Do You Face A Hard Time Saying No?

5 ways that helped me and might help you too

Do you often find it hard to say no when someone approaches you? Do you feel rude in saying no? As a result, you end up saying yes to a lot of things and later you regret it and feel stressed and burned out.

There might be many reasons that are stopping you from saying no to the person standing in front of you. Some with which I can relate are: 1. You don’t want to hurt the feelings of another person. 2. You may not want to get drawn into a conflict by saying no.

Many times we end up saying yes despite having enough time or energy just because we don’t want to lose those friends.

But we must ensure that we don’t use all of our time and energy in another person’s work. Many successful people you’ll meet in your life are going to tell you how important saying no is. Steve Jobs was famous for saying how important it is to say no as it’s the only way you can focus on your own life.

If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will

— Greg Mckeown

So, how can we help ourselves say no? Let’s see.

Start small

Start saying no to small things that you really don’t feel like doing. You don’t want to say no to the family vacation that your mom is wanting to plan for a while now. That can be too emotionally charged at the beginning and you would again hate saying no.

So start with telling no to some of your friends whom you would love to help, but you don’t have time when maybe they ask you to help them out with their project.

Focus on what’s going on inside your head

You need to notice what stuff you are making up in your head about the situation. You need to peek through your mind and see the thoughts that are going on before you say yes. It may be the fear of being hated by saying no to the other person or the fear of letting them down or it may be the thought of maintaining peace.

It might be difficult in the beginning but believe me, it will completely change your life.

Peeking into your thoughts will help you prioritize the task being offered by the other person and will help you say yes or no accordingly. If it does not lie significantly high on your priority list, just say no.

Focus on the aftermath

Just go some way back in time through your thoughts and try to recall what your reaction was when you said yes to something that you didn’t want to do, the task which really cost your time and energy unnecessarily.

Or, if you can’t remember any of them, the next time when you say yes to something that you don’t want to, focus on how you felt in your body, what signals your brain sent about it.

If you felt annoyed, were very angry, wanted to hide, or shrink away, you see, that’s the point where your boundaries were crossed. Once you start noticing when your boundaries are crossed only then you’ll try to uphold them.

And once you have started to notice your boundaries you can go to step 1 and start saying some small nos.

You get drowned due to your explanation

And yes, I am guilty of it too. I am still working on it. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of the other person, so we start explaining why we can’t help them.

But, what we don’t understand is that our explanation is providing them the information they want. The key information that they can use to manipulate us.

It’s going to be very awkward in the beginning, but with time, you will learn to deal with those feelings. At last, it’s your life and your decision, stick with it. Just don’t let anyone else manipulate you.

Just keep calm, if you can’t do their work, just say no. True friends will always respect your decision.

You are actually helping them by saying no

Realize this, if you don’t want to say yes to them, you won’t be able to commit completely if you say yes.

By saying no, you are letting them find someone who can stick to their commitment and help the other person with a wholehearted commitment in such a way that could’ve never been with partial commitment.

Hence, you’re actually helping them in the long run.

I hope this would be useful. I too used to struggle a lot with saying no. But I got rid of it to some extent and still improving by using the above-mentioned ways and hope that it might help you too.

Thanks for reading!!

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