Through profiles of others and candid anecdotes from her own life, Lue explains the various styles of and remedies to people pleasing (i.e., ignoring one’s own needs, wants, feelings, and opinions). She teaches readers how to say No when they’ve always automatically and resentfully said Yes. And, through vivid metaphors, she explains the mind-body connection of stress with greater relatability than can be found in similar works written by experts.

And it turns out that being able to say ‘no’ is a vital skill for work success. In his new book Great at Work: How Top Performers Work Less and Achieve More, based on a survey of 5,000 employees and managers in which work practices were charted against results, author Morten T. Hansen has distilled the findings into ‘work-smart’ practices. The first step, he found, is to have the courage and discipline to focus on very few key tasks, and go all-in on those. Managers need to become ‘do-less bosses’ who listen to employees when they say that giving them more work is counterproductive. And employees need to get better at saying ‘no’. At first, this approach worked for me. It was great to collaborate towards a joint end and to feel genuinely that I was adding value to lots of projects. About three years ago, I realised the only way to stop saying sorry was to start saying noI have learned that if you live your life depending on other people’s approval, you will never feel free and truly happy. Dale Henderson recommends finding the line between being completely passive, and being aggressive and territorial – the former could lead to you being the office doormat, and the latter to you being perceived as unhelpful.

So many of us struggle with feelings of abandonment, rejection, feeling not good enough, and people pleasing with emotionally unavailable and shady folks. We’ve been scared of boundaries, expressing our needs, being less than perfect, and becoming more of who we are, and so we settle for crumbs and abandon and hurt ourselves in the process.

The Joy Of Saying No" will be an excellent book for those people who tend to please others a lot, each with their different reasons. Although I'm not the target audience, I chose to read this book because I was curious about what people pleasers who have a hard time saying no think. If you do have conflicting priorities, the most assertive position to take with your boss is to state, ‘I have this deadline and this deadline, and my recommendation is to focus on this one first’. In this way, you’re showing that you’re in complete charge of your time and priorities, rather than handing that decision to them. GIVE A REASON

The second step to learning to say no is realizing that you are valuable and choosing your own opinion about yourself over others.

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The Joy of Saying No will help you identify your people-pleasing style and habits. A six-step framework then teaches you how to discover the healing and transformative power of no to: The Joy of Saying No will help you identify your people-pleasing style and habits. A six-step framework then teaches you how to discover the healing and transformative power of no to The aim of all this is to reduce the complexity of my life. Now, I try to work on no more than three projects in a day. Splitting attention between multiple tasks can leave you feeling out of control. If you provide a ‘because’, you have more chance of the person accepting. Even if it’s an utterly random reason, people are less likely to argue with it. But if you give a list of reasons, it undermines you. AND…REPEAT It is no surprise to me that this is the focus of the current wave of “how can I fix my life” angst. The wish to say no instead of saying yes, to stay in instead of going out, to discard instead of to accumulate – these are all logical responses to our feelings of being overstretched, overtired and overwhelmed. Clinical psychologist Rachel Andrew says she sees this in many forms in her consulting room, with patients saying life is too stressful and too pressured, or describing themselves as detached and their lives as meaningless and unsustainable.

And if you don’t have any good excuses, you then have to decide if you are going to tell the truth or come up with a lie. What makes a person great is not their looks or achievements, but their willingness to love others, be humble, and grow as a person.

Why saying ‘yes’ to everything can be overwhelming

Maurice Mcleod, a writer and local councillor, found that his inability to say “no” caused him serious problems when he went freelance about a decade ago. He took on so many projects and agreed to do so many favours that, he says, he was living with “a constant feeling of unease and panic. Every time the phone rang, I’d think: ‘Oh my God, who’s that, what haven’t I done?’ It was this constant feeling of letting people down.” He took on so much unpaid work that he had to refuse work that was paid, got into debt, and realised the only way out was to just say “no”. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Joy_of_Saying_No_-_Natalie_Lue.pdf, The_Joy_of_Saying_No_-_Natalie_Lue.epub My workload soon started to get out of hand. I was making so many promises that I couldn’t remember who I was letting down from one day to the next. Every time the phone rang or my inbox pinged, it was another person asking for help or chasing up the help they had already solicited. My wonderful portfolio career, filled with interesting and engaging projects, had turned into a roll call of accusations. All the individual projects seemed to merge into a ball of pain. I realised I had developed a subconscious animosity towards the people for whom I was working. Instead of being clients or colleagues, they had become an annoyance. If, like me, you’re having trouble saying no, this may help. Saying No Doesn’t Mean You’re a Bad Person To make matters worse, much of the work I was struggling to do was unpaid. I was getting into debt because my to-do list was so full that I was turning down paid work.