Dear Creative,
do you feel like you don’t have time for your creative work?
There is a formula that will create more time and space in your schedule:
learning to say no:
- more often,
- to the things you don’t want to do,
- and even sometimes to the things you want to do but that are not a priority (aka your creative work)!
This formula will also be beneficial for your general well-being as well as create space for others (more on that trick later).
Learning to say NO has been a process for me and still is work in progress but it feels soooo good to live a life I love because I do the things I actually want to do.
Now, I’m aware that we all have obligations in life that require us to show up, but there are also soooooo MANY THINGS that we think we have to do but actually don’t! I’m going to take leisure time as a main example because it’s usually the time we can fully decide of our activities and is usually fun and if you are not a professional creative yet, that’s where you’ll carve out time for your creative work.
So when you do have time off, what do you choose to do? How does your schedule look like? Do you find yourself having a thousand things scheduled but no time for yourself and for what actually matters to you?
I definitely used to overload my schedule with fun, doing things like meeting 3 girlfriends in a row on a Saturday afternoon which would leave me totally depleted at the end of the day! And even though I looooved spending time with them all, it wasn’t necessarily serving me. Especially when I started to take my creative work seriously, that’s what I struggled with in particular: saying NO to the things that I wanted to do!
It’s Liz Gilbert who said something along those lines: if you want to put your creative practice at the forefront, you also need to say no to the things you want to do.
It’s a practice.
Maybe even a form of disguised Resistance to not do so.
Next to the things we want to do, there are also all those gatherings, events that we don’t really feel like attending. The ones we think we should be attending because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or disappoint them.
Why do we often feel like having to do the things we don’t want to do?!
Why it’s hard to say NO:
Because of the shoulds we grow up with. Because we are raised to say yes. It makes our parents life easier! Can’t blame them! In fact, I will do the same if I ever have kids! They need to teach us how to behave in a social setting, how to interact with adults and other kids. Which is a good thing but behind all those dos and don’ts there are often lots of ‘what are people going to think?’ which can have a tendency to push us to do things we don’t want to do from a very young age or to put others’ needs before our own because our parents are worried about what people are going to think or feel. We need to become aware of our conditioning to be able to see what serves us and what doesn’t anymore.
As a kid you might have heard: ‘you are being selfish’, ‘you are a brat’ whenever you didn’t want to do what was expected from you. I know that I heard a lot: ‘you are so selfish’, still hear it. Of course, it’s great to be here for others but not when you do it to:
a) to please
b) with resentment
When you choose to do something for somebody else it needs to come from the heart! Because you truly feel like doing it, truly want to help, and not because you feel guilty if you don’t do it.
Gabor Mate M.D. says: ‘choose guilt over resentment anytime’!
And the more you practice saying NO + the more inner work you do on this topic, the less guilt you will feel!
Ok I know it got heavy very quickly, but I couldn’t find a way around it.
How to say NO:
A friend of mine said : ‘justification calls for negotiation’. Meaning: when you don’t want to do something, you don’t need to justify yourself (especially if you try to come up with a reason that is not true!) because the other person may try to find a solution for you. For example:
- ‘I can’t come to the party, because I don’t have anyone to babysit the kids’.
- Your friend: ‘I have a great baby-sitter, maybe she could babysit all the kids at the same time and we could share costs?’
But you actually don’t want to go to the party! So now you have to find another reason why this could not work, you see? Extra energy spent unnecessarily. And remember we are trying to create space so that you have energy for what matters!
Sometimes a simple: ‘sorry I can’t’, ‘this is not going to work for me’, ‘not this time’, is enough and you don’t need to offer a plan B either.
Find a way to say NO that works for you and keep in mind that nothing is set in stone forever and that you are allowed to change your mind.
Give yourself time to take a decision before you reply. Always. No decision needs to be taken right this second.
What happens when you say NO:
In her workshop Christine Gerber Rutt said: it’s uncomfortable to say NO but it’s okay because that discomfort lasts less long than saying yes to something you actually don’t want.
It’s like ripping the band-aid off, doing it quickly hurts for 1 second but doing it slowly - which is what you are doing to yourself when you do something you don’t want to do - is a longer pain. So from that perspective, would you rather choose the short-term pain or the long-term one?
The more you practice setting boundaries and saying no, knowing your yesses and nos, the more you’ll be able to do things that feel like hell yesses!
What you need to be aware of :
People might take things personally once you start saying no more often and/or not justify yourself. Or the opposite might happen, it might inspire them to do the same so they can create space in their lives too!
If you on the other hand are the person who takes things personally, a great book that would be worth reading is: ‘The Four Agreements’ by Don Miguel Ruiz and especially chapter two: ‘whatever happens, don’t take things personally’.
But you can absolutely trust that when you say no to someone, something else is going to open up for that person! It’s just like quitting a job that you thought you would be the only one able to do, even though you hate it but by leaving you create space for the next person who might be passionate about that job and a much better fit than you! With relationships it’s the same thing, the next bestie might be such a better fit than you!
Saying NO doesn’t mean you are being mean. It doesn’t mean that you are mad at the person either.
Recently I organized a Bad Taste Mini-Golf party and when I asked a friend if she wanted to come (even though I knew she wouldn’t really fit in the group/ vibe), she looked at me and said: ‘mini-what’?! I was laughing so hard already! She then said: ‘mini-golf?! No thanks! That’s something I used to do as a kid, but you can take my daughter one day if you want!’ and then I deleted her phone number! No jk!!! Of course not! Because I didn’t mind that she didn’t want to come. I didn’t take it personally, because her not liking what I like – I know I’m a nerd - doesn’t make me question what I like! She is allowed to like different things! It also doesn’t make me question our friendship or make me wonder if she still likes me or ever liked me! If you are the type of person who takes things personally next time someone says NO: remember the bad taste mini-golf party example ;)
Are you on the tolerance ladder?
Many of us have kind of a ‘tolerance level,’ meaning: when something bothers us, we don’t necessarily say something right away, we swallow whatever happened instead, and repeat until we usually explode like a volcano! Which has an impact on both you and your relationships and at this point, you will not be able to practice non-violent communication anymore.
That’s one of the things I learned from my Cuban friend: she doesn’t do the ladder of tolerance. When something bothers her, she says it right away! She doesn’t waste her time nor her energy. She doesn’t pretend. She doesn’t play the good girl. She speaks it out! She definitely doesn’t need to read Gabor Mate’s book ‘When the Body Says No’, because she is able to say it herself! That’s something I think we can all learn about from Latin cultures, they are direct and say what they think. In Switzerland politeness is at the forefront.
Know your NO
Now I just assumed that you know your yesses and nos, but in some life situations it can be quite tricky to actually know!
In Christine Gerber Rutt’s workshop, that’s what she started with: ‘to know your no’! She says that, ‘sometimes, it’s easier to know your yes first to be able to identify your no’. Can you think of examples of what clear yesses and clear nos could look and feel like in your own life?
It’s funny because as I’m editing this chapter, I see a teenage couple sitting on a bench in front of my office and I have no idea what they’re talking about but just witnessing their body language, I can tell that the guy is constantly trying to kiss her and the girl pushes him away. No idea if they are together already and might have had a fight or if he is trying to kiss her for the first time but she is soon going to fall off the bench if she keeps going away from him. And yet, she doesn’t stand up and leave! Maybe she doesn’t know that it could be option?! Maybe she doesn’t want to be too rude by leaving?! Maybe she is scared she will hurt his feelings?! So she stays even though her whole body wants to leave. Or maybe she is not even aware that she doesn’t want to be there?! A part of me wanted to get out of my office and start playing mediator but of course I refrained and remembered that teenagers are by definition confused beings and remembered my teenage self. OMG! Was I clear on my needs and wants?! Absolutely not! I remember having gone out with boys simply because THEY wanted plus all my friends thought it would be a good idea! Of course, it didn’t last more than a few days and sometimes only a few hours because you cannot go against your wants and needs for too long! And sometimes we do need to make the experience to actually know, but a lot of the time we could know beforehand.
Isn’t it fascinating that we are influenced by others so much, to the point that they are the ones making the decisions for you - when you let them?!
P.S.: the teenage boy from the bench ended up succeeding.
Where in your own life, have other people insisted that you do something, and you gave in?
By starting to allow yourself to reflect on this kind of questions, dropping the conditioning of the good girl, of your childhood and society, plus by developing your intuition, it gets easier and even obvious sometimes to know what feels right and what doesn’t and from there you can make choices that are aligned! Again, it takes some practice.
Isabelle Mercier’s view on the topic:
If you need another angle and wording on the topic, I highly recommend watching the amazing Tedx with Isabelle Mercier titled ‘the power of zero tolerance’, in which she shares a funny story of her childhood where she didn’t dare to say no to the school bully who wanted her to do something she didn’t want to do until her Mum taught her a lesson in the most brilliant way (worth watching for details) and said: if you can’t say no to what you don’t want, you will never have the energy to say yes to what you do want!
From then on, she realized that what you tolerate, you worry about. Apparently, we spend 92 % of the time worrying about stuff. She suggests that instead of taking that time to worry, we could take that time to do something good for ourselves like increase our units of happiness and for that she invented the HERO formulawhich stands for:
Hush the noise so that you can reconnect with what you truly want
Evaluate what and who you are tolerating in your life
Ritualize the habits that have the potential to bring your best ‘you’ into life
Own what you stand for, own your non-negotiables
She says that peace of mind is a choice and that it’s not easy to say no to someone we love but it’s freeing!
At the end she asks the audience:
if you are tolerating something or someone in your life: will you choose to worry or will you choose to embrace the HERO in you?
Where/how can you create space when you have time off?
Are you doing something right now because you are scared of what people would think of you if didn’t do it?
Are you doing something right now because you are scared of hurting someone’s feelings by not doing that thing?
What kind of things did your parents tell you in your childhood when they wanted you to do something? What kind of reward did you get for ‘good behavior’ (aka agreeing or saying yes)?
How does a clear YES feel in your body?
How does a clear NO feel in your body?
Do you have another option?
What’s a HELL YES in your life?
Choose one thing that feels like a big NO and say no to it TODAY by embodying your inner Latina because like my Cuban friend says: life is too short to do things you don’t want to do!
If you need support, saying NO, please reach out!
