If your path is in any way similar to mine — maybe you have a farm, or you don’t send your kids to school, or you work for yourself…  You’ve met up with negativity, incessant claims on your time (especially if you don’t go to a normal 9-5 job), unreasonable customer demands, doubters and critics, and lots of false opportunities.  Any of these hazards can turn a profitable farm into a failure, a happy business owner into a miserable wretch; a contented, engaged parent into a monster; a happy marriage into a divorce.  As an antidote to all this, as part of this Celebration of Negation series, I’d like to offer you a small gift, a magic charm to help you navigate the illusory snake pit that will pop up from nowhere, sometimes daily or multiple times per day,  to pull you off your charted course of a life in harmony with your values.  Are you holding out your hand?  Good.  Here’s the gift.

No.

Keep that word with you.  Tuck it in your pocket, put it on a chain around your neck, hide it in your shoe, or just tattoo it someplace where you’ll see it.  

Practice using it on your spouse, your kids, your customers, your folks, or anyone who threatens the quality of life you’ve laid out for yourself.  But then, as you practice, be willing to experience an even greater benefit of the word:  learn to let it be used on you.

According to time-use studies, “women entrepreneurs who work at home are still caught in the double bind, doing more housework and child care than men who work at home,” warns Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: work, love and play when no-one has the time, “”(139)(Schulte 2014).   I feel the truth of that statement at a visceral level.  I was an over-achiever growing up, earning straight A’s, going on to grad school.  I had big plans for all that I was going to accomplish.  When my analysis of the economy revealed that life on the fast track would merely be a treacherous journey of pits and pot holes, I changed course.  But my ego’s need to remain excessively accomplished while pleasing others didn’t get the memo.  I had to be competant and generous regarding all things, churning out three home-cooked meals every day, keeping an enormous garden, canning bushel upon bushel of fruits, jellies and vegetables; saving every scrap of fabric to re-purpose into something else, knitting miles and miles of yarn, carting my kids to playdates and “enrichment opportunities,” investing hours into my children’s education, rushing to answer the phone whenever it rang, accepting every public speaking opportunity or request to teach cooking workshops; pushing myself to be laboring at the farm at the drop of a hat, buying my parents’ groceries for them; being the perfect daughter every mother’s day, bestowing hand-made gifts upon every maternal figure in my life; accepting every committee, volunteer request and board appointment that came my way; accepting every social invitation into our calendar, then returning the invite; dashing off thank-you notes and arranging family get-togethers, and still writing books.  I’m all for recognizing the value of non-monetary income and community and family engagement.  But that level of acceptance was just ego-driven stupidity.   Bob was constantly trying to step in and help, offering to pick up tasks, or encouraging me to drop things, but I couldn’t see the problem for the longest time.  

I was putting my family on a dangerous trajectory, because researchers are finding that daughters learn about leisure from their mothers.  “And since most mothers put themselves last and reach for the to-do list first, their example teaches their daughters to do the same,” (235) says Schulte (Schulte 2014).  How was I to raise my daughters to be empowered, confident women, when I had traded in the idea of having to please one boss in favor of pleasing everyone?  There were other problems.  My business couldn’t grow.  My kids weren’t learning in the ways I thought they should be.  

Finally, one Christmas several years back, I gave myself a very important gift.  I decided to learn how to say No.  I started by looking for ways the word or concept was being used around me.  And truthfully, I wasn’t seeing much of it at all.  My kids’ friends’ mothers had over-crammed schedules. Many of them were on anti-depressents or anti-anxiety meds.  My parents weren’t as skilled at using the word as they are now, and they would get stressed to the point of yelling at each other instead.  Even Bob would put aside every priority he was working on to jump to my needs and requests, falling behind in his own work, until his hair stood on end and the house reeked with his stress hormones.  We were all caught in a tailspin of dangerous, resentful yeses.

But then, one day, I got to see a beautiful no in action.  Richard, an organic vegetable farmer at the farmers market where we used to sell, had promised to sell me a bushel of green beans one weekend.  When I walked over to pick them up early in the morning, he shrugged his shoulders.  “Sorry, I forgot,” he said.  

“Can someone go back and get them?”

“No.”

“But I scheduled to can green beans this weekend.”

“Sorry.”

“Can someone out at the farm bring them by the end of the day?”

“No.”

He didn’t offer to have one of his workers drive back to the farm to get them.  He didn’t call his wife and ask her to drop everything and bring them down.  It was a big sale, and rather than wreck his day, the flow of his workers or his wife’s day, he swallowed his losses and told me no. But he gave me a big smile.  With a smile like that, I couldn’t even feel angry.   

By contrast, one morning Bob and I forgot a special order for 2 pork chops.  Panicked that the customer might be angry with us, I stayed to run the booth while Bob raced our car 30 miles back to the farm and got a $300 speeding ticket so that we wouldn’t disappoint the customer.  It was a $30 sale.  Do the math on that one.

To make my business work, to make my life work, I needed to learn to disappoint, create boundaries, reject, and decline as clearly and beautifully as Richard.  Trouble was, I didn’t have it in me.  When I said no, I felt like I had to justify myself.  Then I got angry about justifying myself, and conflict ensued.   Or I suppressed the anger and relented (seriously bad for the digestive system, by the way). 

That’s because before I could effectively say no, I had to understand what I was saying yes to. “Every important Yes requires a thousand Nos,” writes William Ury in The Power of a Positive No. “No is a key word in defining your strategic focus”(19)(Ury 2008).  I had to learn to use  No as a sculptor might use a chisel and hammer on a block of marble.  It starts with a vision for what the marble can be.  But the art cannot emerge without the sculptor shaving and chipping away and discarding massive quantities of rock.  Focusing on our Quality of Life, every time I used the word No, I would shape my personal sculpture, chiseling it to my vision until it was rich with only the most relevant work, fertile with creativity, joyous with meaningful connections, and pleasurable with ample rest, solitude and adventures. 

Ury explains that we can do this sculpting by examining the three gifts of No, asking ourselves the following questions:

What am I seeking to create by saying No?  What other activity or person am I wanting to say Yes to?

What am I seeking to protect by saying No?  What core interest of mine is at risk if I say Yes or simply continue to accept the other’s behavior?

What am I seeking to change by saying No?  What is wrong with the other’s current behavior (or the situation) and what would be improved if that behavior (or situation) changed? 37(Plotkin 2008)

By identifying these gifts of NO, I uncovered my Yeses.  And when I focused on my Yeses, essentially my most deeply held interests, my anger and resentment melted away.  I mentally felt myself slipping into a position where no was no longer fraught with resentment or defensiveness.  It was simply a tool for coming closer to my Yes.

From there, my journey to the realm of effective, gracious Nos was a matter of using William Ury’s tried-and-true formula for what he calls a “Positive No:”    We’ll employ it here with an imaginary situation where I might be asked to join a tourism commission.

Yes! No. Yes?

Yes!:  According to Ury, that first Yes! is about protecting yourself and what is important to you.  Is it family time?  Uninterrupted time for creative work?  Business cash liquidity?  Business priorities?  I might say this aloud, or just articulate it to myself.  In the case of the fictitious tourism commission, I would articulate my time priorities are devoted to my business needs, to my creative work, and to my family.  

No. This part is obvious.  It is what you are rejecting. “The essential action in asserting your No is very simple,” writes Ury.  “You are setting a clear limit, drawing a clean line, creating a firm boundary”(125). Here, I should be clear, and direct my NO out loud (or in writing) to the requester.  I might say, Joining the tourism commission interferes with my schedule, so I cannot accept. 

Yes?  This final Yes? is an “invitation to a positive outcome” (148).  Rather than simply closing the door and creating hard feelings (just because we need to say NO doesn’t mean the request isn’t worthwhile), this final Yes? is about preserving the relationship.  I might say to the requester, I’m so thankful there are folks in the community who are making this a priority.  It means a lot to my business.  It can even include an offer of something that you can say yes to:  Let me know if you’d like me to help promote your activities through my email newsletter.  

The Yes! No. Yes? Formula has served me well in many situations.

Setting boundaries with family members, defining boundaries with customers, setting limits on obligations, addressing interpersonal conflict.

I’ve had so much success with Ury’s formula that my daughters have absorbed it into their own lexicon.  As they negotiate dating life, social demands, even customer requests, I hear them quietly reciting the formula to themselves: Yes! No.  Yes?  As kids, they used to climb into bed with me at night and rehearse their answers before delivering them, gaining confidence in their rhetoric.

Ury’s formula works when we need to assert ourselves to another party.  But on this path, sometimes the No we need is merely quiet resolve.  So here are a few more uses for that magic charm I gave you:

No, I’m not going to let myself cave to peer pressure.  

No, I’m not going to give in to fear or bullying.  

No, I’m not going to chase after every opportunity. 

No, I’m not going to accept every claim on my time simply because I don’t work conventional hours.  

I see that last one a lot with fellow self-employed business owners, with women who choose to stay home with young children, with new retirees, or with people who simply prefer not to have every hour of every day occupied with a career.  Somehow, we worry that if our hours aren’t fully occupied with stuff to do, we aren’t productive members of society.  Balderdash. “We need to make time for idling,” argues Tom Hodgkinson, author of Business for Bohemians, “and we need to be pretty ruthless about it…Other people are quite happy to bust into your idle time.  You have to be very strict with them”(201)(Hodgkinson 2018)  He’s right.  There are many predators lurking in the shadows ready to seize upon your open-ended life.  Social Media wants you to believe that your constant attention will help raise brand awareness.  Community organizers will ask you to volunteer.  Family members might see you as a daycare or pick-up service.  The local historical society will want you to volunteer your professional expertise.  A colleague will want to “pick your brain” while they strategize next steps.  Your family will want to assign you all the weekly errands, since you have flexibility in your schedule.  Say yes to some of it, but choose wisely, or you will lose your way.  “There is a well-known poster which people put on their walls that says, ‘Work hard and be nice to people,’” says Hodgkinson.  “That is  terrible business advice.  If you work hard and are nice to people, you will end up working sixteen hours a day while people make off with your money.  Better advice would be” “Be lazy and be a complete bastard”(188).

And finally…One last important NO:

No, I’m not going to fear rejection or failure.  If you’re going to learn to dish out the Nos, be ready to take them.  The life-serving economy is rife with rejection and failure.  Luckily, it’s where some of the greatest transformational energy can be uncovered.  

I face rejection and failure every day.  A customer complains about the croissants.  Another customer tells me my lamb shares are a rip off.  Mom and Dad tell me my cafe prices are wrong.  Ula gets frustrated and can’t learn her math.  Saoirse storms off after telling me I’m not hearing her out.   A reader criticizes a blog post. The farm bank account runs dry. Someone who considers themselves wiser and more experienced lectures me that my world view is futile, naive and hopeless  I get hate mail.

Taken the wrong way, all of this could stack up to make for a hearty bowl of despair to slurp down at bedtime.  But the transformational power of negative experience is pretty amazing.  Every failure, criticism, embarrassment and conflict is an opportunity for growth.  It’s also fodder for great conversation with Bob and the kids at cocktail hour.  

This doesn’t mean I don’t let these things get to me.  Actually, I let them pierce my soul and bring tears to my eyes.   I wail, hang my head in sorrow, even occasionally fling myself onto my bed and pound my pillows with a hearty toddler-sized temper tantrum.  

“Mom?”  Ula has grown fond of asking, “Is this one of your process things?  Where you act like everything’s horrible before you figure out how to fix everything and get all happy again?”

 That’s exactly what I do.  I’ve learned to let failures and rejection penetrate deeply.  Somehow, it’s purifying.  Because then, when it’s done, I manage to make jokes about it.  And then I manage to get some sleep.  And after a while — maybe it’s just a night, maybe it takes longer, I find the antidote I need, and it makes me stronger than before.

I figure out a better way to make the croissants.  I find a way to have constructive dialog with my customer about lamb shares, and then design a more effective marketing and communication strategy.  I dig into the data and explain the cafe revenues and costs more clearly to Mom and Dad.  I come up with a different way to explain Ula’s math.  I sit down and have a heart-to-heart conversation with Saoirse, and learn a lot more about her.  And me.  I deepen my understanding on a topic I’ve written about.  I think of a new tactic for managing the farm cash flow.  I use my adversary’s arguments to hone and refine my own.  I delete the hate mail and practice letting go, but remember to use it in my next funny story. And then I go for a walk, listen to the birds, watch the water flow, sip my morning coffee with Bob beside a forest stream and give thanks for the interesting problems that plague my life.  They are, after all, of my choosing.  

*Adapted from Shannon Hayes’ Redefining Rich: Achieving true wealth with small business, side hustles and smart living, from BenBella Books.  Copyright 2021.

 

Works Cited:

Hodgkinson, Tom. 2018. Business for Bohemians: live well, make money.

Plotkin, Bill. 2008. Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World. Novato, CA: New World Library.

Schulte, Brigid. 2014. Overwhelmed: work, love, and play when no one has the time. First edition ed. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ury, William. 2008. The power of a positive no: how to say no and still get to yes ; [Save the deal, save the relationship, and still say no]. Trade paperback ed ed.Bantam Trade Paperback Business. New York, NY: Bantam Dell.

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