Saying Yes and No Appropriately
SUMMARY
Do you find yourself saying ‘yes’ to things all the time, and then you go away from that situation going, “why did I do that? Now, I'm in a more stressful situation than I was before. And I haven't got enough time to get stuff done that I'm already doing.” Or have you learnt to be on top of this and to treat yourself as your number one priority.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Master Coach Trainer and today, I want to continue our conversation around developing our Personal Power, that underpinning competency of emotional intelligence, by learning to say ‘yes and no’ appropriately.
The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you are totally clear on your priorities.
The second thing that you can do is to go through a simple exercise that says, “when I say yes to this, I'm saying no to that.”
The third thing is to slowdown the decision making process.
To help you out with that, I'm going to be running some events during the month that will help you as an individual.
If you are looking to develop your Emotional Intelligence through our Emotional intelligence Boot camp, or if you're someone who is a coach, a trainer or an educator, who wants to learn how to train and coach others in Social and Emotional intelligence, I'll be running events to help you to do just that.
Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week, when we continue this conversation around Social and Emotional Intelligence so that we can navigate our emotions in a healthy way and enjoy life way more, have lots more energy, and manage the responses to those things around us in a healthy and rewarding way.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you find yourself saying ‘yes’ to things all the time, and then you go away from that situation going, “why did I do that? Now, I'm in a more stressful situation than I was before. And I haven't got enough time to get stuff done that I'm already doing.” Or have you learnt to be on top of this and to treat yourself as your number one priority.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Master Coach Trainer and today, I want to continue our conversation around developing our Personal Power, that underpinning competency of emotional intelligence, by learning to say ‘yes and no’ appropriately.
People tell me all the time, “Grant, I have a problem saying ‘no’.”
And I'm quick to point out that that's not actually correct because every time that you say ‘yes’ to someone or to something out of obligation, then you're actually saying ‘no’ to yourself -- to something else that is a true priority of yours.
Now, over the last few weeks, we've looked at why this is the case. When we are working to please others to get their approval, when we're operating in that performance trap, we will say ‘yes’ subconsciously without even thinking; because we think that's what we need to do to get them to like us, to get them to accept us.
Have you ever said ‘yes’ to something, and as it's coming out of your mouth you're trying to get it back, but it's too late it's already gone?
So, what I want to do in this very quick video today, is to help you to know exactly what to do so that you say ‘yes’ to things that are best for you to say ‘yes’ to and ‘no’ to those things that you might be saying ‘yes’ to way too quickly, right now.
The first thing we need to do is know your true priorities.
As I said before, you don't have a problem saying ‘no’, you have a priority problem. What I mean by that is that you are putting everything else before your priorities, or you're putting priorities in a list and then you're not sticking to that.
You might have those boundaries that we looked at and we set last week and you're allowing your saying ‘yes or no’ to actually open the gate to those priorities as well.
So, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that you are totally clear on your priorities. So then you know exactly what it is that you are saying ‘yes’ to and more importantly, which of your priorities you might actually be saying ‘no’ to.
The second thing that you can do (I get my clients to do this all the time) is to go through a simple exercise that says, “when I say yes to this, I'm saying no to that.”
And being able to recognize by the things that you constantly are saying ‘yes or no’ to right now, whether or not any of those things are outside your priorities.
For example, when I say ‘yes’ to working many hours in my practice, outside what I've got in my calendar, I'm saying ‘no’ to my family time; to the things that are most important to me.
So, by going through that and by writing down a list of all the things that you say ‘yes’ to, you will find out exactly what is the consequence of saying ‘yes’ to that.
By doing this exercise and then considering the answers over the coming weeks and months, you will build up in your subconscious, a store of information that when you go to say ‘yes’ to something, you will think of those things that are your priorities, and it may help you to slow down.
And number three is exactly that. It's to slow down the decision making process.
As I said before, a lot of times we'll just go ‘yes or no’ to something, and then think that's not really what I want, and then we deal with the consequences.
So, what we need to do is make sure that we are in control of our emotional responses; that we're making sure that we are in a position to make a decision as to whether or not that is something that we should be saying ’yes’ to right now.
To do that, we need to go back, if we haven't already, and we need to develop that emotional self-awareness.
We need to be able to recognize when an emotion is coming up and our thoughts that are around that are steering us towards saying ‘yes or no’ inappropriately.
By coming out of the emotional brain and up into the logical brain, what we're able to do is then take that audit that we did, of those things that we were saying yes or no to, and apply them logically to that decision-making process.
What I love to do when people are asking me to do things, is I like to come back with a question. And that is a trigger stopper for me to be able to make sure that I'm answering it and it is the best decision for me and for the other person.
I might say, “that's interesting. It sounds like something that I could consider doing.”
“Can you give me some more information as to what that actually would entail.”
By doing that I've done two things: Firstly, I've interrupted the pattern of just saying ‘yes’, because I love to help. I'm a person who likes to serve. What it has also done is it asked a ‘what’ question.
So, I said what it actually entails. I'm seeking more information before I say ‘yes’.
So, there you have it three simple but powerful steps that you can take yourself through this week to help you to recognize, whether or not, something is within your priorities when you're saying ‘yes or no’ to it.
October is Emotional Intelligence awareness month. Even though it's a thing that we should be looking at all the time, I'm glad that we've actually got a month where we can focus in and go, “you know what, this is the month where I'm going to finally work in this area of my life.”
To help you out with that, I'm going to be running some events during the month that will help you as an individual.
If you are looking to develop your Emotional Intelligence through our Emotional Intelligence Boot Camp, or if you're someone who is a coach or a trainer or an educator, who wants to learn how to train and coach others in Social and Emotional intelligence, I'll be running events to help you to do just that.
Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week, when we continue this conversation around Social and Emotional Intelligence so that we can navigate our emotions in a healthy way and enjoy life way more, have lots more energy, and manage the responses to those things around us in a healthy and rewarding way.
I'll see you then.
