#107: Do You Say No Enough?

Welcome to the Mindset for Life podcast. This is Bethanie, your coach from Dr. B coach.com. Coaching with power, purpose and practical tools to help you show up with confidence.

Welcome to the podcast. So excited to have you with us. Today we're going to talk about saying no, in fact, the question today is, do you say no enough? Do you need to say no more often? Do you feel like your time is sucked away and you have no control over your opportunities or your time? If that's you, it's definitely time to think about saying no much more often.

There was an episode some time ago about you saying no too much. And that episode was about saying no to yourself, saying no to the things that you care most about saying no to your priorities. But today's episode number 107, we're talking about saying no much more often. So if you don't say no to other people, you are in fact saying no to yourself.

And you might be saying yes to things that you really want to do. These are great opportunities, great things that you want to go participate in people you want to be with. But in the end, it's not really what you want long term. So you get caught up in this whole time suck.

There's no time left, you're exhausted, you're overcommitted, you're overwhelmed. And you're wondering where to draw the line, how you can really stop the madness. And now it's time to start saying, No.

Today we're going to talk about this, gonna give you a couple of tips to help you say no to the things that you want to say no to give you a little courage on that. And we might as well dive right in.
Our time and commitments change as we age.
I just want to give you a little bit of background about myself as a person. I grew up with many, many options and opportunities. I was very blessed, very fortunate in my young life. I was in music, I learned piano from third grade onward. And I was in band, I got to play the trumpet, the flute, the tenor saxophone, and a bunch of other instruments too, when I was still in public school, so I had a lot of opportunities. As a result, I wrote music. So I composed music when I was a young person. And when I was a senior in high school, I wrote a musical. This musical had a lot of songs and a lot of speaking parts. And I wrote all the songs. And I recruited all my friends to be in the musical. Lots of people at my church came and made a nice, big audience. And I played the piano for all of those songs.

So I accompanied all of those songs too. I was pretty involved. I just did a lot of stuff. And I was also a science kid. So I took chemistry and physics and all the things that I loved. Early in high school, I took biology, in junior high, and there's just a lot that I was doing. I was not into sports, I was not a sports person. And that probably would have really made my time crazy and out of control. Because as you know, music activities take a lot. But I can speak from a place of knowing when I say it's easy to sign on for the next thing and the next thing until pretty soon, you want to do everything. You just want to do it all.

And when you're in that space, you don't know what you should choose and what you shouldn't. You're just going to say yes to all those activities. And in my young life, I felt that was okay, because there were very few actual responsibilities. But as an adult, that's dangerous.

We can't say yes to every single thing. If we take on every work project, if we take on every presentation opportunity, if we take on every chance for advancement or something new and special, we're going to be exhausted.

The other side of that coin is that if we say yes to everything, no one else gets a chance; no one gets an opportunity. No one gets to test themselves or shine or grow or contribute. So there's that too. And that's really important to be thinking about when we're choosing to say no. If we give someone else the opportunity in an area that we really need to get ...