Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Just say "No"

This may be a revelation for many of us - particularly women - but "no" is a complete sentence. However, it is not considered to be by most of us. When we are asked to do something, go somewhere, etc. and our inner voice screams "NO" what we end up saying instead is "well if I didn't have to pick up the kids" or "if I wasn't doing ..." or "well no because..."

These responses and all those like them allow for the requester to interject a solution to the problem we are offering as a reason for our "no". In other words, if it wasn't for the reason, we'd be more than willing to say "yes". So then the persuading begins and generally no one really wins. We end up doing what we don't want to do and the other person gets an unwilling-angry-annoyed participant.

Clearly if we had just said "no" we wouldn't be in this situation. So why don't we just say "no"? There are a vast number of books, theories and opinions on why we don't, so I won't go into them here. Instead, I would like to offer --even if it has to be on a very small scale at first-- that we just say "no".

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