People-Pleasing & Realizing You Can't Say Yes to Everything

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I hear variations of “I’m a people pleaser” as people join a Bright Method program or, once they’re in the program, variations of “I’m realizing I can’t say yes to everything, and if I’m not that person, who am I?” Let’s talk about it – and three points for those who related to that.

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Full transcript:

Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bright Method Podcast, where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up the bright method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep, proud of what you got done today, and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in.

Hey, hey. All right. Today we are gonna talk about kind of people pleasing. It is people pleasing, and then it goes a little bit beyond it too. And to give you some context, basically this concept that I wanna talk about comes up in two different scenarios. Usually. One is when people are joining the program.

I have them fill out a very intense intake form so that I can get to know them. And one of the things that some people share with me is I’m a people pleaser and they’re explaining [00:01:00] that to explain what might be going on in their life and that they need some help with that because they’re over committed, because they are people pleasing.

And that leads to that another scenario that is a little bit different and related. Is when we’re working through the program with clients, sometimes people have a moment of, I’m thinking about one client in particular who’s this wonderful woman who said, I don’t wanna say I’m having an existential crisis, but I might be having an existential crisis.

Because if I’m not the person who can say yes to everything, then who am I? And I wanna. Dig into that too. It’s different than people pleasing, but it’s related because it’s more about, to me, people pleasing is like caring a lot about what other people think and in the second scenario it’s also about that, but it’s a little bit also about your identity and a little bit of I’m superwoman, [00:02:00] I can do it all.

And then confronting if I can’t do it all. Yes, there’s a level of disappointment that others will feel in me and that affects like how I view myself, but it also relates to just how I view myself. Like, you know, if I’m not that person who can do everything I thought I could, who am I? So they’re overlapping.

The people pleasing the’re related. I think we all have it to some degree, but then it also in some ways goes beyond just, I think people pleasing can sound. So, um. Cliche or overused or stereotypical, but it an important thing that’s going on, I think for a lot of women. And then in addition, there’s a like an identity element to it that I think is really important and I wanna talk about it today just to discuss what’s going on.

And then also where I think we go from here if you relate to that a lot. So I mean, no really like no real surprise, like how we got here, you know? I think that we don’t need to go into it a [00:03:00] lot. I think we all know that. Or, or I’ve heard a lot that women are conditioned to say yes to, a lot to be, make other people happy, be very accommodating, all that kind of stuff.

In addition, I think when we are junior in a workplace, all of us men and women are told to say yes, you know? Right. When you’re new, that’s really how you add value is by saying, yes, being responsive, like making everybody else’s life easier. I was explicitly told that when I joined my law firm, and I think.

It’s valid, like if you are a junior, that is, that is how you add value. You don’t have expertise yet to add a whole lot of value. You are learning a lot, but you can add value by being responsive, saying yes to everything, making everybody else’s life easier, and we can talk a lot about how that changes over time and no one tells you to shift your approach, but that’s a little bit of a different episode.

I’m sure I’ve touched on it in other episodes, but that also. Kind of compounds or affirms and [00:04:00] continues to condition us into saying yes. I also think that it, it happens because when we are younger, when we’re joining a workforce in particular, we can, we kind of can be those people, right? Like when you’re younger, typically you have less responsibility, you have more time freedom.

You’re typically not caretaking for anybody else. I know that there are exceptions, but typically. You know, you can say yes to most things and people please and be the person and kind of adopt this superhero mentality because for the most part you can. I mean, I, I like to say I early bloomed early in the overwhelmed department.

I kind of couldn’t in my, I, I tried to, but I was very overwhelmed early when I was doing this. But most people I think, kind of can do it and you just kind of white knuckle through. But you still can do it. It’s not all. Happiness in puppies and rainbows, but you do it. And so again, it, it facilitates it and you get rewarded for it.

And so it kind of, I can’t think of the right word, but [00:05:00] really just affirms this approach and I think that’s how we get there is like all these things happen and we used to be able to do it and it worked. We got rewarded for it. But then life gets more complicated. You have more responsibilities at work, you have more responsibilities at home.

Time feels a lot tighter in a sense. It’s almost like, I think for some, almost like a claustrophobic feeling or a panicky feeling of we take this approach, this yes approach. Into a phase of life where we don’t have the ability to do it. Our energy is also typically lower at a, I mean, at least for me, I’m not, I don’t have my 20-year-old energy anymore.

So saying yes just stops being doable from an energy standpoint, from a time standpoint, just because so much of those things are taken up by other things in my life, including other work things. I don’t think it’s not just personal life, but in addition, your work responsibilities. Also become higher, that your ability to absorb all the things that are [00:06:00] asked of you becomes less because your capacity work is already full of so many of your job description responsibilities.

But we kind of keep that approach of the yes person and just try and muscle through all of these things that have changed, that don’t facilitate that in the same way. In addition, I think another thing is that. The more you succeed as being the yes person and be known as the yes person and being accommodating or she’ll get it done or all those types of things, the more it’s gonna be asked of you.

And so it’s somewhat of a trap too, that like you’re doing so well at this and so people are gonna keep asking you to keep doing so well at that. And it just kind of multiplies. But again, those constraints that we were talking about are still there, and that’s where the problems really start coming up.

And what’s hard is I think that. Most people understand all this, like most people understand conceptually I can’t do everything. But there’s a [00:07:00] real difference between knowing something and like having it absorb into you and your brain and play it out in real life. And I think we really know all this women come into my program, some of them expressly sane, you know, I know I’m over committed.

But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and like having it really be absorbed into our bodies, like into our brain. And when women go through the bright method, it is often the first time that it’s so concrete, it’s so visual, it’s so objective that it actually is absorbed into the brain in a sense of.

I’m doing too much. I cannot say yes to everything. I can’t even say yes to the things I’ve said, yes to, much less anything else coming at me. And so now I can’t be the person, even if I want to, people please, even if that’s where it’s coming from or it’s coming from a belief that you’re a superhero or whatever it might be, wherever it’s [00:08:00] coming from that you can’t.

And that’s a hard realization. I mean, I think it, it’s hard. Some ways of like, again, I can’t say yes to everybody. I’m gonna disappoint some people. I’m not who I thought I was. I’m not a superhero. I also have limited hours like everybody else does, and that is difficult. But I also want you to move through those feelings and pass those feelings to not pass them like, like just really moving through them to understand.

That this is actually a wonderful thing and that’s what I wanna talk about today. That realization that you cannot, you just objectively cannot say yes to everything is a wonderful thing to know, but also have your mind fully absorb in the way that so many women do inside the Brain Method. And while that.

Realization sounds like it [00:09:00] would lead to down shifting, slowing down in your career, doing less in a way that doesn’t sound appealing. If you’re ambitious, I wanna really talk about today that I fully, fully, fully believe. It will make you better at your job. It will make you a more effective leader and a happier person to boot.

So let’s talk about a couple things related to that. They’re kind of three points. They’re not really. I don’t know how well organized they’re, but they’re kind of three things I wanna dig into on this front. The first thing is whether you use the Bright Method or not, use a system that helps you look at this more objectively.

I would love for everyone to have a system that they can use that takes the emotion out of it to the best we can, and I think that a lot of us as women need that. We need to. Not be able to negotiate around outcomes with our emotions and logic. It’s like we can [00:10:00] use our logic to trick our emotions, kind of, and we need to be able to look at things really objectively in a way that we can’t do that to help us bring the temperature down so that we can realize these are just neutral facts.

The, whether you can take something on or not often is a neutral fact that is that simple. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still emotion around feeling weird about disappointing people, or again, not being that superhero, but the idea of the like kind of emotional turmoil and negotiations around, well, maybe I could do this, or maybe I could fit it in if I did it this way, or things like that.

That goes away because you just start seeing more objectively yes or no. I can fit this in, or this gives me the life I want if I fit this in in a more objective way. I think it comes back to a lot of what I like talking about, about more like physical capacity type stuff. You know, I’ve talked a lot about how, let’s say I’m packing [00:11:00] for a weekend away trip with friends and I get all the clothes out that I am excited to bring on this trip, and I pile ’em up on my bed and think of a huge sheeping pile.

And then I got my. Small travel suitcase out, that’s like, and I fill it up with like my DAP kit and you know, the bag of bra and underwear, socks and the kind of basic stuff. And then I look at my massive pile and I’m like, Hmm, it’s not gonna fit right. And so I have to go through, like, we all do this, we all go, what are, what are we actually doing?

What am I gonna need? How many nights are we going to a restaurant? And like using that fit in what we have, like what, what I need for that trip that we’re used to doing. Now imagine I think about that, but then I just take the whole huge pile and try and shove it into the suitcase, and I’m sitting there being like, well, if I just worked harder, this would all fit in here.

Or if I were as powerful and as superheroes as I thought I would be able to bring it all. Like I [00:12:00] would be able to do this. Again, if I just tried harder, if I just worked harder, I would be able to fit it in and like there’s just no way. There’s no way. And if you were watching me, you’d be like, dude, it’s not gonna fit.

Like let it go and start thinking about what you actually need. But we don’t do that with our time. We just take all the things thrown at us, all the things people are thrown into the big pile on our bed, all the emails coming in, any request made, saying yes to all of it, and then being mad at ourselves when we can’t shove it into the Securian suitcase.

And instead what we wanna do is really just accept the reality of having a carry on suitcase. Really think through what we’re gonna be doing on that trip, where we wanna go, what’s important to us, and what we need to do that. And then we say no to a lot of other stuff ’cause it just can’t fit. And we might just be disappointed that we can’t bring certain things, but we don’t take it as like some sort of moral failing on our part for being able to get those things in the suitcase.

And that’s a really key [00:13:00] distinction. So again, whatever the first point really is. I don’t think we can intellectualize our way to this understanding. I think we already know that we can’t say yes to everything, but because we don’t have clarity around, well, how much could I say yes to, when is the line crossed?

What does that look like? We let our emotional drivers. Take the wheel in a sense, because we don’t have the logical clarity to let the logical side of our brains drive the ship. A lot of analogies there. So what I would love for all of us, again, whether you use the Bright Method or something else, is this year, lean into a system that gives you that objective clarity so the logical part of yourself can make these decisions, not the emotional side, and it’s not as clean as that again.

There can be emotions around having to say no to things, but hopefully you get the point that I’m trying to make is we’ve got [00:14:00] to give ourselves the clarity to understand capacity, to understand workload, to understand potential workload, how they all interact, so that we can make these decisions more logically and more neutrally and more emotion free.

And I have clients say that all the time of, you know, I felt bad I was disappointing this person, but. It was much cleaner because I knew I couldn’t take the thing on like I knew it. It was objective. I could not do it. There was no negotiating with myself, and it just came down to how to phrase it with the other person.

It’s not an emotional, or like if I just cared more type thing. It’s just objectively impossible to do certain things. Seeing that really helps with the emotional hurdles of saying no, and I really love when women start seeing that because I do think we women, I don’t know if we need it more than men, but we definitely need it.

We need that often. We need that evidence, the clarity, the objectivity, true, feel, [00:15:00] confident and solid in making those calls. Second point, as I was saying before, is this is actually a really good thing. It’s a really wonderful thing when you realize I can’t do it all, and so I need to be strategic around what I say yes or no to, and that allows you to be the one deciding for yourself where you wanna take things.

Like if you say yes to everything. You are letting other people dictate strategy. Strategy for your department, strategy for yourself, for your career, for your family, for your company, for your time, all of that, like what you do is dictated by what other people decide to ask of you. And so other people are deciding your strategic approach to life.

It’s a very reactive place to be because your actions are just dependent on what other people ask of you. [00:16:00] Once you really absorb, you can’t do that anymore. Like it’s just impossible for you to say yes to everything that is asked of you. Then you have to decide what to say yes or no to, and that’s harder.

In some ways, saying yes to everything is easier, and if I wanted to really land into the tough love approach, I would say it. It is weaker. I think we sometimes think that saying no is weak. Where I just think when you think about it really through like if I say yes to everything, I let other people dictate.

For me, that’s a weaker position than if you are like, I have to make decisions for myself around what I say yes and no to. I have to be the strategist, I have to be the leader. That is a stronger position. That’s a harder approach in some ways I would say. Especially for those of us who don’t like confrontation, like I don’t, which is hilarious that I was a litigator.

It is harder on the front end, but it is much easier in the long run when you have a reasonable workload that [00:17:00] you have selected for yourself. Again, we’re realists here. I don’t think we all can do this all the time, but I do think we have more power than we think. Even outside of the work setting, I think some of us do this with school committees or other committees or boards or whatever it might be.

And we have more control than we think in a lot of ways. But I do wanna just clarify. I do get it. Like, it is hard. It’s hard to make decisions, it’s hard to become the leader. It’s, it’s vulnerable in a way to be taking stances on what’s important and what’s not, and saying no and disappointing people, like in some ways that’s very a vulnerable place.

We really need to, because one, as we talked about, we have to, it’s just objectively true that like you have to, but also I do think it will make people better, employees better in all their roles, and more importantly, happier overall. And I say the happier thing because I do think that when you can feel ownership and more control of your [00:18:00] time and more the one driving, not all of your time, but more of it.

I do think that you get happier. I’ve, I’ve heard it with clients time and time again. I had a client recently be like, I’m the boss of my time now. And I’m like, yeah, like, that’s so empowering. It’s so wonderful. And that’s what I hope for you. And I guess my point on this second point is it sounds. Hard, and it is hard in some ways to realize I cannot do everything I thought.

I cannot say yes to everything I thought I could or that I wanted to, or that other people wanted to, and all this kind of stuff. But if you move through it, there’s so much empowerment and awesomeness on the other side that I want you to see this as a positive. Even though it’s hard and there’s a lot of discomfort, it is such a positive because.

There’s just so much more potential on the other side when you are the one calling more of the shots and not just reacting to what other people decide to [00:19:00] ask you on any given day. And related to this third point is, and I’ve alluded to it, is I truly believe this will make you better at all your roles.

I think about it often at work. ’cause I think that’s a place where it’s harder to do this in a lot of ways. And I think that people are more, I. Reluctant to do it at work because of, again, people think it makes them look weak or that they can’t hack it or all this kind of stuff. When in reality, having strong positions and advocating and standing up for yourself or saying, I don’t think we should do that because it doesn’t serve this priority and that’s what we’re focusing on this period of time, whatever it might be, it that is what makes you a leader.

That is what shows that you’re strategic. That is what shows that you are thinking big term and understanding that tough decisions must be made and all that, and you’re not just some yes man worker bee. You understand what’s important, [00:20:00] and even if you’re wrong, you are striving to understand what’s important, and then tailoring workload and projects and all of that to accomplish that, to be the most effective you can be versus the busiest you can be.

I have seen this play out for me time and time again. In my attorney days, I really decided that I wanted to go into patent litigation and I really enjoyed the law side of it, the substantive law. I enjoyed the procedural law. I enjoyed the people who worked on that, you know, at my firm. And so I started making calls to do that.

You know, I started basically saying yes to anything they wanted me to do, and a little bit overcommitting my workload. To just take on more and more and more work with them. But then as I sunset it out of work with other teams and then those teams or other teams within the firm would approach me for work, I could say no because my plate was full and I could back it up and all of that.

But I was saying no to a lot of [00:21:00] people for work to go all in on patent litigation. And on the one hand that might’ve been scary, and I don’t get me wrong, I had to like phrase it certain ways. Escalate where I needed to, all sorts of sorts of things, but it still was saying no to a lot of people, and those nos allowed me to really specialize to get to know an area of law really well, to be known as knowing that area of law really well to work with people I really, really liked.

I disappointed people and I had to advocate for myself, which it was scary at the time. Again, I don’t know how I ended up in litigation, but that all led to really great things for me. I really enjoyed it and I’m really glad I did it. And had I just been saying yes to whatever cases were coming at me, I would’ve definitely been overloaded.

I never would’ve specialized, I wouldn’t have been working with the people I wanted to work with, and I would’ve been very, like, much less happy overall with my career, with my life [00:22:00] and all of it. Another example, more recent in my job is I think that maybe two years ago, maybe two years ago, I. Shared an episode of why I wasn’t doing any sort of speaking engagements anymore with corporations and organizations.

That’s scary. You know, like that saying, no, I was disappointing people, but also it was like a money source, like a revenue source that I was saying no to. That was hard, and yet it has very much allowed my business to grow. My business is growing so much faster, and I don’t think it would’ve been possible had I been spending so much time and energy devoted to corporate speaking.

If you wanna hear more about that decision, I’ll link that in the show notes as well. But these are just bigger examples of saying no. I mean, I think there’s day-to-day examples of saying no to projects, to I, I shared more, a more recent, like one-off, one of saying no to a big time media opportunity in my business recently because I wanted to protect time.[00:23:00]

With my family, and it doesn’t always have to do with family. It can also do with workload. I’m a little bit rambling, but more to my point, every lived experience I’ve had in my more traditional job and now as a business owner has confirmed to me that saying no strategically and saying yes strategically and saying no to protect those yeses I’ve said yes to has paid off so well.

I also wanna throw out, it gives clarity even when it doesn’t work out so well. At my second firm I was saying no all the time and they were just bulldozing through my nose. And what was great about that still is that it gave me clarity, you know, it didn’t work out, but I knew it was a them problem, not a me problem.

And I left. So like I’m just saying that often it leads you to things you really like, that you really enjoy, but also it makes you better. At whatever you’re deciding to do, whether you’re [00:24:00] specializing in a certain thing or freeing up time to work on something that’s really important to you that drives revenue or, I feel like I’m really bad at explaining this part, but I had one client, she was a finance director, very big company working with.

Finance just supporting all these other departments in her organization. And when she really got clarity around her workload, she was like, I have like 12 priorities that are dictated by all these other departments. All these other departments are saying these are the top priorities. And so what that meant, because her department supported all these, she had like 12 priorities, and with that clarity and with proposals, she went to her boss, and in her words she said.

The Bright Method had also had her had more confidence in pushing a prioritization conversation. At work with my boss and business partners, I was able to get alignment to work on three big PO projects for the quarter. Only three with two weeks left in the quarter we’re on track to deliver all three.

Something my boss didn’t [00:25:00] expect would be possible, and I want you to really hear that she went from 12 priorities. The first of all, her boss was not even aware of that. Were all fully on her plate. She whittled it down to three, and even still, the boss was like, I don’t know if you can do all this, but by simplifying, by saying no to all those other nine priorities and focusing on those three, she was able to accomplish them well.

She was better at her job because she was clear on, I cannot say yes to all 12 of these priorities. I’m gonna, we’re gonna have to pick three and say no to the other ones or not right now. And her boss was thrilled. I think that’s probably a better example than my rambling examples of that. This is really important to absorb if you acknowledge the realities of the limits of your time and you understand I cannot say yes to everything, but I will use strategy to decide what to take on.

I might do even better at this [00:26:00] and I will have more fun in the process ’cause I will enjoy my life more. I think that’s huge because I think it’s counterintuitive to what we think will happen when we start saying no. All that to say, as you go into this year and you’re really trying to approach the next phase of your career, the next phase of whatever your life holds outside of work, get that clarity that you can’t say yes to everything, and then start asking yourself, what do I wanna say yes to?

What do I want life to feel like in a year in three years? What would have to be true for life to feel that way? What do I say yes to, to get life to feel that way? And no, because it doesn’t serve that way or doesn’t or would take time away from me getting to those things that I want. And don’t be afraid of doing those things because you’ll disappoint people or disappoint yourself or things like that.

I think you’ll be surprised that you will actually do even better on those fronts, on the whole, and that’s really important. [00:27:00] And I want that for you. ’cause I think it leads to maybe not all good things, but mostly really great things that are worth it. And you know me, obviously I believe in the Bright Method.

It’s the only system I know of that can do this. I’m not saying it’s the only one out there, but it’s the only one I know of that can do this. And if I can support you in figuring that out, I would love to jump on in Kelly nolan.com/bright. You can learn all about the 10 week program and jump in there. I hope to see you in there.

More importantly, thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

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People-Pleasing & Realizing You Can’t Say Yes to Everything

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