No Is A Full Sentence
It’s taken me nearly 4 decades to understand something that toddlers have an innate ability to demonstrate so well.
Saying No.
If a young child doesn’t want to do something, they simply say No. At their young age, they’re aware that No is a full sentence. So, if we were all proficient in saying no early on in childhood, why do we have such a hard time saying it now? Especially to someone else without carrying guilt about disappointing them.
I don’t know about you, but for me as a kid my parents taught me that saying no, wouldn’t be allowed.
If I said No, that meant I felt some type of way about something. With an authoritarian parenting style, it means do as I say, not as I do and checking in with how I felt was not going to happen. Falling in line quickly, I learned that saying No was not an option for me.
Throughout the years, No became harder and harder to say. Not just with my parents, but with people around me. I didn’t want to get in trouble if I said no to my mother or father, and I really didn’t want to disappoint friends and teachers by saying no to them either.
This led to me feeling like my voice didn’t matter and everyone else must know better than I did about myself.
No one ever told me I had the choice to say no.
Advocating for myself wasn’t really a thing for 36 years of my life and it wasn’t up until the last year or so that I learned how.
Truth be told, I’m finally finding comfort in saying No. I had to start by getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Yes, it’s absolutely going to feel awful the first several times you start to say no to someone. My first instinct was always to take on their discomfort and disappointment as my fault. I thought I was causing this pain by saying no to their request and it made me feel awful, so I deserved to carry it and be the one to fix it.
Here’s the thing though, I’m doing both of us a disservice if I take on that pain for them. I needed to learn how to say no and they needed to learn how to take being said no to. There’s two equal growing opportunities when you use No as a full sentence.
Everything is better in moderation. Doing all the things, for all the people, all the time, is just going to lead to burnout. When you’re in burnout, you’re drained. If your energy is low, that makes it so much easier for big and heavy emotions to be triggered, hopping into your Driver’s Seat.
When big emotions are making your choices for you, that can lead to a lot of irreparable damage along the way, in the form of hurting the people we love most with our words and actions that we felt unable to control.
What if I told you there’s one thing in this universe you have control over?
Because, the reality is we don’t have control over anything, ever. Not our partner, not our children, not our friends, or even our pets. We have control of zip, zilch, nada…Except this one thing.
The power of our own choices.
While you don’t always get to have control of the circumstances, you most certainly can control your next decision in the current moment you’re in. Meaning, we are responsible for our own choices and being aware of that can give us great power. What you must also remember is that with great power, comes great responsibility.
Not only can you use the power of choice for the greater good, but People that know the power of choice can use it in ways to manipulate and control others too. Which is why, the power of you advocating for yourself by using No as a full sentence, is paramount to your health and well being. We are what we consume and if you’re spending time around lower vibration energy people, that’s where your energy will sink to.
Let’s say you have a group of friends that when everyone gets together they drink. When they drink, it turns into a not-so-great-feeling atmosphere and people start to complain about life and everything in it. the energy progresses more negatively and people begin to get agitated and arguments break out. Every time you go and hang out, you’d much rather been spending your time at home reading a good book or watching a movie, but you feel obligated because they’re your friends and they’ll be upset if you don’t come over.
I did it for years and years with anyone and everything; my choices based in how others emotions were going to react to them. I felt like my job was to make everyone else around me comfortable. If they were comfortable, I could be comfortable. But, if I was wanting to be somewhere else, wishing I had the power to say no and not feel guilt, was I genuinely ‘comfortable’? I was sitting in discomfort so they wouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable. When all along, they needed to sit in their own discomfort, as I needed to sit in my own, realizing that my voice and needs matter.
So much time was wasted in situations where I felt bad saying no.
I suppose though, if I’m reflecting now on that time and making better choices in my present moment, was that time really wasted?
Seeing time spent in struggles as the true lessons, helps us to realize just how precious that time really is, facilitating our growth and evolution.
Without struggle, you won’t know what success truly feels like.
This week, I challenge you to practice saying No to the things that others can most certainly handle on their own.
Such as, someone in the house needing a drink. My son Eli is notorious for being perfectly capable of doing something, but wanting someone to do it for him so he doesn’t have to.
Lately, when I know this and he asks for a drink and I’m unable to fulfill that request at the moment, I politely say “right now, I have something going on. You are so good at making your own water now, I know you can handle it buddy.” When he starts to get triggered, I gently say “I get disappointed too when people aren’t able to do something I ask. I try to remember that they might have a lot going on and it gives me an opportunity to do something for myself, maybe even learning a new skill I didn’t have before.”
We don’t have to drop everything we are doing because someone needs us. We can set a boundary and say that they have every capability of doing it themselves, without us taking on the guilt of their disappointment or dissatisfaction.
We are teaching them their own independence and advocacy by living it in front of them.
This goes without saying that urgent situations are much, much different and need tending to right away. Obviously if someone is hurt or in danger, that takes precedence.
We can adapt this to all things in our life. We have to put our oxygen mask on first and we don’t have to put guilt onto ourselves about it, we can simply say No.
Because, No is a full sentence.
🫶jenn
P.S. it’ll feel weird and uncomfortable to say No in the beginning. You can still be kind and still say No. I do it, and I’m kind every single moment of every single day.
If I can do it, you can too ✨