Can saying “No” help or hurt your work-life balance?

My son suddenly decided he loves that old Three Dog Night song “One [Is the Loneliest Number]” and I’ve been paying a bit closer attention to the lyrics as a result.

This line hit me the other day: “No is the saddest experience you’ll ever know.” And I thought to myself, “Are you kidding? ‘No’ is possibly the happiest experience some people will ever know.”

I’m talking in terms of what you say “Yes” and “No” to, in life in general and specifically when it comes to your work-life balance.

Granted, the first few times of saying “No” can be as stressful as anything you ever do. The folks at the Mayo Clinic realize this, and they’ve come up with a primer for saying “No” that’s perfectly straightforward.

That said, it might help for you to read a few role-playing examples, to see how saying “No” works in action, and why you can get away with it, with the right phrasing. Head over to the Real Simple website to check that out for yourself. (They supposedly have video on it there as well, but for some reason it wouldn’t load after about 10 minutes of waiting.)

Now, if you really want to get advanced in saying no, you can do something described in this blog post about saying “No” as a default response to whatever situation presents itself. The writer, Derek Sivers, relates this great little nugget of a story in there:

In June of 2003, Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people … My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do (x)?”, “Do you plan to add (y)?”. Finally Jobs said, “Wait wait – put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes *could* have. So do we. But we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.“

As with iTunes, so with your life and work. Say “Yes” to what’s most important.

Of course, you’ll have to decide what’s most important in your life. But that’s another conversation entirely.

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