We just sold my father’s home and one detail about it is stuck prominently in my mind. On the mirror in his bedroom, he had written in sharpie this strange phrase: “consonant and vowel, NO!” And I think now that maybe that represented an epiphany that hit him late in life. I have been reflecting on this idea of “no” as a revolutionary idea for a while now.
There are two different ways to say no and I think it’s important not to get mixed up.
One way to say no is to turn down opportunities. and within this, I would include certain specific no’s like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m not ready” and of course the worst of all, “I’m not worthy.”
But there is another very important kind of no, which is setting a boundary. To say “I’m not going to do that because it’s not right for me,” or “I understand that is what you want, but it is not what’s best for me” is very different from saying “I’m not going to take that chance because I don’t believe in a positive future.”
I’m sure there are narrow exceptions to this general rule, but good things in life come to those who take risks, not to those who indulge only their fears against taking action.
This of course comes back to two main topics in personal psychology that I’ve been studying for the last couple years, boundaries and attachment. These two things are very closely related, because people with attachment problems usually also have boundary problems, and people who learn to set and enforce healthy boundaries usually get that skill from a basis of secure attachment. There are many excellent and lengthy books on these topics, and I can’t expect to adequately summarize them in a blog post. But if I wanted to try, I would say that the essence of good boundaries is being able to recognize the difference between what is good for you versus what someone else desires, and the essence of secure attachment is similarly the ability to be confident that you’ll be OK even if this particular risk doesn’t work out. Secure attachment enables healthy boundaries.
People seem to mostly talk about secure attachment in the context of romantic relationships, but it really does touch on just about everything, particularly your ability to take risks in life. When you are not secure, every risk is amplified on the negative side. When you look at a potential risk like applying for a desired job or pursuing an attractive potential romantic partner, secure attachment allows you to say “the downside risk is manageable, so it’s worth taking a chance on the upside risk.” Insecure attachment, or simply the lack of secure attachment, tends to make a person fixate on and exaggerate the downside potential, the negative aspects of the risk, and often minimize the upside potential. Minimizing the upside potential while amplifying the adverse side of the risk equation is a pretty effective way to talk yourself out of anything. Surefire, even. If you amplify the negative (cost) while minimizing the positive, your math will always “rationally” land on “no.”
And yet we cannot fix this just by saying “yes to all.” The “yes man” concept can be a great exercise, but it’s a learning experience only. (There is a book and a movie directly on this topic, but it’s explored in many other places.) Saying yes to everything might be a great shortcut to taking bigger risks, but it’s also a recipe for burnout and bad boundaries. Saying yes to everything can indeed mean that you take that big adventure or challenging job, but it also might mean you get stuck babysitting while someone else does all the fun stuff. You need to be able to distinguish between the “nos” that enable you to say “yes” when you should, and the “nos” that really should be “yeses.”
I am by no means any kind of expert on this but increasingly I’m receiving confirmation that i’ve learned some things worth knowing and had some not quite unique but unusual enough experiences that there are people who want to know how and why. And the how is “By saying yes when fear might have otherwise led me to a no.” Going to law school, enlisting in the Navy, going river kayaking for the first time in a February when I was in bad physical shape, and yes, accepting that case that my paralegal didn’t like (and quit over) were all risks that paid off in one way or another. And of course the potential payoff was kind of obvious: (the benefits of each is easy to guess) but the costs or downside risks are also obvious enough. Law school could mean debt and lots of work and maybe wasted years, especially if you don’t get through the whole program. The Navy could have been a great career, but it could have led to a tragic premature demise; where it actually went for me was neither of the poles of that spectrum and took years for me to see how it really paid off (and boy did it pay off). Winter kayaking was nuts, and most people still think it is, but it became the best part of my life for a long time. These are prominent examples from my own life but the list from others lives would and does fill entire libraries.
Did you ever take a big risk that paid off? Hopefully you did, and can articulate what that was. What could have gone wrong? What could have gone right? How did you get your mind to see the upside as worth the risk? Odds are good that it was either being down enough in some way to be willing to risk it all no matter what (rock bottom), or it was having the “faith” or “confidence” or just security it took to believe that taking the risk was worth it.
Learning to say no at the right times helps you get there. And this is probably an easier thing to see in the other direction, unfortunately. Can you recall a time when you said yes for the wrong reasons, usually a sense of social obligation or frustration, and paid for it, perhaps dearly? Can you think of another time when you instead said no to something that you felt pressured to do but knew wasn’t good for you?
The subtlety is indeed tough. How do you really know the difference between a good no, that is boundary protection or truly rational self-care, and a bad no, that is letting your fear and doubt take the wheel when it should be confidence or faith in command? I definitely don’t have an easy answer for that either, and if i did it would probably be the “happiness project” key i’ve been seeking. And yet, what was that key? Years of research confirmed that human happiness comes mostly from good social relationships, strong connections that do not drain your energy by more than they replenish you. And this is such a hard thing to get to from a position of trauma, loss, poverty, or disability. But I remain convinced that it is possible. I would never go as far as the “toxically positive” lies that anyone can do anything, or that “If I could do it, anyone can.” Neither of those things will ever be true, at least not in general. What I do believe is true is that everyone who has a bad life could get to a slightly or significantly better life if they are able to learn boundaries and security, and that there are in fact small and concrete steps, which I would generally categorize under “mindfulness”, that just about anyone could take to make small but significant improvements in their outcomes.