I long while ago I wrote a post on Saying No to things that aren’t really a great fit for you. It seems that I have a continued need to explore this, as I have been thinking a lot about it all week long and written innumerable pages of notes on it. Here are some more.
I know that there are people endowed with immense powers of clarity in this area. They know what they want, they know what they don’t want, and they never get confused on the difference. In other words, they don’t let themselves say YES to something that they don’t truly feel YES about. I admire these people!
Someday I hope to be one of them 🙂 To say YES when I mean YES, but not otherwise. Wow, what a concept. It seems so simple. Yet how is it that some of us suck at it so much? I guess I can only speak for myself. How is it that I have sucked at this so much? Has my desire to please others gotten in the way of my decision-making skills? What mistaken idea has been causing me to say YES when I didn’t mean it? Why has being truthful been so frigging difficult at times?
On the good side, asking these sort of questions this has led to a lot of self-examination. I have learned a great deal about myself, and am using it to shape my life for the better. On the negative side, not having mastered this issue, I have become reticent about making decisions involving others. I have probably become more withdrawn or even stingy about giving of myself in certain situations because I didn’t trust myself to be honest and make good decisions
It’s a humbling thing to admit, but sometimes I have really sucked at saying the truth. All too often, the desire to please others has mixed with my own sense of pride, as I didn’t want to admit that I had made a mistake and change my mind once I realized this. Rather than “rocking the boat,” too often I suffered through commitments I made, preferring to wait them out instead of tackling the challenge of how to enable a graceful early exit. My own black-and-white sense of integrity has often caused me to tolerate situations that I didn’t enjoy (or even absolutely hated), merely because I had agreed to something before really understanding what I was agreeing to or knowing for sure that I wanted to pay the price of seeing it through
That’s where all this thinking comes in handy. I am on a roll with personal insight, and as I dig into the complex chambers of my mind, I am uncovering the truth. Usually, it is covered over by a fair amount of bullshit. I am learning to be okay with this! Rather than judging myself about it, I am excited that every insight helps me become happier and make choices that work for me
How about you? Are you good at saying Yes when you mean Yes? Saying No when you mean No? What, if any, have been your struggles in this department?