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Reader,

Last week, in a session with one of my executive coaching clients, I asked what he thought would be his biggest challenge going forward.

"Saying no," he said.

"I get so many requests to help or get involved with so many different things, things that I'm absolutely interested in doing, but I can't say yes to all of them."

That hit me right in my gut, because I feel that way all the time.

It's the curse of being a very capable achiever. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Saying yes to everything that feels interesting and or impactful is a recipe for burnout. When we try to do more than we naturally have capacity for, we end up stretched too thin and eventually become resentful of the things we initially wanted to do.

But the opposite is even harder. Saying "no" to things we are possibly capable of doing feels like defeat. Feels like an admission of not being able to handle all the things. The possible disappointment in the person asking us to do something is dwarfed by our disappointment in ourselves.

So what are we to do?

It's important to be clear about what matters to us in the decision.

It reminds me of a decision I made 5 years ago.

I had just helped to redesign the decision making curriculum in Stanford’s Designing Your Life course. With the changes I made, students were able to counter FOMO with the fortitude born of a decision matrix. Whenever my coaching clients brought big career decisions to our sessions, I lived for the moment their anxiety melted and confidence bloomed after we mapped their thoughts and feelings into visual frameworks. I was starting to lead workshops on decision making for groups and conferences.

People were eager to delve deeper. I kept getting questions like:

“What book do you recommend reading if I want to learn more?”
“My friend is facing a really tough decision. Is there a book I should get him?”

Although I had a whole shelf full of decision-making books, there wasn’t one book that quite captured what I was teaching. So people told me that I should write one.

I laughed that off as one of those nice things that people say.

Until one of my friends sent me a note.

“I was chatting with a friend of mine over coffee and she’s a business editor at a major publishing house. I mentioned the work you do and she said ‘Oh! The decision engineer you had on your podcast? That woman can write a book, do you know if she wants to?’”

Wow. Someone in the industry thought this was a good idea; it was no longer just people here and there who thought I should write a book. Like any good business person presented with concrete validation from the market, I got going. I began writing the proposal: identified the target market, did some competitive analysis, developed how I would position it, and collected the ideas I had successfully tested so far.

But even though I wanted to write a book, I wasn’t ready to. I was pregnant with my second child. There was no way I would have the time and energy to write and properly promote a book. It was a tough decision, but the right one. I put my half-done proposal on the shelf and had my baby.

Saying "no" to this book idea was hard, until I got clear about what really mattered.

I made what was important to me internally more important than the things coming at me externally.

I did the same exercise with my client. What was more important to him than saying yes to every request that crossed his desk?

Everything else was noise.

What decisions do you have coming up where it feels hard but necessary to say no? What is more important to you than saying yes?

Wishing you the conviction to focus on what matters most,

Michelle

p.s.
Last call to sign up for my Stanford Continuing Studies Course​