The Need to Say No in Business

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the expression, “no is a complete sentence.” have you ever heard that one? It’s interesting because it’s very hard to just say no in business when someone asks you something. That was an old Nancy Reagan thing, right? “Just say no.” Say no to drugs. Just say no. But when somebody asks you to do something, you just say “no.” I think there was an episode of Seinfeld like that…

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I discuss the need to say no in business. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David. I think this is one of the hardest things to do in business because we feel like we can answer every question and that we should.

And the reality is, that’s not the case.

David: Yeah, and it’s such an easy trap to fall into because there are so many people that we feel like we need to say yes to, right? We’ve got business associates, we’ve got clients, we’ve got prospects, we’ve got family, we’ve got friends, everybody coming to us with things.

And the agree type of person inside us wants to say yes to most things. We want to be agreeable. We want to do the best of our ability. But sometimes we can really get in over our heads when we don’t at least start to say no to some of the things that are not going to allow us to get where we need to go.

Jay: Yeah, and I agree. It’s in your personal life. It’s in your business life. If you have a sales cycle, it’s which customers you choose to deal with. I mean, you can let your entire life be dominated. And I know people like this and I’ve looked at him and I said, how do you ever get something done? I mean, I love you because you want to help everybody and you’re so serving to other people, but your family might be neglected. Your business might be neglected. There’s got to be balance in the force, right?

David: Yeah. And sometimes, during some stages of life, it’s easier than other times to say no. But there are periods in there, man, where it’s just like you feel like you have to do everything.

You have to say yes to every opportunity. You have to at least explore it. You want to try to help everyone you can possibly help, which is a great thing, but we all have a limited, finite number of hours in a day. 24 hours is fixed. It’s inflexible. We can’t change that.

And everything we say yes to means that we’re saying no to something else, even if we’re not physically saying no.

We’re not giving ourselves the ability to accomplish additional things, which creates sort of a huge opportunity cost if we’re not careful.

Jay: Yeah, and how many of us are careful? That word careful, right, David? What does that mean? Is it identifying the things that you have to get done? I think yes, the things you want to get done, the priorities? And I don’t think we’re saying no to everybody, right?

It’s understanding yourself and what’s most important and saying, I’m actually going to say yes. to so many people, but after that, I’m booked. I can’t. I’ve got to be with my family. I’ve got to be at work. I’ve got to be, with these other priorities.

David: Yes, and I think for a lot of us, it’s inside of work where we often have the most difficulty saying no. Because when you’re dealing with family and friends, in a way, it’s easier to say, well, I can’t because I have to do this. I can’t because I have to work, right?

We’re not saying no I’m not doing it. We’re saying I can’t. When in fact, we’re either prioritizing incorrectly or prioritizing poorly or we’re just making the decision that no, I’m going to do this instead

And it’s very difficult to do that to actually say no to someone as opposed to presenting the excuse instead of the actual no. Saying I can’t as opposed to I am choosing to do this other thing. That’s tough.

Jay: Yeah, it is tough or find what I’ll do is because I don’t want to use the word no, I’ll put it off till later. Like, I’ll say, well, let’s do that next week, or let’s do this. I should just be saying, I’m sorry, that doesn’t fit into what I need to be focusing my time on.

That’s a difficult thing for me.

David: Yeah. And when we push things off, especially when we put something off Indefinitely, or we don’t connect a date to it, it makes it even harder because now we’re going to have to have another conversation about when that’s going to come together.

So very often, if we are planning on saying yes to something, we should immediately get it scheduled for a certain day or time, that would be the best thing to do, because then, you know, you’ve got that time blocked out.

But if you really feel like you don’t have the bandwidth to be able to do it. We’re always far better off just saying, I can’t right now. And if we are going to put it off, then it might need to be several weeks or a month or whatever. But make it realistic so that when you’re saying no to someone, but you plan on doing something later, you’re at least figuring out what that is now, as opposed to creating another thing that’s in the back of your mind, driving you crazy that you haven’t gotten either scheduled or done.

Jay: Yeah, exactly. So what happens is I end up having to almost say no three or four times instead of just saying no the first time so like a lie turns into more lies, turns into more lies. If I was just honest up front, then I could move on with my life and I’m not going to have to spend time making up excuses later.

David: Yeah, and just to be able to say, no, I’m sorry, I can’t do this at this particular point. And if you can reschedule it, you do. And if you can’t, then you say, I don’t even know when I can schedule at this point. And unfortunately, that’s kind of the way things need to go. Otherwise, what ends up happening is we spend the majority of our lives reacting to other people’s priorities.

If someone asks you to do something that you really feel like you don’t have the time or the desire or the energy to do, and you say, yes, well, now you have sacrificed whatever it was that you actually wanted or needed to do, for somebody else’s priorities.

Jay: Yeah. again, I want to make sure that people understand, we’re not saying say no to everybody.

But we are saying maybe you say yes three times a week if people want your scheduling time or your focus after work. So you’re saying, I can do that once a week, I can do that once a month.

And once that’s scheduled, like when I was in radio, I did a lot of appearances. And if I would just, let people get my time no matter what, I realize I’m busy every night of the week.

And so I literally had to say, no, I’m only going to do that once a week. And eventually that came into twice a month, right? And after that, I’m like, well, let’s shoot for next month. I’ve got two openings for next month. Let’s do it then.

I can’t tell you how much bandwidth that cleared in my mind. Because we’re not just talking about scheduling time. We’re talking about mental time, your capacity to handle more things, right?

David: No question. And I think part of the struggle, too, is when we think in terms of a to do list rather than in terms of a calendar? If we’re thinking, oh, I need to do this, I need to do this, I need to do this, and I don’t have any timeline in terms of when any of those things are going to happen, it just drives you crazy.

Whereas if you are able to have open slots on your calendar for specific things, Out over the course of the next at least month or so, and you say to somebody, well, I can’t do it this week, but how is Thursday of next week at two o’clock? Then it gives you an opportunity to get that scheduled. Now I don’t have to think about that again until it’s time to do it.

And when somebody else asks about something, I can either tell them, I’m sorry, I’m booked up until the following Tuesday or whatever it is. But at least you know. And I think one of the big difficulties that we often have is thinking in terms of stuff that we want to do, as opposed to things that we are actually committed enough to, to get them onto our calendars.

Jay: Yeah, and it just occurs to me, and this may be a podcast for another time. But learning to say no to yourself. In a lot of ways, that’s what we’re talking about, right? The things that you may want to do, above what is important. Or even like you said, I want to help people out, and so when I say no to them, I’m really saying no to myself.

David: Yeah, that’s such a great point. Because I feel like particularly many of us in business, we’re saying no to ourselves a lot more than we’re saying no to other people because we want to please them. We want to accomplish or help whatever it is that they want to do.

And we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Because we’re not saying out loud, no, I can’t do that. We’re not saying that to ourselves. We’re saying yes to something else. And then we’re realizing we don’t have time.

And then when we’re asked to do something that we would actually prefer to do, we say we can’t, because we don’t have the time to do it.

Jay: Yeah, exactly. I can think of many things that recently I’ve cut out of my schedule, and they’re things that I actually like to do, but I’ve just decided, focusing on that is not going to give me the same benefit as focusing on