Why You Keep Saying Yes to Things You Don't Want
Somewhere on your calendar this week there's probably something you didn't really want to say yes to.
Maybe it's a call with someone who asked for your time, and you couldn't find a good enough reason to say no.
Maybe it's something bigger. The candidate you were on the fence about and hired anyway.
The investor you didn't really want as a partner who was willing to give you the money after the ones you wanted said no.
Or maybe it's the path itself, raising venture capital because that's just the way it's done.
Each of those yeses felt reasonable in the moment. There was a decent argument for every one of them.
But forcing yourself to do things you don't want to do drains a lot of energy. It shows up as frustration, and eventually as burnout. I see it constantly: people who are incredibly busy, and yet they keep saying yes to more.
It's a great question to ask yourself: What has you say yes to things you don't really want to do?
Why We Default to Yes
There are a couple of answers most people discover.
Sometimes it's people-pleasing. Someone asks for a raise, a task, or an hour of your time, and you say yes because you don't want to disappoint them or have them be angry with you.
Sometimes it's the voice in your head telling you what you should do. That voice started as an externally imposed idea of the right way to live, probably from your parents or some other source, and over time it became an internalized voice bullying you: "You should do that. That's what good founders do."
Sometimes it's fear of letting go. If I don't do it, it won't get done, or it won't get done well.
And sometimes it's almost like guilt: if I don't like doing it, it's not fair for me to give it to somebody else. What you fail to realize is that one man's heaven is another man's hell. We have different preferences, different talents, different gifts.
That guilt often points to the belief that success requires suffering. There's this sense that you have to do all the hard stuff you don't want to do, because that's how you earn it. So you keep saying yes to the grindy things and tell yourself, well, that's just life, or that's just the reality of building a startup.
You probably recognized yourself in at least one of these. And they all create the same problem: with so much noise about what you should do, it gets harder to hear the wisest decision for you and your company, the one aligned with what you actually want.
It reminds me of a metaphor I use with my clients. Imagine a glass jar with water and a bunch of sand in it. It's murky, and you want it to be clear, so you shake it up. Of course, that just makes it murkier. The only way to get clarity is to set the jar down and let the sand settle.
All that pressure to say yes, to please everyone, to do it all, to get every decision right, is the shaking.
What settles into view when you stop is what you actually want.
So how do you set the jar down?
Go on a No Diet to Find Your Real Yeses
A real yes has a distinct feeling. The Conscious Leadership Group calls it a whole body yes: your head, your heart, and your gut all say yes. You know it as a hell yes, that feeling of being lit up about a possibility. Many of your yeses probably don't feel like that.
There's a practice I learned from them for discovering which of your yeses are real. It's called going on a no diet.
Switch your default to no. For a period of time, say no first, at least inside your own mind, to every request that comes your way. A meeting, a task, a decision your team wants you to make. Then sit with the no.
Notice what arises. If you feel anger, you actually wanted it. Anger is the energy of wanting and of boundaries, so when you deny yourself something you have a real yes to, it flares up. If you feel relief, it was never a real yes. And if you feel fear or sadness, look closer. Often that's the exact feeling you were about to say yes in order to avoid.
Don't confuse fear with a no. You can have a whole body yes and be scared at the same time. I'm publishing a book soon, and I'm scared people won't like it. If being scared meant you don't have a whole body yes, you'd never do anything courageous. The things that scare you and that you really want to do generally lead to the most growth.
Tell the people around you what you're doing, so your no's don't catch them off guard or get taken the wrong way.
The radical way to live this is to treat any no as a veto. If your head, your heart, or your gut says no, it's a no.
That's hard, because sometimes the intellect makes a great case for settling. But if you notice yourself doing that, settling for yeses that aren't whole body yeses, look for the limiting belief underneath. It's usually some version of "I can't have it all."
Because if you believed you could find a whole body yes, why would you ever settle for one you don't?
What Happens When You Stop Settling
Every fear-based story your mind makes up about what will happen when you start only following your whole body yes turns out, in my experience, to be generally the exact opposite of what people find when they actually do it. They end up more successful, not less.
I keep seeing a theme with my clients: when they surrender and let go of trying to control everything, life unfolds even more incredibly than anything they could have created while planning and controlling. Michael Singer wrote a whole book about living this way called “The Surrender Experiment,” and it's inspiring for a lot of them.
On the surface, a no diet and a surrender experiment might sound like opposites. One is about refusing what comes to you, the other about accepting whatever life brings.
But they're both ways of taking your fear-based mind out of the driver's seat, so you can sense what's actually wanting to happen through you. And your whole body yeses are one of the clearest signals of exactly that.
The no diet is how the jar settles enough for you to see which direction life is inviting you to surrender to.
The world is so vast, and there are so many possibilities. So notice if you carry any limiting belief that you can't have life be absolutely exquisite, exactly the way you want it. Because you can.
You can truly live life from aliveness, and at least 80% of the time say yes only to the things you have a whole body yes to.
I love this question: What are you gonna do with your one wild and precious life?
Because your yeses are how you answer it.
With love,
Dave Kashen
P.S. Enrollment for the third annual Sun Valley Founders Retreat (January 20th-24th) is now open. Four days of deep inner work with eleven other founders, releasing the patterns that have you saying yes to things you don't really want. If you notice a whole body yes, even a scared one, that's worth trusting. Click Here To Learn More And Apply >>
