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How to Say “No”: Politely but Firmly Take Back Control of Your Time and Your Life
was written for those try to please everybody and usually come pretty close, failing only to please themselves.
You are entirely and solely responsible for your own happiness. To be sure, this does not mean that you don’t have responsibilities, especially if you’re a parent, or that you should never do anything for a boss, spouse, child, friend, etc. if it is not your first choice of activity or decision. It does, however, mean that your time and life should not be entirely consumed by the expectations of others.
Few things are as damaging to a relationship that one of the party’s always saying, “Yes” even when they want to say “No”.
This is especially true in marriage, in which people often agree to anything their spouse wants just to keep peace. This may be effective over the short-term, but over the long-term it inevitably brings resentment. This practice alone has ruined countless relationships, as the person always saying, “Yes” grows to resent the other person for having such expectations, which often reach the level of demands over time, while the person always hearing “Yes” may either resent a “No” when it finally comes or wonder why the other person didn’t say “No” years earlier.
There are right ways and wrong ways to say “no”, as well as good reasons and bad reasons for doing so.
Often people who decide that they want to take control of their lives after saying “Yes” for so many years immediately begin to say “no” to everything and everyone. This defeats the purpose of saying “no” because it often become detrimental to the person’s life and can ruin friendships, relationships, and careers. This book examines the good and bad reasons for doing so, as well as the best ways to say “no” in different situations.
This book obviously can’t answer all of your questions, but it can help you to make sure that you’re asking the right ones of yourself. Obviously no book of this nature can ever account for all of the dynamics of each individual relationship of each reader. This book provides a good overview, though, of assessing the situations in which you would consider saying “no” and will help you to determine how and when to say “no”.
Don’t forget to say “no” to yourself sometimes. While most of this book deals with saying “no” to other people, it would be incomplete it didn’t address saying “no” to yourself sometimes when it will help you to achieve longer-term and more meaningful happiness. This book has a chapter on that as well.
