Becoming a NO woman

When you say "YES" to others, make sure you're not saying "NO" to yourself.

GAHH!!!!  Sometimes you have to continue to get hit over the head with a sledge hammer (repeatedly?) to learn an important life lesson.  Saying NO is definitely one of those sledge hammer lessons for me. I often find myself saying yes to doing things for one of two reasons: my ultimate desire to live life to its fullest or guilt around disappointing another.

I have always had a strong drive to live a full life/find and fulfill my purpose, so I strive to not limit  myself to new experiences.  Unfortunately I don't always account for the amount of time saying YES really requires.  This often leads to me realizing too late that I have way too much on my plate and that those extra YESes robbed me of the joy I thought my YES would bring because I was stressed out trying to do everything?!?  <headthump>

My other driver to YES is that I am intrinsically a people pleaser.  I would do darn near anything for someone I consider a friend and when I have to say NO, I really have to battle my inner sense of guilt and the feeling that I've disappointed them somehow.  I recognize that I do not OWE anyone else MY time.  I have gotten better with this over the past year, but its definitely an uphill road for me.

In light of these obvious drivers of my YESes, I've come up with a triage method to ensure I'm saying YES to the right things.  Here are the questions I now ask myself when opportunities come knocking and I have to decide how to spend my time:

1) Do I love it? (It might be hard but its gratifying and the effort expended is worth the return)
2) Does it feed me? (It fills my soul, time flies by and I don't even realize it)
3) Do I grow from it in ways I need to in order to make forward progress on my path (gaining experience, knowledge, betterment)

Next step?  Documenting my successful NOs!  I plan to track in my journal each successful NO so that I can train myself that its okay to say it and that I am actually making progress in doing so!