You have more clarity than you think
Many of the women we work with feel overwhelmed by competing demands.
A single human can’t meet the demands you carry. The people asking for things, the projects to move forward or the emails haunting your inbox. It all feels like too much.
No matter what you focus on, guilt plagues you. You feel the weight of the things not done and beat yourself up about how little you do to the standard you expect of yourself.
That’s only at work. Life is a lot more than work, despite it not always feeling that way. You have a community to foster, romantic partnerships to tend to and kids who need your care. The interests and desires in your heart don't get attention.
How to meet your demands
The short answer is you can’t achieve all you demand of yourself. The longer answer comes in the form of a story with a client.
I’ve been working with a client to get clear about what she needs to say no to. She's lost her sanity trying to do it all. It's taking a toll.
She manages an important division of a large technology company. She's sitting on a pile of more than 10 priorities. All important and all understaffed. Understandably, she feels the pressure.
Week after week she’s laid out the priorities with her boss, requesting guidance on where to focus. The answer is always everywhere. She leaves those meetings without the clarity she seeks.
Eliminate some of the demands
I asked this client to experiment with me.
If she had to say no to half of the priorities, what wouldn't make the cut?
In what felt like no time, she had her answer. It was clear and reasoned with logic. I see this all the time.
Knowing what you want or need to say no to is not the same as knowing how to communicate a no. We conflate the two.
What makes a no hard to identify
Patriarchy conditions women to be nice and polite, even at the cost of our own sanity. Society derives our value based on how we serve others.
The pull of that conditioning disrupts our ability to even identify a no. The fear about who we'll let down and the value we'll lose as a result overwhelms our system.
I want you to set aside the question of how. Challenge yourself to identify your nos.
How to identify your nos
Force yourself to eliminate a percentage of your work. Like with my client above, use a forcing function. If you had to say no to 25% of your work, what would you cut?
Know what a yes looks like. Write a list of requirements for any task, project or initiative to be a yes for you. Cross reference your work to that list. These yeses often make the no more obvious.
Track your energy. What gives you energy, and what depletes your energy? Different things affect each of us differently. What drains your energy might not drain someone else’s. Someone else might be better suited for something you have on your plate.
Support your future vision for yourself. When you know the direction you want to guide your career, you know which items don't jive with your future vision. What are you doing right now that you don’t want to be doing in the future?
Give others an opportunity. You’re likely doing things other people can do. They might not do them as well as you would, but identify those things anyway. A guideline I use a lot with clients is that anything someone else can do at 80% of the caliber you can do needs to go.
What unfolds when you can see the nos
Like it did for my client, clarity on what a no looks like often provides a boost in motivation to say no. And most of the time, saying no requires a lot less context than we imagine. “No” is a complete sentence.
If you want to be generous, try coupling your no with where you will focus instead. Name your yeses to garner support for your decision.
Call for reflection:
What would your life look like if you invited the option of saying no?
Shine On,
Alicia