. Discernment.
With gratitude,
Randi
This is *so* true, and true of so many facets of life. Thank you for articulating it in your inimitable fashion.