#Microblog Monday 398: How To Say No
Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.
*******
I often struggle with how to say “no” when I know that I need to say, “no.” And when I get it right (or I feel like I’ve nailed a good “no”), I drop the text into a document that I can look back on in the future. The email is rarely helpful a second time, but you never know.
Someone passed along this canned response gallery of “how to say no,” and now I pass it along to you in case it is helpful. A lot of these situations are not ones I struggle with, but I still bookmarked it for inspiration. Maybe they’ll pad it out with more situations in the future.
*******
Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.
5 comments
Ha, I tried something along the lines of the first one years ago at work. A coworker (not boss) had volunteered for a manual writing project with outside groups and then sent an email to our whole team asking us to pick a section to write. I was like “sorry, I’m unable to volunteer at this time blah workload blah.” I *was* busy but I was more offended that I was basically getting assigned something I didn’t sign up for. I did not get a response so who knows how it went over. 🤷🏻♀️
I know that saying “no” is something that a lot of folks struggle with, but I have always been pretty good with boundaries. Any residual challenge I had was cured by becoming a mother to twins: when you work full-time in a demanding job and also have two infants/toddlers at home, you genuinely don’t have time to do much else, so I had to say no to LOTS of things for the first 3-4 years of my sons’ lives.
Oh wow, that is awesome. I am getting better at saying no, but it still takes significant effort. I pretty much have to hermit myself away in order to say no. I love these ideas. I do think that sometimes when you say no too often you stop getting asked, but maybe sometimes that’s for the best. 🙂 If you didn’t want to go, chances are it wasn’t good for you anyway. I do sometimes enjoy things that I dreaded but then forced myself to go to though. But argh, always the guilt for saying “no,” which probably warrants a little introspection!
Omg I love this! Thank you!
I have to say, I’ve gotten good at saying no to social stuff (pandemic helps) but starting to run into that again.
Ooh, I like that. As a woman, I grew up not feeling I was allowed to say no to anyone (except boys who wanted “only one thing” according to my mother! lol), because I had to put everyone else before me. So learning to say no in the last 20 or so years hasn’t been easy. I love this.