A Spell to Expand Your Capacity for A Guiltless No

No is a big, dangerous, empowering word.

No allows you to protect your energy,

and direct it toward the projects and practices

that resonate for you.

No keeps you from wasting resources

on what everyone else wants us to do,

and gives us all permission to go all-in

on the things that bring us joy.

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Mentioned:

More Room at Home Declutter Coaching

Make Magic:

When you’re feeling guilt or shame about saying no,

remember that every Yes is a No to something else.

Reserving your yesses for what lights you up

allows you to show up in the world exactly as you want,

and deepens the impact of your energy output.

Transcript: A Spell to Expand Your Capacity for A Guiltless No

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here. 

Hello, my love. I'm glad you're here today, especially if you are just full of yeses. [laugh] Are you maybe one of those people who loves to say yes when someone asks you to do something, when there's a volunteer opportunity? Maybe you, like me, just really love to raise your hand, and really love to figure out how to make it work.

If that's you, I see you. I love you. I am you. And I know that as we progress through life, we find ourselves in a place where we have said yes to so much: yes to more responsibilities; yes to bigger roles; yes to relationships; maybe yes to kids; yes to pets; yes to plants. We have said so many yeses that our lives are quite, quite full.

Here we are growing. Here we are still wanting to say yes to new opportunities; wanting to say yes to new directions; wanting to have the energy for new things; and, yet, finding ourselves—you know, I don't even want to say it but I will say it. [laugh] I notice myself wanting to not say "burdened" or "weighed down" because I wish it didn't feel that way and, yet, I think for me and for many of us, that is the reality. We are weighed down, and it is time to learn how to say no.

So, that is what I have for you today. I have for you today a spell for expanding your capacity to say a guiltless no. So, I have to say, when I said that, my whole body got very excited. [laugh] So, I hope you are excited about this spell too, and I hope that it serves you.

So, even before we begin talking about how to say a guiltless no, I would love to just acknowledge how badly our culture wants us to say yes. We really are conditioned from the get-go to smile and say yes. You can think for your own self in your own upbringing, where did you learn that it is nice to say yes? Who taught you either overtly, directly, or by example that the way to move through life is to comply with other people's requests and other people's desires?

I know I definitely had examples of it, and I know that I learned from experience that when I said yes, when I figured out how to give people what they wanted, I was rewarded. Listen, that really worked for me—for a while. And/but, now, I am a grown-ass woman, and if I said yes to every single request that came across my desk, well, I mean, I just—I couldn't. I would…I could not possibly say yes to everyone and everything. 

And, very frankly, I am now less interested in what everyone else wants from me, and I am more committed to the truth. I believe this is a truth. You've heard me say versions of this. That when I do what I want to do, that is how I make my best contribution. When I do what I want to do, I have more energy, I have more impact, and all of what I'm doing is sustainable. 

If I'm saying yes to myself, I am helping so many more people than I am if I say yes to every request of me and my time and my energy. Yeah? So, I want to start with that foundation because this desire to say yes, it does not just sort of come from nowhere. It's not just, "Oh, yeah, I don’t know. That's just kind of how I am." 

No. You have been conditioned to be that way. And, hey, if you're listening to this podcast, it is because [laugh] when we say yes to everyone else, when we are busy fulfilling everyone else's desires—and I do want to state it that plainly—when we are busy fulfilling everybody else's needs and desires, we have less power. We have less self-directed agency. 

We are less dangerous to the all the systems and all the powers that be. We're compliant with them, and with what they are asking of us. So, let's just begin there with that understanding because that really is foundational. 

Now, I want to go straight into kind of the protocol or the process for saying the guiltless no. So, let's imagine that someone has made a request of you. This happened [laugh] to me the other day. I was at a parent meeting, and they needed a parent coordinator for this particular project. They actually needed several parent volunteers. 

They needed a fundraising coordinator. They needed a whole project coordinator. They needed a social coordinator. And can I tell you that I knew this was going to happen in this meeting. This request was coming. I knew it. And, still, I had to sit on my hands, and bite my lip to not just raise my hand, and say, "OK, I'll do it."

I was in that room, looking around at all of those other tired [laugh], tired parents, and feeling bad for all of us, and, yet, knowing that I could not in my best interests and, therefore, in the best interests of everyone I reach, I could not say yes. So, I'd love for you to think about some kind of area where you find yourself [laugh] just with this, like, impulse to say yes. 

It might be in your work. It might be in your community. It might be in a particular relationship. It might be with clients, might be with your kids—I don’t know—wherever it is, which is maybe all of the above [laugh], that you just really have this kind of knee-jerk impulse to say yes, or where you feel bad saying no. OK? 

So, get one of those places in mind here. It will help you as we go through the protocol for the guiltless no. OK. So, here's the very first thing I want to recommend. Create a buffer between their request and your response where you can just have a moment with yourself. This is number one. This is really important. Just get a little bit of time.

So, it can look like this. Someone can say, "Request, request of your energy. What do you say?" And you can say, "Whew, you know, I have a new agreement with myself that I wait 24 hours before I answer a request like this; something like that. You could also say, like, "Hmm, let me think about that, and get back to you," if you don't want to be so explanatory which, of course, you don't have to be.

So, giving yourself that buffer of time, and just making that a policy, "OK, this is a policy I have with myself," that gives you a moment to really be with the request, and to process it from a more self-centered, a centered-in-the-self place. So, how do you process it? 

Well, a first thing to do is to feel into it. And here's what I mean by that. Feeling into it is like asking our bodies for input on the answer we're about to give. And to do this, you have to sort of do it on the terms of the body, meaning, to get a body read, you can't just think in your mind about the request, right? You've got to put yourself imaginarily in the situation, right?

So, for example, with this parent committee thing, I can't just think in my mind, "Hmm, should I say yes to the parent committee?" No, that won't quite work. To give my body a chance to respond, I need to imagine myself in the situation where I am chairing the parent committee. So, I close my eyes, and imagine myself sitting down to input the parent emails into a master list. 

I imagine myself writing the parents. I imagine myself at my computer, right. I'm really picturing myself in this situation. I imagine my inbox pinging with responses from people. I imagine the teachers and the school coordinators, like, asking me for information.

[laugh] And I have to tell you, even just saying that, my whole body is like, "No!" [laugh] My gosh. Whew. That's OK, body, we didn't say yes. So, when I put myself in this situation, I start to notice what does my body say. 

And, generally speaking, a sense of sinking, a sense of contraction, for me, the telltale sign is my breath. My breathing gets really constricted if it's a no. It's almost like I'm frozen. And if it's a yes, I feel expansiveness. I feel an upwelling of excitement. My breath is very free and easy. 

So, you might even just press pause right here, and try that out with a place that you think you might want to say no, or even just with a recent request that's been made of you. Just try it out. Imagine yourself actually doing the thing. OK. You're actually going to the lunch that someone asked you to. You're sitting down across from the person, right? You imagine it, and then see what your body has to say.

As you can see, you wouldn't really be able to do that in the space of a quick conversation. You need that time buffer in order to be able to do a body check, a body check-in. OK. So, that's one way to see if the yes is a yes, or if maybe the knee-jerk to yes is actually masking a no, a felt no in your body. And I don't think—the body does not tend to lie. 

Here's another thing you can do. You can ask yourself, "What is my motivation for saying yes? Why would I say yes? Like, what do I really want here?" It may be that there are lots of reasons that have to do with other people's motivations, or that are kind of more vague, right? 

So, for my parent committee example, why would I say yes? Hmm, because it's important for parents to be involved in these kinds of activities. Because the school is understaffed, and they really need parental help, right? Because someone's got to do it. 

Notice that all of those reasons don't really have a lot to do with me personally, so why would I say yes? What's my motivation? What do I want here? And what do I want? I want to support my kid. I want to support the community. 

OK. Cool. Now, I've got my own motivation, what I really want here, what is another way I could do that? What is a better way I could do that? Finding my own motivation is so important because when I find my own motivation, then I'm acting not out of expectation, not out of conditioning, not out of something that's pulling me outside of myself, but I am acting out of integrity with myself. Yeah?

And from that place, when I'm clear on why I want to say yes, I can ask, "OK, how else could I do that? How else could I contribute here? How else could I support? What is a way that feels better to me? What is a way that doesn't make me want to crawl out of my skin?" [laugh] Yeah?

From that place, I get to be creative. From that place, any yes that I say is not stretching me beyond who I want to be and what I want to do. I want to acknowledge that so many of us are in situations and organizations that are under-resourced, vastly under-resourced. And, so, often, what we do is we, ourselves, spread ourselves as thinly as we can just to try to do the resourcing ourselves, to pour our own hearts and minds and time into these projects, into these organizations, into these situations, to try to make up for the under-resourcedness of them. 

And what I find, for myself, for my clients, is that oftentimes that is just not sustainable. That has people exhausted, and spread way too thin, and, you know, therefore, not doing the best job. And, by the way, that's important too, is to imagine, OK, if I say yes, what is that going to look like? If I'm very honest with myself, what will that look like? 

So, for me, if I said yes to being the fundraising coordinator, what would that really look like? And I will tell you (a) that would look like a lot of crankiness for me, resentment, and martyrdom, and crankiness, irritability. I would be annoyed. I would be like, "Well, no one else volunteered so it had to be me because it's always me." Like, good is not going to come from that place. So, I'm really honest with myself about that. 

But when I remember, you know what, that is not the only option here, there are other ways to contribute. There are other ways to say yes. There are other things to say yes to. Right? This thing is not going to work for me. But I could think of something else. Maybe there's something else I could do. That is the way that we evolve the whole situation. 

In the case of this project, it's very cool, actually. Like, my daughter and a bunch of her classmates are going to Colombia. They're doing this exchange with a school in Colombia, so we get to have a little girl from Colombia here, and then my daughter gets to go in the spring. And, of course, that costs money and, of course, we're trying to come together to do some fundraising and some project managing to make this work for the group.

And when I thought about being the fundraising chair [laugh], I was like, "Oh, no, that would—no, no, that's a no. That's a no." But when I thought about being in charge of a specific fundraiser, period, that got me kind of excited because I had lots of ideas, and I thought, "Oh, yeah, OK, that would feel good." You see?

So, the way I was able to come to the thing that was a yes for me was by giving myself a moment to say, "OK, why would I say yes? What do I want? What do I like to do? What is my motivation? And then what's a better way to do that?" And I guarantee you that my one little fundraiser is going to make a bunch of money, and will be more contained and more potent, and my whole self will be in it, and therefore it will make a bigger contribution.

There are other places where I was getting really inundated with requests just for my time, like, just to connect, you know, that sort of like, "Can I pick your brain?" sort of situation. And, you know, partly this podcast is a response to that. Like, no, I don't feel good saying yes to those requests. Yes, I want to give you my thoughts, and I want to give you my attention, and I want to give you my time, but there are too many of you to do that in little 30-minute Zooms. 

And, so, I pour my whole self here into this podcast. I say a blanket no to brain-picking sessions and, instead, I take my brain, and I make it available for harvest here in these podcasts, yeah? So, I digress or I elaborate fully. [laugh] I guess it's not digression. It's full elaboration. 

Getting into your motivation for why would you say yes, seeing what is conditioning, and then what is actual desire, what's your motivation for saying yes, and then how else could I do that? How else could I contribute? What else could that look like?

And, my love, if there is no answer, if it's like, you know what, I ju…I don't really want to say yes, there's no motivation for me to say yes to this, then, OK, it's a no. How do we make that no guiltless? Two things. 

Number one, I already mentioned. Imagine yourself in the situation where you have said yes. Be honest with yourself. How will you show up? What will your vibe be? What will that look like? What will it do to your health? What will it do to the way you're able to show up for all your other commitments?

What will it do to your mood? Being very honest with yourself, OK, if I say yes when I have no personal motivation, when I have no stake in it, am I really going to be there? I don't think so. It won't really be me. And if I'm not in it, and if I'm not getting anything out of it, it is only draining me, and that will be the result. 

If I say yes to chairing the committee when I have no desire to do that, when that does not feel right to me, I will not be an effective or energetic committee chair. I won't be who I want to be in the world. That's really important. 

You know what comes to mind is I've been working a little bit with this amazing, like, home organizing, decluttering coach. Her name is Candice Shakur, and I will totally put her contact info in the Show Notes because she's wonderful. 

And one of the things she's been helping me with is decluttering my closet, my clothing especially. For some reason, it is [laugh] really challenging for me to be honest about and let go of clothes. It's hard for me to say a guiltless no when I'm trying to evaluate my closet, yeah?

And she asked me this question when we were going through my sweaters. [laugh] She said, well, she had me sort things. First of all (a) she did what I'm advising you to do. She gave me time with each decision. So, when we started, we started by sorting all my sweaters into a clear yes, a clear no, and a maybe. 

And, sure enough, the largest pile was the maybe pile. So, I had a little bit of time with the maybes. I went through the maybes a second round, and one of the questions she asked me is, "OK, when you imagine where you're going, when you imagine who you're becoming, does this sweater feel right with that?"

Oh, my gosh, that was so helpful for me, and I wonder if it will be a helpful question here for you also. When I think about where I'm going, when I think about who I am becoming, what I want to do more of, does a yes to this request go with that? Does it coordinate with that, or is this actually something I've outgrown? Is this something that doesn't really match the vibe I'm wanting to have in the world? Isn't that a cool question?

By the way, I ended up with, like, six sweaters at the end of that. Like, I ended up with a cavernous sweater drawer [laugh], which I love, which I love, and which gradually and beautifully is now slowly becoming populated with sweaters that do suit the person I am becoming, and the vibe I am wanting, yeah?

And maybe this is the last thing to remind you. Every yes we say is also a no. Hmm? In my sweater drawer, if I say, "Yes, I'll keep these sweaters that I bought, and never really liked because I did buy them, and I did spend money on them, and it would be a waste to let them go," when I say yes to this sweater, I say no to a spacious drawer that I can actually look through. 

I was going to say I say no [laugh] to a new sweater that would suit me even better, but that's actually not true. I will just pile that new sweater onto the pile. I will just stuff it into the drawer. I will wear it all the time, but I will have to fight through the drawer to find it, and to store it. [laugh] Right?

Oh, and then that's what the commitments feel like also, right? If I keep saying yes to everything, listen, I'm Natalie Miller. I love to say yes. I am a big yes to life, and so will I really say no to this upcoming opportunity that I want? No, I won't. I'll say yes. But when I say yes, I will have to cram it into a life that is full of all these other commitments, and it won't have room, and it'll all be jumbled, and it will get disorganized so easily. 

I don’t know. Is this metaphor working for you? It's working for me. [laugh] OK? So, when I say yes to something, I'm also saying no. I'm saying a no, and that's important to say, OK, if I say yes to this, what am I saying no to? And, sometimes, it's like, well, I'm saying no to my Thursday night, any spaciousness there. Sometimes, it's, well, I'm saying no to the spaciousness I've been trying to cultivate. 

Hey, if I'm honest, I'm probably saying no to myself sustenance practices because, for me and for almost every client I have, the first thing to go when we are over-busy, when our schedules are over-stuffed, the first thing to go is the workout, the meditation practice, the morning walk, the journaling. When I say yes to something, I will be saying no to something else, even if it is I'm saying yes to all the sweaters, and I'm saying no to a spacious drawer that stores them easily. 

So, I hope that this combination, number one, being very realistic and honest about how you will show up when your whole self really isn't into the yes you're about to say, that it's actually—it's not going to be the best version of you, I hope that alleviates any guilt you might feel around saying no. I hope that being honest about what you'll be saying no to, if you say this yes, I hope that alleviates the guilt of saying no. And, to come full circle back to the very beginning of our episode, remembering that when we say no, especially those of us who are conditioned so fully to say yes, when we say no, we are forging, we are co-creating a different kind of culture. 

We're co-creating a culture where yes is not expected. We are leading by example, saying no, and this is so important. I really mean this. When you say no, you are saying no for all the yes-sayers out there. When you find a more aligned, a more integrated way to contribute, or when you opt fully out of what does not interest you, of what you do not want, then you take all of your energy, and you channel it into that which really does make a difference, and makes a difference in a way that does not drain you dry, and run you ragged. 

When you do it for yourself, you do it for all of us. It is actually so generous of you to start to move through the world in this way because you become an example, and you forge a new path, and you get creative, and you bring your unique contribution forward. And that is so much more fruitful than the knee-jerk yes.

Whew. All right, my love, I hope that this episode is inspiring you to make time for your decisions around the requests that are made of you, to feel into them, to center in to your own motivations, and to say no without any guilt and with full conviction that your no is also a yes to your becoming self. OK. Thank you for listening. Bye for now. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. 

Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time. 

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