Bloom Your Mind

Ep 146: Saying No to Say Yes

• Marie McDonald

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The more we put ourselves out into the world, the more people come to know us by the value we add—and the more they begin to depend on us. This is beautiful…until it isn’t. Because over time, the value we add and the strengths we command become commodities people want more and more of. Eventually, we’re faced with a flood of requests: friends needing support, family projects that need a helpful hand, community support requests, work opportunities, and so much more. For many of us, our hearts want to say yes to all of these things, but everything we say yes to means we’re saying no to everything else. 

In this episode, I offer a perspective and tools to navigate this tension between wanting to give and needing to protect our capacity. Because hey, we’ve all been there. The month I said yes to too many things and eroded my margins landed me in bed with migraines, a cancelled videographer session, and a good, hard look at the greater contribution I had sacrificed by saying yes to so many small ones. 

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

  • Why every yes is also a no—and every no is a yes to something else, though we often don’t see it in the moment 
  • How leaning into this concept makes saying no much easier 
  • The concept of a high-quality no 
  • Using values, Regenerative Design, and priority thinking to help differentiate your yeses from your no’s
  • Examples of the areas my students struggle with the most, and the payoff they experience when they start to use this thinking 

We also dive into the truth that saying no with love, clarity, and strength doesn’t create rejection—it creates relief, respect, and space. A “high-quality no” (as Eckhart Tolle would call it) is contagious in the best way: it shows others what’s possible when we live in alignment with our commitments to ourselves.

By the end of this episode, you’ll be challenged to ask yourself: Every time I say no, what yes am I creating space for? It might just be more joy, more peace, and more energy to make your own ideas for how the world can be a better place, real.

Mentioned in this episode: Eckhart Tolle 

How to connect with Marie:

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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hello everybody, and welcome to episode number 146 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. It is the beginning of October where I am right now, and October is my daughter's birthday month, and y'all, she is about to be a teenager. She is gonna be 13, and it's such a big deal. Talking to my husband, talking to her, and we have a month of celebration planned because I believe in celebrating the shit out of big transitions and milestones like this. And we started, you know, she loves music, and I love following my kids' passions instead of having them follow mine. And so she really, really loves music. And I have been taking her to live music a lot. So I took her to a concert last week, super amazing, super fun. And in the middle of the concert, there was this energetic song, and you heard a pop, and all of these paper hearts came floating down into the crowd. And I grabbed a handful of them and stuck them in my backpack. And then this week, I wanted to give her her second big gift, which is another concert. So I taped the hearts from that first concert in a trail from the front door through our house and around the corner. And I had a picture there of Chapel Rone. I'm taking her to see Chapel Rhone, she loves her, um, on the wall with like thought bubbles saying, I wish Luca would come and see me at my concert in LA. And she came in the front door and she followed all of the hearts and she found it and she was all excited. And I've gotten a couple messages from friends who I've sent the video to, and you know, I was like, look, we're going. And they said, she's so lucky to have you as a mom. And I have this feeling when people say that to me, that is that I am so lucky to have her as a kid. I am so honored to have my children as my children. And it is such the authentic, real response that I have when people say stuff about, like, you're a great mom, or you know, good job. I feel like just honored that I get to be theirs. And it just made me think about how much I think like that with my husband, with my kids, with my friends. It is my go-to thought in reaction to thinking about them, is that it is a deep, deep honor in this life that I get to have a seat in the front row with these people that are so amazing to me, you know, that I get the deep honor of seeing them in their journey and supporting them in their journey and laughing with them and loving them and seeing them up close. And I just wanted to share that because it really I think makes small moments easier sometimes when we're annoyed with someone or things are hard, just to remember the honor of being their person. It can kind of lighten that and remind us sometimes about why we're doing it all, you know? And also it just recenters us around the opposite of taking someone for granted. It's like in this one beautiful life that our people in our life have, we get to be there right next to them. We get to have their back. They get to have ours. We get to experience this joy of this life with them in the big moments and the small moments. So I don't know. I just thought I'd share that with you because it's been on my mind this week and bringing me joy. All right. Well, let's move on to our topic for today, which is saying yes and saying no, and how every time you say yes, you are also saying no. And every time you say no, you are also saying yes. Because the more you put yourself out there into the world, the more people come to know who you are and what they can depend on you for. They want to depend on you for more and more things. The more we do this, the more requests come our way for ways to spend our time and our energy and our love and our efforts. In the bloom room and the moxie mastermind, we work on making ideas real. You and I are always making ideas real all day, every day, whether we realize it or not. And in the bloom room and moxie mastermind, we do that really intentionally. We focus our energy on the ideas we most want to focus on, we most want to make real. And we, as we're meeting and we're talking about these ideas we're making real, there's a pattern that comes up for people. And it's this pattern is the challenge that comes with saying no to things in order to make room for the ideas we are saying yes to. So today we're taking a deep dive into how to frame your thinking around saying big, juicy, high-quality no's without the weird vibes. No weird vibes on it, guys. All right. For me, there are always friends and family who need support. There are always things my kids want to make or do or experience. Just last month, I had an example of a friend who needed my help, a person in my community who needed advice. There were a couple of projects that were sent my way. There was a situation where my direct family needed help. I get requests for these types of things constantly and consistently. And here's the deal: my body wants to say yes to all of the things. Do you feel me? I want to say yes because I want to help. And because helping and supporting and connecting and loving people is really in line with my values. And when I see something that's a need that fits the skills that I have, I want to help. And just last month, I ended up saying yes to a lot of these things. And what happened is even though I had sort of budgeted out my time, I was only saying yes to enough things that allowed me to still barely pull off the things I had committed to already to myself. The new commitments, the things I said yes to ate up my margins. It ate up my buffer time. And then life happened. I got migraines and I had to actually reschedule the things that I had committed to for me. I had a videographer that was scheduled to come over for three days to re-record some of my content because I'm busting it out all fresh and reorganized and in a way that people can actually work through themselves. I had been working towards these three days with my videographer for a long time. But because I allowed that buffer to get eaten up, I had to cancel them and reschedule them, which means that I am not showing up for my own project because I said yes reactively to the things other people needed. So saying yes to all those requests means saying no to the time I had set aside to refine my program content. The videographer was going to make these new courses clean, streamlined, refined, and that people can walk through at their own pace, making the work that I believe in, that I have dedicated my idea that I'm blooming in the world, that I'm making real, my moxie that I'm bringing into the world. I'm trying to make it more accessible to more people so I can help, which makes my contribution much larger in the world. And it also makes my connection to people more deep because I'm connected to more people. So connection and contribution are two of my top values, my top five values. But I have to say no to contributing on a one-on-one level sometimes, in order to say yes to that higher level contribution. I have to say no in order to say yes. No to the thing in front of me to say yes to the big thing I'm committed to for myself, for my contribution to the world. But it's tricky to figure out what is what sometimes. So there are two tools I use to help me do that. But before getting into that, we're going to take a look at how this shows up for my students who are facing this all the time too. So in the bloom room, other students that I have outside of the bloom room, here's some examples of how they're facing this. One was sharing that she feels bad for saying no to friends and family and coworkers in order to create self-care time for yoga, for podcast listening, for walks, for thinking, for meditation, for doing her bloom room work. Another client, another student, has a hard time saying no to opportunities where he can help keep the peace at work, with friends, with family. But saying yes and always stepping in to keep the peace eats up a lot of his time and energy. So he's not working on his other projects that are a higher contribution. A few people have talked about feeling conflicted around setting boundaries when there's a conflict with their primary partner. Like they don't want to leave an argument or a rough moment unsettled, even when it would allow themselves to follow through on their commitment to their own projects and their own work. Have you been there? I have. I can totally relate because it takes effort. It's hard to say, I love you, you're important to me, and I need to work now. So we can talk about this some more later when I get home. It requires us to manage our own emotions and to set strong boundaries. And then another client set boundaries with her family at a special event, but her family's not used to her setting those boundaries and her saying no. Saying no to her family to say yes to her own well-being and self-care. So those are some examples of how this has shown up recently. This is just recent examples for a bunch of my clients, my students. So we know that everything we say yes to means we're saying no in that moment to everything else. Like if we decide to go to a party, that means that in that moment, by saying yes to spending our time and energy at that event with that group of people, we are by default also saying no to everything else that we could be doing with our time during that party. You with me? So by saying yes to going on a run, we're saying no to relaxing. By saying yes to a job that we take where we spend the hours of our day, we're saying no to all the other jobs that we could have. By saying yes to a relationship, whether that's a primary relationship or friendship, we have that much less space for other relationships. I said yes to my husband, to marrying him, which meant I was saying no to every other person in the world that I will meet in my lifetime that I could marry. So when we say yes to something, it means we're saying no to everything else. And here's the magic the opposite is also true. Are you ready for this? This is where it gets fun. Because every time we say no to things, we are also saying yes to something that we choose to prioritize. So in the example that I started out with, I told you that there are two things that help me differentiate between the things that we can say yes and no to. I'm actually gonna expand this to three. First of all, number one, when something comes our way and we have to decide yes or no, what's it gonna be? Are we saying yes or we saying no? We can first ask ourselves, it is in is it in line with our values? And if so, we move on to the two tools. If it's in line with our values, it's something we would like to say yes to. Then we ask ourselves, is it regenerative in the ways that we want it to be? And third, if it is, it is in line with our values and it is regenerative, we move on to number three, which is is it in line with what we've decided to prioritize right now? So let's walk through those three one by one. Number one, is it in line with our values? All right. In the example I started off the episode with, I was getting requests like a friend sitting me down on the couch and saying, help me. I have a challenge, I have a conflict that's going on right now and I need some help. Can you coach me through how to communicate with someone that's important to me? I also had a person that I know that approached me about an idea for going into business together. I also had a couple people in the community last month that wanted my help on something because my skills matched the need. I had a crisis in a community that my family is a part of, a crisis going on that directly impacts the well-being and future of my own family. I saw people not speaking up about this crisis and they asked me to speak up on their behalf. So all of these things were in line with my values, every single one of them, had contribution and connection as part of the things that people were asking me for. And so when it's like this, when it's hard to determine what saying yes means, because they're all in line with your values, which things to say yes to, which things to say no to, if they're all in line, we go on to number two. Are they regenerative? So let's review regenerative by saying that. What I mean is our time, our energy, our attention are our greatest resources. Regenerative design means that our energy, our time, and attention that our limited resources as well as our greatest resources, we're gonna put whatever we choose to put them into is only worth it if we get the same or more energy back from the thing we're putting energy into. And not only the same or more amount of energy, but also the type of energy we're getting back has to be quality energy. It has to be in the form of something we value. So let's go back to that list of things that were asking for my attention last month. Number one, some I said yes to, like, for example, the friend sitting me down on the couch saying, help me, because I love the reciprocal nature of relationships and being there for each other when it's someone you really care about that is reciprocal. It was a reciprocal relationship. So I wanted to pour into it like it pours into me. It was worth it. Some of them I said yes to, for instance, the one about the community that directly relates to my family. I had to put a ton of energy into it, but that community is vital to my family's well-being. So I chose to do that because it needed me. And the energy I get back out of it is super important. Some of the requests, I said yes, but I can do that in three weeks. People are not always happy with that, especially when it's like three or four weeks. But for some of them, that was the answer because they were gonna be regenerative, but they were gonna take the time and energy that I needed for other things that were more prioritized, which we're gonna get into next. So I said yes, but not yet. And then some I said no to. For instance, that person that was interested in going into business with me that would have required a ton of energy to investigate and launch. And I just don't have that energy right now. So now when my clients really get this and they get this idea, they start paying more attention to where they're spending their energy and whether it's regenerative and which things are giving them energy back. They also often start seeing how much of their time and energy and focus is going to random things that people are requesting of them. They're like, why am I even saying yes to this? Sometimes we say yes because of old beliefs about ourselves, like we're only of value when we're serving or helping. So when we start to see these things, we often start thinking, whoa, yo, this is my life. I want to spend the hours and days and minutes of the time that I have in this body on this planet doing one of three things. Number one, spending time with people I love and that bring me joy. Those are called regenerative relationships. Number two, doing something that brings me joy, pleasure, ease, that refills my cup, makes me feel present and happy and like I'm taking care of myself. Those are regenerative actions and habits. Number three, working on projects and bringing ideas to life that make me feel like I'm contributing to the world from my truest self and my passions. I'm in the zone, I'm making the world a better place. Those are called regenerative ideas where your passion meets the world's need. So, in order to prioritize these relationships, these habits and activities and these ideas, we got to make room by clearing out all the stuff that's currently taking up our time and energy. And we have to prioritize what we're gonna focus on, which is number three. So if the things that are taking asking for your attention are yes, in line with your values and yes, regenerative, both, then it's time to prioritize what we want to focus on first. In the bloom room, we prioritize either one or two things every 90 days, and we're gonna say no to everything that doesn't carry those one or two things forward so that we can say yes over and over again for 90 days to those one or two things. We have to start saying no to everything else, saying no to say yes. One of my clients was feeling bad because she was saying no more often to make room for three things a week for herself. She's so used to taking care of everybody else, her family, the people that are dependent on her in her job, that she decided I'm gonna have some friend time, some exercise time, and some mental wellness time every week. And when she makes time for those three things, she's present, she's happy. She doesn't try to control things or other people. She's flexible. It's the most regenerative thing that she can do, but she has to say no to things to make room for it. Because every time she says no, she's also saying yes. Every time you say no, you are also saying yes. Every time you say a high quality no, that comes from Eckhart Tolle, you are also creating space for your yeses. Every time you say no to a request of your time, you're creating time for something that is a yes for you. Yes to things that are regenerative, that are reciprocal, that give you energy. You're saying yes to the things you've chosen to prioritize. You're saying yes to being your best self. You're saying yes to being fulfilled at the end of your life, happy with how you spent your time here. You're saying yes to trusting yourself to follow through on what you prioritize. You're saying yes to being a badass and not people pleasing. You're saying yes to being in charge of your own life, your own time, your own future. And every time you do that, you're in touch with your own moxie, your own spunk, your own authentic, amazing energy and determination to live life on your own terms. Every no is a yes. So here's my challenge to you this week, my friends. Every time you say no this week, ask yourself, what did you just say yes to? Every time you say no, what space did it create for you to say yes to what you really want? This will bring more joy, more peace, more time, more energy to make your ideas real. And guess what? The people experiencing your no, the ones you're saying no to, will be inspired when you're giving them a high quality no. You can feel the difference. When you're not like given a condescending no, I ain't got time for you, no. It's not a I can't be bothered, no. It's a no, I have a different commitment. That no does not feel like rejection. It feels contagious. It feels healthy, it feels inspiring, it feels like a relief to people that you have the boundaries and the strength to only say yes when you mean it. So say no this week. Say no and mean it. Say no with strength and love. Make it a high-quality no and notice what yes that no has created space for. That's what I've got for you today, and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.