Let your “yes” be “yes”, and your “no”, “no”.

Sounds easy, right?

Related to the idea of “busyness” is our inability to say “no” to people. When we can’t say “no”, we overcommit ourselves, then we struggle to juggle the various tasks we accepted, and we end up angry and/or drained. Why do we feel a constant need to say “yes” to people when we sometimes need to say “no”? One obvious answer is that gladly do things for the people we love. Trying to help and please our friends and family is an example of selfless action, and it’s how we show we care. However, when we say “yes” so often that we feel drained of energy, that we put our wants/needs on hold, that we let our list of tasks overwhelm our well-being, we run the risk of moving from selflessness to co-dependency. We fear rejection from those we love if we say “no” to them, and this tendency spills over into our work lives as well. We find ourselves constantly seeking approval, so we say “yes” when we need to set healthy limits for ourselves. Our friends and family who love us, want what’s best for us AND them. They understand that sometimes we have to say “no” so we can rest, recharge our energy, gain a little clarity, and focus on what’s important.

However, we all have those people in our lives who have a hard time taking “no” for an answer. They are people we love, our friends and family, or they can also be our bosses and co-workers. We run ourselves ragged trying to please these people because the consequences of telling them “no” are hard to deal with. We can read all the memes we want to, but those quotes don’t really reveal what transpires when we try to say “no” to someone who can’t tolerate hearing it. We say “yes” to these people time and time again because they somehow have the power to not accept our “no” answer to their requests. One thing to remember here is that how other people react is THEIR responsibility, and what we allow them to do is OUR responsibility.  When we say “no” to the people who don’t want to hear “no”, we can expect a wide range of behavior from them: guilt trips, calling in favors (which then reduces the favor to a trade-off), manipulation tactics, and outright anger. Understand that no one can upset us, hurt us, bully us, or shame us without our permission. People who can’t hear “no” are aggressive folks who will probably never really care about your needs when it comes to the choice between your needs or THEIR needs. The people who won’t accept “no” as an answer is trying to CONTROL you, for whatever reasons might lie within their personalities and life experiences. I’ll repeat it again: their reaction is NOT your responsibility.  

I recently had an experience with having a hard time saying “no” to a person. I am a people pleaser. I have a hard time saying “no” to most people. Deep down, I realize I do that because I desperately seek approval, and I don’t want to be viewed as “bad.” There is a huge personal cost to me because of my inability to say “no”, often taking the form of exhaustion, insomnia, and turning into anger/resentment. That is not healthy for me OR the person I can’t refuse. However, I am blessed with a number of friends who entirely accept that sometimes I have to refuse their requests because I’m tired, I have prior obligations, or I simply forgot and overcommitted myself - I left myself fall victim to “busyness”. In the recent experience, I refused a request from someone, and the refusal resulted in the other person resulted in the person refusing to believe I am his/her friend, and proceeded into a short rant about how there are no true friends in this world… Folks, I want you to recognize this response as a blatant attempt to make me feel guilty about saying “no”, and that’s the only reason I use it as an example. Most of the time, our difficulty saying “no” to others is because of their response, and their tactics to control/manipulate us into doing what they want. It’s ok to say “no”, and to mean it. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It means that you have boundaries and you expect your friends/family/co-workers to respect those boundaries. No more, no less. If we can remember that, we are much closer to letting our yes be yes, and letting our no be no (Matt. 5:37). Only we can control our responses to others. When we give in to others’ attempt to control us, we can no longer truly let our yes, be yes, or our no be no.  

More about control tomorrow… Have a blessed day, and don’t forget to share a smile with someone!