I was inspired this morning by my friend’s LinkedIn post that reminded me of the importance of saying no. As I reflected further on the underlying tenet of “No yes. Either HELL YEAH! or no” and it really boiled down to a question of conviction.
(Also important sidebar: on principle I try not to look at LinkedIn, nor do I endorse perusing LinkedIn. There’s definitely good stuff but then there’s also a lot of bad stuff that just drains your soul. Proceed with caution.)
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that conviction is what drives happiness in a lot of situations. When you have conviction that you made the right decision, even if the outcome is not as expected, the confidence in that decision mitigates a lot of regret / unhappiness. When you lack the conviction, you question the decision and torment yourself with what ifs ad nauseam.
Before I get into thoughts on how to build this conviction, a quick paragraph for my recurring soapbox:
Most of the examples mentioned in the LinkedIn post were around making choices on how to spend one’s time. Are you open to a speaking engagement? What about some extra customer meetings? One of the comments on the post emphasized the importance of considering one’s time as money. I think that’s generally true, though I would also propose that one’s energy is just as valuable a resource. With time but without energy, a lot of things are not possible—it’s extremely hard to do a good job even if you have an hour set aside to complete a task if you’re absolutely drained. And likewise in the other direction: if you have no time but plenty of brain cycles, it’s also going to be a challenge to create any meaningful output.
And with that out of the way, some suggestions on building conviction:
Have clear priorities. Whether this is within the context of your job, your career more broadly, your family, or something else, know what matters the most. It’s easiest if you have one north star within each domain. You might have one primary and one secondary focus. Be able to verbalize what the north star is. Update this quarterly or a few times a year.
For example, my biggest priority at work is learning from my peers and my manager. I wanted to work at a large company to understand how leaders operate and get stuff done (and also to understand how large companies generally function). If given an opportunity to work on a new project that sounds slightly tedious or uninteresting, I immediately default to asking myself, is there something I can learn from this work? If yes, then it’s much easier to justify saying yes in spite of the downsides. If no, then I spend more time considering the opportunity costs (including, of course, the political cost of saying no)
Be very wary of type 2 fun. REI helpfully defines it as “miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect” while type 1 fun is “enjoyable while it’s happening.” Everyone has limited tolerance for type 2 fun. It’s too easy to say yes to something just because “it’s good for me.” Candidly, if I have a type 2 fun commitment in one domain of my life at any point in time, I basically say no to all other type 2 fun requests otherwise. Unsurprisingly, the maximum limit is universal across all domains of life.
Hold quality as a personal value. I mean, take it or leave it. But one of my personal values is quality—or rather, the notion that I’d rather do the things where I can commit 100% than give more things half my attention.
Examples: If I had to choose between spending more time with my friends where we all scroll our phones and don’t really feel interested in engaging with each other or seeing them less often but being 100% engaged the majority of the time, it’s a fairly easy choice for me. Likewise, if I were asked to join an extracurricular where I’d only be able to make half the sessions in a given semester, I’d feel poorly about not making the most of it and also holding back the others in the group.
So, tactically, how can this help you say no?
Redirect: As suggested by Dave, if there’s someone else who’d be a good fit for the ask, propose reaching out to them to see if they are interested
Prioritize: You can tell the asker that you’re really focused on certain areas and offer to help in the future if there are asks that align with your priorities. Share what those priorities are. “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m really focused on building my skills in X this year rather than Y. If there’s anything that comes up in X area, I’d love to be involved.”
Quality: You and the asker both want a good quality outcome. “This sounds really cool, but I don’t think I’d be able to do a great job on this given what’s on my plate at the moment. I want to make sure your event is a huge success and I wouldn’t want to be the weak link in the chain.”
Isabella -- you might also like the "Energy Audit" approach, given you mentioned edit. Chat will tell you about it, having plagiarized the sources like "Conscious Leadership" Commitment 8. I find the notion of "zone of genius" AND having that be a % target to be too much (and annoying) to me, but the flexible quadrants still make sense.