REPEAT AFTER ME: NO!

I often think that if I never learned to say “no”, it would have been the death of me.

People MUST learn to say "no". Sure, if you have nothing better to do, then you can help out. But if you are already committed to something, why would you have time to solve somebody else’s problems? Everybody wants to help, but everybody also has limits. Do you know your limits? If you do know your limits, it means that you finally learned to say "no".

I was so frustrated during my first few years of teaching. I had so many responsibilities and I felt like I had so much going on that I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I learned a little trick that saved my life and was the salvation of my own sanity: I learned to say “no”. It was very difficult to do the first time because I was so used to saying “yes.” But during my fourth year of teaching, after pumping myself up to say “no” for the first time in my career, a nice lady asked me if I could help tutor her child. She said he was struggling in his math class and that she would really appreciate it if I could help. After babbling for about two minutes with a bunch of stutters, I finally got the point across: sorry, but I can’t do it. This moment saved my life.

If you fail to learn to say “no”, you will end up being a teacher who complains about all the work you have to do. You complain about how much grading you have, how many students you have, how many parent emails you have, etc. But in reality, the only thing that this accomplishes is to demonstrate your inability to control your variables. You are demonstrating your inability to handle your responsibilities that YOU agreed to do. If you have too much going on, stop, analyze the situation, and control your variables.

If you are already in a commitment that you can’t control, then either pass that responsibility on to someone else, or just suck it up and learn to say “no” next time. If you are still complaining about the SAME variables a year later, you are not only demonstrating a lack of control, you are also demonstrating a lack of wisdom because you aren’t learning from your failures.

You are bound to make some people upset if you say “no” to certain requests. Sometimes, I’m even upset with myself because I can’t do more. However, the best way you can make a bunch of people happy is to actually do what you promised to do. Fulfilling commitments you have already made, and doing them well, will turn a lot of upset people into some of your biggest fans.