Stop Saying 'Yes' Too Much - Episode: 031
Do you take on too much? A lot of men do. It drains our energy and sucks our time.
This episode will help you to develop a filter so you have a clear grasp on when to say 'yes' and when to say 'no.' You'll get a roadmap that guides you to respectfully decline every opportunity that does not roll up to your priorities.
It's about making conscious decisions that align with your goals and personal growth. And when you say 'yes,' but really want to say 'no,' it's actually a selfish way to respond. Learn the difference between good selfish and bad selfish so you can make your best contribution in this life.
Speaker 1
This is the Durable Dad podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, what's up guys? Episode number 31, durable Dad podcast.
Speaker 1
What we're talking about is learning how to say no more often to things that aren't aligned with our priorities, because a lot of dudes, ladies too we say yes to things that aren't our priority. That's what we're talking about today saying yes to things that aren't our priority. When we do that, we're not being honest. We're not being honest with the people that we're saying yes to. We're not being honest with ourselves, because there's something inside of us that wants to say no, but we quiet it and we say yes. That task that we say yes to becomes a huge energy suck. It just feels heavy. I was talking to this one guy that his brother asked him to help him with some accounting issue. He said yes and right away he was pissed at his brother for asking him.
Speaker 1
People are going to ask us all the time. They have every right to ask us to do things. It's our responsibility to say no when we say yes to something we feel resentful about it, or we feel like it's a pain for us, or it's just another responsibility we got to own, that we said yes to it. People call this people pleasing. I don't love the phrase people pleasing. It sounds a little soft. This not being honest, going so far as to say lying is what we're actually doing when we say yes to things that we don't want to do. We all have things that we want to get done Big things, small things, that are important to us, and it's up to us to prioritize those things and carry them out. We're talking about times that we're thinking I should do this, I have to do this.
Speaker 1
Requests at work that come up that are fires, or someone wants us to hop on a call real quick, or can you pop into this meeting these are the things that we'll say yes to that we don't really need to be saying yes to. They're not real priorities. It's being a part of a new initiative or a new committee. At work, it could be dinner with friends. Some friends give you a call, ask you to come over for dinner on Saturday night. You had plans with your family to keep it chill around the house, but you feel this like oh, we should go have dinner at their house. You really don't want to, but you feel like you should. No, we were planning on having a chill family night. That was our priority. We need to learn to say no to those kinds of things.
Speaker 1
A good guardrail to have here when new options, new opportunities present themselves, people make requests. A guardrail to have before making a decision is why would we say yes to this? Why do we want to say yes? And it's usually something like we don't want to be a jerk, or we tell ourselves that we want to be helpful. And when we tell ourselves we want to be helpful, if we ask why do we want to be helpful? And we drill into that, we're usually looking for some type of external validation from the other person or from someone else thing oh, he's a good guy, oh, he's helping out, thanks so much. We want that, thank you, we want that praise. And this kind of goes back to the I want to be a good guy, the nice guy syndrome.
Speaker 1
I talked about an episode number twenty six, this seeking external validation covertly by doing things for people, wanting them to appreciate us. So Check why you would be saying yes. I said yes to being on this committee one time that I knew I did not want to be on. And when this person asked me to be on the committee, it was someone that, like someone I respected, I really wanted to help them out and In me was like you don't have time for this, you have a lot of other things that you have going on right now. And externally, I said yes because I wanted To help out. I wanted him to know that he, that I appreciated him and it. It sounds like a great motive. But when I said yes, like that committee became such a pain in my ass right, and it wasn't the committee's fault, it was me. I was telling myself I don't want to really do this. It felt heavy, it felt like an obligation.
Speaker 1
All the time when we would pop on zoom to have meetings about the efforts that we were doing, I would just, you know, internally be rolling my eyes, externally, engage talking all that, but then there would be action items to leave with and I have something to do and it would be the task that I would totally procrastinate on, kick myself, beat myself up for being on the committee and and that's I don't know in my experience, when I say yes to something that I really don't want to say yes to it, it becomes that heavy task and then that person that we wanted to help out, we start to like build up this resentment inside. It takes a lot of our energy and it takes us away from other things that we wanted to do. So All that to say it is okay to say no. Maybe we're trying to do new things in our life and if we're gonna try anything new to shift our behavior and change the way we're showing up or our health or our relationships, we're gonna have to learn to say no. And If we don't and the flip side if we try to do everything we we don't make much progress in any direction. When we say yes to something, we're saying no to something else. Right, that's a saying that's out there. I don't. It's probably not the first time you're hearing that if we say yes to something, we're saying no to something else. So Consider what's the cost of saying yes to this certain project and what we'll usually see is we're sacrificing some type of long term goal or project or success by saying yes to that task that's right in front of us.
Speaker 1
So sometimes saying no it can sound selfish. I don't want to be selfish. I want to help other people, but there's a there's a good kind of selfish and the bad selfish Is that lack of consideration for other people. It's bulldozing other people over without considering your actions and how they affect other people's emotions and time and all that kind of stuff. That's the bad selfishness. We don't think about other people, but Most of the guys that I'm working with if you're listening to the podcast and what we actually do is we over-consider what other people are thinking and feeling. We over-consider our impact on their emotions.
Speaker 1
So the good selfish is taking care of your needs and making sure that you're doing what has to happen for yourself so you can have the energy to do the work that you want to do in one of the roles that we play Taking care of ourselves. So we have the energy to be a dad, to be a husband, to be a leader at work, to be a leader in our community, to coach our kids' team. We're selfish. We take care of our needs so we can help the bigger team. If you think about this in athletics, if you're on a team, you've got to take the time to take care of yourself and to stay healthy and to eat right and to practice off the field and then show up and be your best self for the team. How would you add to the team if you're not 100% at game time? So you take care of yourself, so you can be the best person on your team in your life.
Speaker 1
So I'm going to give you three things to do around this saying yes to the right things, getting rid of the things that are not essential. One is to get clear on your daily priorities. So every day before I kick off my day, I wake up doing a little morning routine get the girls out, meditate, sit down and I write down three priorities that I have for the day. So these three things are reasonable, I can totally get them done and I know that when these are done, it'll be a productive day. I'll feel proud of myself if I get these three things done, and the reason I do that is because throughout the day, other requests are going to come in, other emails are going to come in, people are going to be text messaging me about stuff.
Speaker 1
People are going to ask can they switch their session or can I meet with you this time instead of that time? And I have my priorities, what's important to me and the first filter there is Any request that comes, is it going to conflict with or is it going to prevent me from finishing these priorities? And that's the first filter. And if the answer is yes, it's probably going to be a pretty hard no for me and you got to stick with this. And it might sound a little harsh, it might sound crude, but we prioritize other people's stuff and other people's time and the first thing we need to do is understand our priorities and this goes for the small day to day picture and also the big picture. And then the second thing to do is kind of tied in with number one. The second thing is get really good at saying no, and this takes courage.
Speaker 1
So, working with one dude that throughout his career he's done a lot of peer reviews, reviews of paper, reviews of books, and now he's at this point where he really doesn't have the time to focus on those like he could make the time, but those aren't going to impact his work in the greater good and his department that he runs, it's not gonna. It's gonna take away from the positive impact he can make on his responsibilities when he reviews these things. So he wants to start saying no to any of these paper reviews or book reviews that come his way, and you know a lot of us get these kinds of requests. Hey, can you take a look at this proposal real quick before I send it out? Can you take a look at this email before I send it out? And People say, real quick, it'll only take a couple minutes. But you're you only have so much time and it's really precious and we gotta protect it. So this client decided that these are one of the things he's just gonna start saying no to and hitting send on that email.
Identifying Purpose and Creating Legacy
Speaker 1
The first time might feel uncomfortable and that's like the courage to say no. And if you want to throw in some referrals to other people or point them in the direction of different resources to help them review, you can totally do that to soften it up a little bit. If you don't want to, if you want to make sure you don't piss people off, but you don't have to explain yourself in my experience when I send these quick responses that I have other priorities in my band with his low right now. People get it and they actually there's respect there, and one of the big teachers that I've learned a lot of this stuff from One, greg McEwen, who I'm reading now, but also Tim Ferriss. He has a lot of different processes to Politely or softly say no to people, and that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 1
We're saying no to things that aren't important to us, to things that we don't want to prioritize. And you can also think of it as a negotiation, right. If you don't want to say a straight up no, negotiate on your terms when the timetables work for you, the work that you're actually willing to do. Hey, you want me to show up to this meeting, can you send me an agenda first? Or If you want me to take a look at this proposal, can you have this person look at, look it over first. I can't get it to you by tomorrow, but I can get it to you next week.
Speaker 1
At this time we can negotiate. We don't have to do just a straight up no, right? So that's the second thing. Number one was get clear on our priorities. Number two is get good at saying no. And then the third is understanding the legacy you want to leave.
Speaker 1
So here we're zooming out, we're zooming out way out, and, and I believe that we all are here for a purpose. So we're looking at from when we were born to when we're gonna die, and we have a purpose, and in Buddhism, this is called your Dharma Not karma, but Dharma, and it's the work that you're meant to do. It's being a dad, it's being a man that fulfills his contribution to the greater good, how he shows up in everyday life. And In order to identify what that purpose is, we gotta pull ourselves out of the daily grind, Remove the veil of busy work and short-term wins being the priority and something that we have to really focus on, and it's not easy to keep that in mind. What it takes is stepping back and giving yourself time to think, and that's really what this Get Organized course is going to be all about.
Speaker 1
It's about stopping and considering the decisions that we're making, not just moving through the motions and saying no to the stuff that drags us down, the stuff that weighs on us, and considering when I go, how do I wanna be remembered and what choices do I make today that are gonna start creating that legacy now? So that's the third thing that we wanna do Understanding the legacy you wanna leave. All right, so that's what I got. Want us to stop people pleasing, stop lying, start being honest with yourself, with other people.
Speaker 1
Prioritize, get the courage to say no and keep the long-term purpose in mind when we're making decisions today, on a daily basis. All right, guys, have a good week, peace out, catch you next week. Thank you, you, you, you, you, you. And when someone comes in and says, hey, this is my priority, will you put your priorities aside and do my priority for me when we say yes to that, that's. There's like a twinge of resentment there, and not all the time. I don't want to, I want to. I want to caveat this with. Sometimes it's appropriate to say yes and there's filters we can run stuff through.
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