11 min read · 2,098 words
The Value of Saying No
In my natural state, I’m a people pleaser. I want people to like me, I want to live a calm and peaceful life, I want to avoid all drama like the plague.
I avoid conflict, I sugarcoat, I turn on my headphones, and I try to just… exist.
It’s really annoying that I’ll probably have CoStar tell me all of this too, because I want it to not be true. I want to be the truth telling, fire breathing, rageaholic that just allows situations to be shitty. But it’s not my natural state.
So when I went to work at mFoundry, a small start up building mobile applications in the VERY early days of mobile applications, and started being in the consulting/professional services world… I thought that I could ride on my natural state of being, just working to be a people pleaser in a different context. Hell, it worked at my previous gig doing technology training for financial advisors, and it got me through the interview process, it’s gotta work!
But then, on my very first client call, half way through my boss put the speakerphone on mute and said “I gotta run to this other meeting, cover the rest of it for me!” and then left to go do the other meeting… leaving me there on the phone with our client. And of course, the client immediately recognized that I was alone and took advantage of the opportunity to say, “Scott, I know you’ve been working on OTA (over the air, an acronym I didn’t know at the time lol) delivery of iPhone apps, and the goal was to have it ready next week, are we on track?”
Pause. Well, I think to myself, I’m sure that if we’ve been tracking it, and haven’t told him it’s off track that it’s probably coming… “Uh, yea, I’m pretty sure it’s still on track!” Gulp. ’
Obviously we didn’t have a solution ready nor did we within the next few weeks or even months. This was back in the early days, before anything like TestFlight even was a thought process. We did eventually deliver the OTA solution, but by the time we did it was met with a guffaw by the client because we had already promised it so many times and so much never amounting to any sort of deliverable.
My natural inclination as a people pleaser was just to get to the positive answer right then, give us all a nice hit of dopamine then move on with our days.
But the short term feeling of victory was quickly eclipsed by the feeling of dread realizing that I said “Yes” when the real answer was “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about”.
And so I pivoted. The next time anyone asked me if something was ready I just would quickly say “no” then go and ask the people doing the work how things were going. That way if I said no, but everything was on track, I could come back and say, “oh, I was totally wrong, we had hit a roadblock but the team hurdled it and did amazing work and now we’re on track”, or if things were going poorly… well I had already said it was so now it was a “how do we get back on track” conversation and that was expected by everyone.
It got so ingrained in me, that we did an onsite with the client and they would ask me “can we do xyz” and I would say no to their face while typing into our chat with the team “could you just mock that up quickly then we’ll show it when you’re ready”. I would say no then 10 minutes later I would say “oh the guys IN THE ROOM WITH US just pinged me to say they already did it and can show you”.
Eventually, some of those people who were clients became colleagues, and every time they saw me the first thing they’d ask is, “who’re you saying no to today Scott”.
God the people pleasing runs deep. Even in that story I’m trying to make myself sound so great, but let’s be real… I got so entrenched in saying no that I was just being a dick.
But I was being a dick in a way that was specifically tailored to the business I was in and the company we were working with. It wasn’t a thing you could take everywhere. The definitive no worked with this client, because they were used to authoritarian style leadership, so the no didn’t need an explanation. It didn’t need a value statement behind it. No was enough.
Shockingly, that’s not how most of the world works!
So moving on from that client, to a more introspective and collaborative client that wanted dialogue… my “no’s” came across as me just… not listening to them. Which is fair!
Another pivot was needed. I knew that the right thing was to create space to identify the right answer, and the “no’s” had been giving me that space. In other words, I’d given myself a buffer between the client request and the response we gave.
And the lesson wasn’t (even though at the time, I sure thought it was lol) that saying “no” was valuable. The lesson was that saying “no” gave me time to be thoughtful.
I realized (much later than I should have) that my “no” was really just a placeholder for “I don’t know”.
But it seemed wrong in a work context to say “I don’t know”. Especially if I was the person who was supposed to know! I felt like saying I don’t know was a weakness. It was an admission of failure. It was an admission that I didn’t know what I was doing. It was validation of all the impostor syndrome nonsense that was being peddled inside my stupid head.
But there was more there. I wasn’t just saying “no” INSTEAD OF “I don’t know”. I was saying I don’t know for sure. It was always a part of it. But I was also saying “I need to figure out if this is worth my time”. Which was half way to actually meaning “no”.
One of the weird parts of being a person is that there’s always more to do. Right now, I could be doing the dishes I left in the kitchen. Or doing a workout. Or working on an internal project that we really need to do. Or taking the dog on a walk. Or doing laundry. Or, or, or.
The list goes on forever.
So part of my saying no, was giving myself the space to say that the thing that was being asked of me wasn’t worth my time. And I don’t mean that in a nasty or money grubbing kinda way.
It’s more that there’s other things that I need to focus on, and if I focus on your thing, I can’t also focus on my things.
I was learning the lesson that you have to protect your time, because it’s the most valuable resource you have. And that’s a super cheesy thing to say, but that’s because it’s the truth. If you say yes to everything you’re going to inevitably let people down. Whether it’s external people because you say yes to too much and you as a human being can’t reasonably do everything that people ask you to do, or it’s yourself, for doing things that don’t matter to you over things that do!
Often, we default to focusing on letting others down, because those feelings of regret and shame are immediate. If someone asks me to water their plants while they’re away and I say “sure” but I don’t have time that day… I’m going to feel bad the second they ask how their plants are doing. But if I go and do it instead of picking up dinner to take a thing off my wife’s plate, I’m not going to feel bad in the moment, because it wasn’t something she was expecting. I’m going to feel bad later, when I realize that I could have done something that meant more to me, instead of something that didn’t.
The more important thing isn’t whether you’re saying yes or no, but really whether you’re living your values when you’re doing it.
I often say yes to things, realize that I’m never going to do them, then feel guilty. Not because I’m not going to do the thing. I don’t care about the thing. I care about my own integrity. I want to be seen as a person who does what they say. So if I don’t, I am going to feel bad about the way I performed my values.
Similarly saying “no” in place of “I don’t know” or “I don’t know if I have time for that” isn’t living my values. Because I value honesty and integrity, and just saying no is a violation of that as well. It’s not honest, it’s a crutch. It’s the same crutch that makes me say yes, or sugar coat things.
And I’m not saying “I now have solved this, and I have unlocked the secret door to always living my values” because… that’d be bullshit. I constantly fail still.
But there’s value in the failure. The value is, that it’s giving you an opportunity to still live those values even if you didn’t do it up front.
I miss deadlines. I miss phone calls. Sometimes I do it on purpose even. Knowing I have other things I need to attend to, or knowing that the call will get me sucked into a conversation I’m not ready to have. And sometimes I join calls I don’t need to be on, just because it’ll make me feel busier.
In other words, I’m like everyone else.
So why try and hide it? Why pretend we’re these robots who don’t think and feel but rather are just worker bees, worried so much about the hive that we’ll sacrifice ourselves as needed? It’s not real.
My solution? It’s not to stop saying no (I’ll never stop) - but rather it’s to start saying the truth, even when the truth is shitty. “You said this last month, but now you’re saying the opposite, why?” — well, last month, I made these assumptions, and the more I thought about them, those assumptions were bullshit, and were there to make the numbers look good rather than to be an honest telling of what the result would be.
Shitty conversation to have… but it allows you to actually solve a problem!
If you just said “it’ll be fine” until it wasn’t that wouldn’t work. If you say “well I was right but” then you look like you’re just making up excuses. So tell the truth. If you don’t know the answer, don’t make something up, say “I don’t know.”
So what, who cares?
Sometimes, we get wrapped around the axel of saying the right things or doing the right things or being the right person for the right job… and society reinforces that. We have a limited pool of jobs, with an ever expanding society of people who need jobs, jobs are paying less relative to costs making it so that they’re that much more crucial for everyday lives to continue, we’re debating paying for fucking food stamps not thinking that the consequences of not paying are people starving to death… I mean it’s hard to just be yourself anywhere these days without worrying about reprisal in some way shape or form.
So my telling you “be your authentic self at work” isn’t exactly helpful.
What I will tell you that I’ve learned is, if you’re too helpful, you’re hurting yourself. If you’re too negative you’re hurting yourself. If you’re doing things blindly without thinking about the next step you’re hurting yourself.
And the companies don’t care if you’re being helped or hurt unless it’s affecting the bottom line. So it’s your responsibility to care about yourself. It’s your responsibility to take the breath and say internally “what do I really think” and then interrogate if you’re able to say it at work.
And if your answer is no, then you need to evaluate “do I have other opportunities to explore” and if you do, you should start exploring them.
There’s only one person ultimately responsible for you — you. And you have to take care of that person, because they’re important and necessary.
And everything else is bullshit to manage.