Learning to Say No to Yourself

To stop creating stress and anxiety in your life

A lot of different bloggers, lifestyle coaches, and popular influencers are chatting about learning to say no to other people in order to live a healthier, happier life.  And that’s great.  Many of us feel like we cannot say no.  Somehow along the way we learned that saying no meant letting someone down, or hurting them in somewhere.  But in a perverse reality not saying no actually hurst us far more.  In my last post, I talked about When the Hustle Hurts, when I realized that in getting my hustle on (as many bloggers tout) actually hurt my chances of succeeding.  This wasn’t because I think anything other than hard work brings success, but because, when emotions are involved, you can be hustling in vain.  I’d like to follow that post up, with another lesson that I learned about my hustle.  I realized that as a multi-passionate person, I was pulling myself in a lot of different directions, and starting a lot of different projects.  In desperation, I was hoping that if I kept all of these ball in the air long enough, one of them would allow me to quit my job and start “the rest of my life”.

I know – on top of multi-passionate, I’m also apparently very over dramatic.

I wasn’t happy in my day job, so naturally I started to seek out other means of making myself so once more.  In the past, I had sold handmade jewelry and knitted items (that I had proudly designed myself).  I had taught yoga, and blogged. So unhappy and desperately wanting a change, I thought, maybe I just wasn’t meant to work a nine to five office job for someone else.  I thought that though I may perpetually be broke, maybe I’d be happy crafting or teaching or writing for a living.  So outside of work, my waking hours were filled with different projects.  It seemed that no idea was a bad idea because it was better than my current situation.  I started to say yes to anything I could come up with.  Soon I was:

• Knitting and selling patterns on Etsy.
• Running a charitable dog project to source donations and knit sweaters for local shelters.
• Blogging and trying to turn this, another website I was managing into something.
• Helping a startup with their website content.
• Reviewing books and hoping to sell ads on this website or make connections and become an author myself
• Writing a yoga blog and trying to become an ambassador to companies that I could one day work with.
• And probably a few other things that I can’t remember right now.

Told you, I was saying yes to myself and my ideas again and again.  After the stress go so bad, that I fought with my parents, had breakdowns, cried myself to sleep, I realized this was a tipping point.  I could not keep saying yes to all of these things.  Even though I loved every single thing I was doing, I couldn’t do them all at one time.  I had to start saying no to myself.  Only saying no to myself could reduce the stress and anxiety that I was creating.  By reducing these outside of work, I was making my time at work a little more bearable as well.  By the time that I was working my last job, at Community Elf, I was saying no to a lot of different things and I was happy.  Community Elf was a source of friendships, getting back to the marketing work I was trained and loved to do.  At this job, I was learning new things and preparing myself to make my dream a reality.  But I would have been blind to all of the positive things this job and the people there had afforded me, if I hadn’t said no to myself.

As I was working in this job, I had the opportunity to take on my first big client, the one that would enable me (without my parents and others flipping out and thinking that I was throwing all of my hard work and previous success away), to take the leap and start my own company.  Now I’m doing what I love – writing, networking and building ambassador programs, creatively thinking and challenging myself every day.

Don’t get me wrong – working at home, for myself, with no one to keep my hand to my tasks but myself, is hard.  I have to be honest with myself and the people I work for (because realistically my client is my boss and I technically work for them even though I bill them) every day.  Its also scary in that I don’t have a team that can share the burden if I fail to meet my promises.  My effort, hard work and results are the only job security that I have.  But this this is what I wanted.  The stress, the anxiety, the fear – those are all still here.  But now I have the ability to say no to myself when I get distracted, to stay focused on what I’m doing and keep moving ahead.  It was hard to learn and felt much like letting go of friendships.  But the beauty is that down the road, I can always say yes to a project here, or there, as long as I keep the promises that I have made to myself as well.

Through out all of the time I was saying yes to myself in everything, if you were to confront me and accuse me of an inability to say no to myself, I would have denied it.  I would have denied it because I was not aware of what I was doing.  It’s like, when an alcoholic first becomes an alcoholic.  They didn’t set out with the goal or intention to do so.  It happened over time.  And often this is something that someone must hit a tipping point in order to make a change.

I say this because you might be reading this post, and be at a similar point in your life, unaware of the situation you are creating for yourself.  Blaming employers or others for your unhappiness is common, and innocent enough.  But I ask you to take stock of all that you have on your plate and see if there isn’t something that you might say no to in order to free yourself from the crushing weight of stress or anxiety.