How To Say No by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-23T23:21:37+00:00

One Final Tactic: Buy Yourself Time

You’ve seen how to mentally prepare yourself so you’re ready to respond to requests with calm composure.

You’ve (hopefully) started to adjust your beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors one no at a time.

And you’ve seen that flexing your no muscle often comes down to how you say things rather than just what you say.

As you practice all this, realize that it will take time for you to feel more comfortable putting your foot down. It might be that people are a little surprised or uncomfortable with your new attitude, especially if they quite enjoyed you being a doormat! But one tactic we can always use as we strengthen our skills is to buy time. Another way of looking at it is to make efforts to be less reactive in general.

People-pleasers are extra sensitive to the demands of a twenty-four-seven, always-on culture that trains you to quickly and constantly respond, react, comply. Saying “I’ll get back to you” is a clever trick when you’re overwhelmed in the moment, but in the long term, it’s worth cultivating a deeper resilience and guarding against reactivity.

Being reactive means that your feelings and behaviors are at the mercy of external events, rather than being driven from within, from your own desires and free will. Each of us is connected to our environment and to others, but we have a problem with reactivity if our experience depends solely on what others do and say. If you’re reactive, everything is someone else’s fault, and you are constantly seeking permission or approval, or adapting your mood to match other people, events, or external situations.

You are like a balloon being blown around in strong winds. Your boss yells and you instantly feel despairing. Your child throws a tantrum and you drop everything and rush to sort it out. You get an email notification and you immediately look at your phone and start responding to it, completely forgetting what you were doing before. And if the email is bad news, your mood is instantly bad, even though you were happy a moment before.

You are merely reacting to life rather than deliberately and consciously choosing how you want to move through it. You are in one hundred percent knee-jerk reaction, all fight-or-flight mode, saying and acting before you think about what you’re doing and why. Other people and events control you, and you never stop to ask how you would like to control them. A related idea is your locus of control, or where you see the power and control of your life coming from. Does your life move along because of external forces, or is it driven by you?

Being proactive doesn’t mean everything magically goes your way, it just means you are there, conscious, and choosing how you will respond to life. How can we cultivate this presence of mind? Well, mindfulness is one obvious path. When we pause to become aware of ourselves in the moment, we put distance between ourselves and events as they emerge, and in that gap, we can put our own will, intention, and desire.

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