It is Healthy to Say No

Do your goals a favor; Say No.

“NO” is a complete sentence. It does not require an explanation to follow. You can truly answer someone’s request with a simple No.

— Sharon E. Rainey

One of the most important skills to learn if you want to start impressing discipline in all that you do is the ability to say no. Unfortunately, many people in the world today don't have that skill. Either they lost it through sheer cowardice, or love for acceptance. Either way, many have forgotten that they can actually say no.

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Let's picture this scenario. You wake up in the morning into a day that you have planned before you went to bed the previous night. You already noted you have about 16 waking hours in that day.

While you were planning, you decided you will take one hour to pray, one hour to read a book, three hours to take a course, eight hours to do your 9 to 4 job, thirty minutes to work out, another thirty minutes to learn a new language, one hour to connect with friends, another one to see a movie before going to bed to get your eight hours of sleep.

There! You have your day all planned out, in line with the big goals you have set for yourself, only to wake up to a call very early in the morning from a friend asking you to come online to read a gist and help with a reply, or you get a link from someone else asking you to read a very long piece in the moment to hear your opinion, or you get a knock on your door from some neighbour asking you to help with something else you know would take an hour at the very least. Or maybe later that morning, a friend calls that he wants to visit you, and you very well know that his visit will cause a disruption in your schedule.

You know that saying yes to any of these will cause your planned productivity to go in shambles, but you still go on to say yes.

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It is almost as if, as a generation, we have completely lost our ability to say no. We treat saying no like a crime, forgetting that we reserve the right to say no to things that aren't convenient, or in line with our goals and our plans. We have let the feelings of other people hinder the forward steps we ought to be having in our lives.

The main reason we say yes to everything and everyone is because we fear saying no will kill our chances of being accepted. It will make us seem unagreeable, not a team player, or a bad friend, and cause other people to be displeased or mad at us, and we don't want that, do we?

Stop letting the feelings of other people hinder the forward steps you ought to be taking in your life.

We are focused too much on how other people will feel about us saying no that we make our own goals and aspirations take a backseat behind someone else's, in our own lives! Man! You're playing yourself!

Think of it this way; when someone asks you to do something in line with their own goals, aspirations, and job description, they are putting themselves first, working on their own goals, and when you put your own plans and goals down to satisfy theirs, you are also putting their goals first in your life and putting your goals in the backseat.

So who takes care of yours? And when you constantly put other people's goals ahead of yours, when will you achieve yours? Or do you not know that for every yes you say to someone else in complete contrast to your own goal, you are saying no to yourself.

At what point will you say yes to yourself?

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Let's look at it in another light.

Like the 16 hours analogy that I earlier explained, every hour you give to someone else, or to something else, you are invariably taking that hour from yourself and your set goals. Every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else, but whenever you say no, you still keep your options open, you still have the chance to say yes to other things.

Saying yes to things limit the amount of relevant things we can say yes to. It's just like you have 20 yeses to say in a day, and you give 15 to irrelevant things or to other people's askings, limiting the yeses you can say to yourself to 5.

Or have you forgotten that we only have a fixed number of hours in a day. If you let someone else take 2 hours; the 2 hours you planned to use for something else, you are making a trade off. The opportunity cost for the two hours is what you would have used to move forward in your goals.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't help people advance their goals, but bro!! Not at the expense of your own goals and purpose. Not at the expense of your own productivity!

If you spend your time helping your colleagues perform their job description, you have less time to do your own. Your own work will suffer, and during performance appraisals, the work you did for your colleagues won't matter. What will matter is your own job description and the progress you have made on it. You are taking care of everyone else's job description. Who will take care of yours?

Stop advancing other people's goals at the expense of your own!

What am I saying in essence? Always put yourself and your goals first. The reason we fail to achieve those goals is because we forget that saying ‘No’ is an option. We can say No to things that will rob us of the time we should spend on those goals.

When you put yourself first, and you have satisfied the necessary goals, and there is time left to help other people advance their goals, do it. Help away. After all, there's a joy that comes in helping others fulfil their goals.

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The truth is, always saying yes to people causes them to like us more, but saying no tangibly, reasonably, but consistently will cause them to respect us more in the long run.

One of the healthiest things to do for your goals is to say no to things and people that will rob you of the time to fulfil them.

But then again, how do you say No to things when you don't even have daily goals to achieve? What tangible reason will you have to say no when you haven't even thought out and written out the things to do in a day? Let's talk about this in next week's newsletter.

To your growth,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨