Being everything to everyone isn’t possible. Yet most of us try to do just that. Answering calls and emails seemingly 24 hours a day. Taking on more projects when your plate is more than full. Lending a helpful hand (or ear) when what you really need is some sleep. Speaking for myself, I know that I struggle quite a bit with saying no to people, often to my detriment.
So I ask this week: How do you say “no”? Can you?
I rarely say no. A legitimate reason to say no is because you don’t want to do something (which can be for ethical reasons, business reasons, personal, etc.) or because you can’t (not competent to do the task, overextended, etc). I enjoy helping others and rarely feel overextended. I consider it a testament to those around me that I am never asked to do something inethical, or for which I am not competent.
I find it the hardest to say no to a good customer that is asking for a product feature that may benefit them but weaken the product for the rest of the target market. Usually being polite and honest works best for me.
“No” and “Yes” have to be the most empowering words in the English language. Yet, we have a hard time mastering them because we feel obligations, pressures, a lack of confidence, etc. There’s a great framework for empowering yourself to say “no” at http://getsimplifized.com/the-power-of-saying-no Thanks, Untemplater, for this and all your posts. I look forward to every one that shows up in my Google Reader!
You just say no!
Be firm, but polite.
One strategy is to not give in in the first place. Once you do one ‘favor’, I’ve noticed that clients expect additional ‘favors’; answer that phone at 9pm, to get that task done extra fast, etc…
Another major annoyance of mine is people asking for help on issues that are outside of my stated services. I used to be willing to help, but it does drain the amount of time I have to work on real stuff. I now try to refer these inquiries to service providers as much as possible. I am also planning on incorporating some tasks into into a new pricing and services sheet, but charging twice or triple my standard rates for tasks that are outside of my services (maybe at that price it will be worth it).
I find that it helps for me to see most of my decisions like contracts. Too often we agree up front with a task, at face value, but then the underlying “fine print” comes back to bite us in the ass because we don’t think of all that stuff that comes along with ( the baggage). I actually wrote a post about this a while ago.
When we say yes to something or someone, we also say no to ourselves or something else. It helps me to ask myself, before I say yes, what am I saying no to.
Depends on the occasion. For emails and phone calls, it’s a matter of finding the sweet spot between batch responding scarcely enough that people would not get upset. In terms of freelancing, there is a video that may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiZ1WeykfBk
Hope it’s helpful.
My default approach is not to give an answer in the moment. “I’d like to think about it”, or similar, gives me the space to think and then say no. In saying no I will try to offer a helpful solution that enables the asker to move somewhere else
One thing that I’ve found helps me is to not put myself in extra situations where I’ll be asked to do things. For example, I know that if I go to certain club meetings, I’ll be asked to head up something. Since I don’t really get anything out of the meetings, I’ve stopped going. Some free food isn’t worth having to tell people no all the time, especially since I get the weekly updates in my email. It’s much more efficient than having to actually go.