Event Details

HR Is Not a Vending Machine: Healthy Boundaries for Humans Who Work in HR by Janice Huffman, SHRM-CP, Certified PDS IAT Exec Coach, SR HRBA

This session explores how HR professionals unintentionally become “vending machines” for everyone else’s urgency—constantly dispensing answers, emotional support, and exceptions on demand. We’ll look at the emotional drivers behind this pattern, such as people-pleasing and “I’m not enough unless I over-give,” which are often rooted in core wounds and limiting beliefs that create poor boundaries and self-neglect.

Participants will learn a clear, practical framework for healthy boundaries—time, emotional, material, and role boundaries—and how these boundaries are actually an authentic expression of our needs and personal reality rather than rejection of others. We will use simple tools such as a boundary audit and a 4-step boundary identification process to help HR professionals recognize where they’re over-extending, understand why it hurts, and practice more balanced, assertive communication in real workplace scenarios.

Learning Objectives:

1) Define healthy HR boundaries: Describe what healthy boundaries are—an “imaginary line” that separates personal needs and reality from others—and explain why they are essential for credibility, psychological safety, and sustainable impact in the HR role.

2) Use a boundary audit to pinpoint where they chronically over-give (time, emotional energy, work products, or decision ownership), and recognize the beliefs and fears (e.g., needing approval, fear of conflict or rejection) that keep them from setting limits.​ 

3) Apply a 4-step boundary identification and negotiation process—identify feeling, why it hurts, what is needed instead, and how to express or negotiate the boundary—to draft at least one real boundary statement they can use with a leader, colleague, or stakeholder back at work.

• Register: 

  Click Here to register for the meeting.