Learning to say no

I hope you are having a great week! I’ll be honest, I’m still on a little bit of a high from last week’s book launches. It was a crazy fun time and exhausting at the same time. Between getting all of the bonus content pages completed, creating all of the marketing materials and marketing, servicing my current clients and onboarding a few more, it would have been easy to get overwhelmed and want to just shut down. 

I know a few of my clients find themselves in similar situations. They have over committed to their business, family and community and are finding it hard to be as successful as they want to be in any of these areas. So today I want to share an idea with you that I hope will help you get through the really busy times as it helped me.  Today we are talking about the power of saying no. 

As high performers and high achievers, we often take on more than we should. It’s in our nature. We love a good challenge. What’s more challenging than a to-do list with 101 important tasks that only we can do correctly. Sure, you could delegate some of those things, but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. Delegation is not the same as saying no. They key to avoiding overload and overwhelm and, consequently, underperformance is learning how to say no in the first place. 

Here are some phrases you’ll hear me use when I say no to something:

• I appreciate you thinking of me but I just don’t have the time to do that.
• I am sorry, I do not have the bandwidth to do that at this time.
• My schedule is totally full, I just am not able to fit that in right now.
• I’m not able to do that but let me help you find someone else to do that.

Now I’m not suggesting that you say no to everything. But I am suggesting you say no to some things. Why? When you say yes to something that you deep down don’t want to do or don’t have the ability to do, you are not living in integrity with yourself. 

When we say yes to something we should have said no to, we set ourselves up for frustration, anxiety and stress. Often this thing gets bumped down on your priority list for other things that you actually want to do. (Hello Procrastination!) Then as you get down to the wire of when this thing has to be done, you start getting stressed about getting it done and frustrated with yourself for saying yes in the first place. On top of all that, it is easy to let those emotions bleed out to your loved ones.

My advice? Put some thought into what you are saying yes to. Make sure that you value your yes’s and give them to things that align with your core values. I promise you will find that you will enjoy how you spend your time so much more and will be able to avoid that overwhelmed, burned out feeling.