Some of the people I lead regularly struggle with accomplishing a particular task. The reason?
They say YES too much.
Their YES is getting in the way of their success.
It’s a basic time management issue, driven by some deeper things.
Remember: whenever you say yes to one thing, you’re in some way saying no to something else, whether you intended to or not.
That’s a reality of our finitude that we all have to accept: we can’t say yes to everything and everyone at the same time. It’s impossible.
We have a limited amount of time that our yeses can fill.
So we make choices. We have to. We may not realize it, but we do. If I say yes to that donut and coffee, I won’t be able to buy that magazine that I wanted to pick up.
And behind our choices are the beliefs that influence what choices we make. With one of these folks who struggles, I was fortunate enough to identify her core belief: “I can’t say no to my clients”.
Bingo. And because she can’t say no to her clients, she never has enough time to finish her other work. Which then piles up.
By saying yes to her clients, “all the time”, she’s in essence saying no to her other work . . . “all the time”.
If it was necessary, I could’ve explored this with her, and dug a little deeper, and found out WHY she couldn’t say no to her clients. This could’ve unearthed a deeper belief and provided even richer material.
This whole thing sounds simple, and conceptually it is, but you need to know something: I’ve had the honor and privilege of being hired by many amazing people over the years to help them solve their problems—from all walks of life and from every possible profession, with every imaginable problem.
Guess what? In some way, this yes and no issue–or the larger issue of healthy boundaries–has been present for each and every one of them.
Did you get that?
Over a span of 30 years, this is a lot of people. Talented, smart, hard-working people.
Tripping over the same issue . . . amazing.
Human nature fascinates me.
People typically never realize it at first—it’s rarely the “problem” that someone calls to consult with me about. But it’s there, in some way.
Some have the opposite problem—they say NO too much. It’s a different version of the same YES/NO problem, with a different set of consequences. We’ll come back to this another time.
What about you? Is your YES getting in the way of your success? Is it keeping you from thriving and excelling as much as you could be?
Make your yes a thoughtful yes. Think it through. Don’t be stingy with your yes, but don’t be so liberal with it that you cause problems for yourself.
Yes?