How to Say “No” and Keep Your Friends and Family

Not long ago, a client came to me with a problem. He received multiple requests from the people in his life to review their art work. As a result, my client found he had little time for his own work and was spending hours critiquing and reviewing the work of other artists.

"I'm having trouble saying no. All these requests for work keep coming in, and I keep saying yes to everything. The truth is that I can't do it all." He was stuck in a cycle of saying yes and didn’t know how he could make more time for himself.

My client seemed unhappy, tired and frustrated. He was hunched over at a table as he told me this and seemed resigned to have to continue giving out critiques. Since humans are inherently good, we want to help everyone. At the same time, our desire to be helpful can be at the expense of our own needs. Ideally, we discover a balance between our desires and needs and the desire to help others.

When we say "yes" to every request and project that comes our way, our "yes" begins to lose meaning to the people asking us for help. We can't fulfill every request every time. In the case of this particular client, he could have started to drop off on creating his own work – and the quality of his own work is the very reason people sought his advice in the first place.

I asked him "what does saying 'yes' cost you?" He replied that he was so busy working on other people's projects that he had no room to think about his own. In short, he no longer had the space to create, and his mind was stuffed with other people's challenges.

When we first started working together on this problem, he was not able to get the word "no" out of his mouth. When I asked him to say no, he would start laughing instead.

Allow me to take a moment to explain the concept of the observer. The observer that we are is composed of:

Language + Body + Emotions.

Since he could not yet implement the language, we worked on the Body of No. He was all smiles (Emotion) and sheepish grins when we started. His smiles and sheepish nature were not supportive of his no, so I asked him to become an inventor. . .

I asked him to invent his Body of No. He created the Body (it’s different for everyone) and discovered a facial gesture to go along with it. When his body disposition and his facial gesture were aligned, he was able to start working on adding the words.

Through doing this work, he achieved coherence between Language, Body, and Emotion and, with practice, was able to say no to what he didn’t want to do and to make time for how he really wanted to spend his time.

Deborah Ager is a Life Transition Coach and helps people embrace change in adventurous ways. You can learn more about her work at lifespacecoach.com.

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