Learning to say No!

The questions I kept asking myself was 'How did I get to this point?', 'Why do I have so much on my plate?' and 'Why do I never have any time to catch up on my admin?' Well the truth of the matter is that I say Yes way to quickly. It's not easy saying No when you want to please people. But what I forget is that when I say Yes to something I actually saying No to something else.

Chatting to one of my friends a couple of weeks ago he said I was 'oversubscribed' and I knew straight away I was in trouble, because it was the truth. Getting your way out of a situation like this is a lot more difficult than I would have initial thought. It required me to change my thinking.

Yes I want to offer a good service to my 'customers', yes I want to conduct myself in a professional way and yes I like it when I contribute to a positive outcome. The trouble is you can very quickly come to a point where you become completely ineffective. And this is key. I was being very efficient in what I was doing, but if I externalised it and looked from the outside for a moment I would see that people viewed me as very ineffective because I had become 'oversubscribed'.

 So! What I have I had to change? I've learnt to say No! At first this was a bit tricky as you don't want to let people down etc. etc. BUT it's a critical skill to have when managing relationships, customers and life in general. I guess a lot of it also comes down to having firm boundaries. Here some tips that helped me get to this point:

• When you say no to something you say yes to something else, and vice vesa
• When you say yes to everything people come to expect you to always say yes, so when they need 'work' done they'll always come straight to you cause they know you'll say yes
• People don't respect people that say yes to everything
• Sometimes you don't need to say no, you just need to say not now, or the timing of this is not for you. A lot of saying no comes down to how you say no. That's were I found this article that came in handy -> The Gentle Art of Saying No What this did not cover for me was why I should be saying no. And this is critical, if you don't know why you're saying no, you land up going back to saying yes. 

I guess that's enough about yes and no for now, but I've had to learn this the hard way, and I guess in life sometimes that's the only way we do learn certain things.

Quote for the day here:

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." Bill Gates