Why you can’t say no at work and four ways to change  

Whether you can’t say no at work because you fear confrontation or disappointing people or feel guilty and selfish because you are not being a team player, you can learn to understand what drives your choices and start giving yourself permission to say no.

Let’s explore three primary reasons you find yourself always saying yes and then dive into three ways you can change your behavior.

WHY you do this

You can’t say no at work because you adhere to a set of unwritten rules that guide your life, sometimes even unconsciously.

When these rules correspond with your values and strengths, they serve your sense of self.

When these rules are outdated – childhood beliefs you blindly follow – they block your authenticity.

Unconsciously following this rule book creates a conflict between what you’ve been trained to do and what you actually need to feel a sense of empowered agency.

These codes are so familiar though that you don’t even stop to reflect before you bow to the shoulds that accompany your every decision.

The more you cave to the musts in your head suppressing your needs and desires, the bigger that conflict becomes.

There are three primary reasons you do what you should, rather than what you want:

1. Self-esteem: you believe you don’t deserve to have needs and wants that conflict with what’s expected of you. You must constantly prove you are good enough at work.
2. Fears: you think you won’t be able to bear the confrontation that you believe will be required; and you believe that if you say no, you will lose your place, your tribe. In short, you won’t belong. You could get fired.

3. Emotions: you can’t bear the painful feelings. When you even think about saying no, you are flooded with guilt, a very disagreeable emotion, which you try to escape by immediately saying yes, whatever the request. What would your team think?

Your most frequent response to this conflict of should versus need/want is to protect the reality you know.

Your force yourself to adhere to the rules. And the more you do that, the harder it is to see your way out of the internal conflict this creates.

You get so good at keeping yourself in line, you start believing that this is just the way it is. Concepts like fate and phrases like “it is what it is” become commonplace.

But rather than resolving the conflict, it simply exacerbates the accompanying internal drama.

So, you take measures to prevent the irritation, resentment, and frustration from spilling out.

What is a common way to keep someone in line? Especially when they don’t really want to stay in line?

You punish yourself. And you are extremely clever about it because the inner critic fights with circular logic, which you can’t argue your way out of.

And any attempt to argue is met with a tone of outrage and contempt that you would dare to step outside the framework you live by.

The inner critic implies that when you have the audacity to ask for what you need or want, you are unreasonable, selfish, asking for or presuming too much. So, you listen. And you stay safe by playing small. You say YES.

 

HOW you can change

 

There are three things you can do to change your perspective which gives you permission to say no in a way that honors your needs and is lovingly delivered.

1. Become aware of, and if needed, rewrite the rules you are using to guide your life.

2. Identify and face the fears you have related to saying no. Validate them and then challenge & reframe them.

3. Feel the emotions – don’t shy away from pain. Recognize that you already are feeling the pain. Look behind the pain to see the message it’s hiding.

4. Learn to set and hold healthy boundaries that protect you, but let you connect with others.

 

Deep Dive

1. Self-esteem: your rules determine your worth

Firstly, let’s dig into the rules you abide by. What are yours?

What rules guide your life that you unconsciously accept as capital T truth, but which, if you examined them a bit closer, might be revealed to be a big misshapen bundle of societal expectations, roles that were modeled in your childhood?

Grab a pen and a piece of paper.

Think about the last time you said yes and resented or regretted it. Think about an area of your life where there is conflict between what you feel is your duty and what you really want.

Use that to write down five to ten rules that guide your decision making in that situation. Once you’ve written them, reflect on whether they are true for you in the current iteration of your identity.

Where they are not true, write a rule that reflects who you want to be and how you want to live now.

 

2. Your Fears: challenge and reframe the boogiemen in your head. Then visualize your success.

When fears come into play there are a couple of ways to tackle them, but everything starts with acknowledging what is.

You must acknowledge the internal conflict, the pain, and dissatisfaction to give voice to it.

After acknowledging your fears, validate them. You aren’t crazy – you just have a need that isn’t being met. Everyone has needs. It’s normal.

Then challenge your fear. Try to identify concrete evidence that your fear is true.

Believe your colleagues are going to think you are selfish if you refuse to take on another project when you already feel overwhelmed? Did someone actually say that to you or is it the sly voice in your head?

If your proof is an opinion or an interpretation, you have no concrete evidence.

With no solid evidence, it’s just a boogieman. A monster in your head that you can paint in a different light.

Reframe your fear to help you see it in a different, more objective, perspective.  

Maybe refusing the project actually opens the door to a wider conversation about workload in general. Perhaps your refusal is an example for others who also feel overwhelmed, but are afraid to say no.

There’s a 50% chance they’ll think you are selfish and a 50% chance you’ll be a role model. Choose to believe the one that helps you live the way you want.

To integrate that belief in your daily life, practice regularly visualizing your success. 

When you are upset about a situation, how often, in the conversations you play in your head, do you feel a sense of success?

You never picture a positive outcome where you explain, they understand and agree, and you experience a desired outcome.

So, you fool yourself into thinking you are able to mind read. You believe you are able to predict what the other person is going to say or do.

Believing this traps you into a limited range of scenarios, of which you have less than a 50% chance of being right.

They’ve measured this, so if you don’t believe me, watch the TED Talk by Kang Lee looking at your ability to tell if your child is lying.

Because you believe you know what the other person is thinking and how they will respond, and their reactions are never positive in your mind, it’s no wonder you feel defensive and avoid confrontation.

Change this pattern by finding the courage to confront your fears and limiting beliefs, not the person or circumstances.

Do a visioning exercise in which you envision the outcome you want and make it as real as possible.

You make the negative outcomes very real to yourself, right. That sense of injustice makes your nostrils flare, your chest gets tight.

What’s cool is that you can take that ability and inverse it so that you are living in the positive outcome.

The more real and more frequently you choose to live in this reality, the easier it will be for you to say no in a calm, respectful way that honors the other person as well as yourself.

 

3. Your emotions are messages. Use them to better understand what you need.

Let’s move on to the third part of learning to say no with love. This part involves learning to sit with your emotional response. How often do you avoid uncomfortable feelings?

Evolutionarily, you are built to avoid pain, so biologically this makes sense. Pain signals danger, so you jerk back from the hot stove to protect yourself.

So, at first step three will feel counter-intuitive.

One thing that might make this a little easier is recognizing that you are already coping with the pain and discomfort, and these feelings are directing your behavior even if it translates to an absence of action.

Walking around all day with 50% or more of your energy tied up in arguments in your head does not actually serve you.

Instead, use that energy to look directly at and feel the discomfort that you are already feeling.

Feeling the discomfort opens the door to learning. Deconstructing and rewiring your stories and beliefs opens the door to change.

In this case, it opens a door through which you can learn to say no from a value-based place.

4. Boundaries, the gate keepers to your integrity and generosity

Brené Brown, a shame researcher and storyteller out of the University of Houston in Texas, shared that in her research she hypothesized that the most generous giving people in the world – the Mother Teresa’s and Dalai Lama’s of the world – were able to continually give of themselves and say yes to the needs of others because they were selfless.

Researching this, she interviewed hundreds of world leaders of that caliber. She was shocked by what the data from the study revealed.

World leaders were able to be generous and giving because they were able to say no.

They all had rock solid boundaries that ensured that they were able to safeguard the energy and passion that they poured into their work. She found they said no like it was their business.

Following that discovery, she coined a term BIG, which means learning to set Boundaries that allow you to show up in your Integrity with what works for you in a way that enables you to continue being Generous to others.

If you’d like to learn to set boundaries or process your emotions, schedule a free discovery call with me to see what that looks like.

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With gratitude to Sydney-based artist Angie Goto for her work “No Boundaries.” Find this and more here: https://arttoart.com.au/artists/angie-goto