How To Say No and Still Preserve Your Relationships

How To Say No and Still Preserve Your Relationships Earlier this week, I did my first ever Facebook Live event, which turned out to be both fun and productive. That’s because I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend, the fabulous Caroline Webb, and she shared some great actionable advice from her new book. Caroline is the author of ‘How To Have a Good Day’, and an expert in how people can use behavioral science to improve their everyday lives at work. Caroline has been doing this for over 15 years, first as a partner at McKinsey where she’s now a Senior Advisor, and now through her own company, as CEO of Sevenshift. Since the interview was 46 minutes long, I’ve included just one bite-sized segment of the interview transcript below. It contains my favorite piece of Caroline’s actionable advice from the Productivity section of her book where Caroline tells us how to create more time by learning how to say “no” something I need in particular! and to do it in a way that also preserves our relationships. Here’s the nugget on May:Caroline, I’d love for you to tell us some of your great wisdom and insight, particularly around how we “create more time”, or get more out of the time we have. And then some insights about our relationships; I have so many clients that say, “I could do so much, except for those other people getting in the way, what do we do about them?” Then, I find that so many of my clients are also dealing, underneath all of it, with confidence. We are all confident about some things, and not confident about others. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit about confidence. Then, everyone please stay until the end, because Caroline is going to share with us the two sure-fire ways to have a good day, or at least a better day then you were going to have, right? You promised you were going to share. Caroline:I did. I will. I promise. Yes. May:Yes, she always does what she says. You heard it here. Okay, so let’s start with this time element. As I said, you and I both coach a lot of clients, some of these are extremely senior people, as in, CEOs, or other C-Suite executives, and oftentimes, for my clients, they’re taking on new, bigger assignments, and they go from doing a huge job to doing an even huger job. And the one thing that they say is, “how do I create more time?” Caroline:Well, there are lots of different components to a good day. If you think about those days when you look back at the day and you feel great about it, it’s usually some combination of three things. One is that you feel like you have done things that matter to you, and second that you feel good about what you’ve done; whether it’s because you’ve had amazing conversations, or you’ve done your best possible thinking, or you’ve made a real impact. Then there is definitely something about whether you have enough enjoyment and energy left in the tank at the end of the day. You know, whether you feel like going through it all again the next day. So the book is gathered around seven building blocks that feed that definition of what a good day is, and sort of the general theme that sits behind all of my work, which is that we have a little bit more control than we tend to think. That’s why it’s a good place to start, to ask about how you create more time in a day, because it feels like it’s the most fixed thing ever. May:So, in the productivity section of your book, and there are over 100 great pieces of advice that you can just put into action immediately from the book, my very favorite of those 100 plus is something that I have a lot of trouble with. It’s about how to say no, and still maintain good relationships. Caroline:Yes, I think when we’re talking about those moments, those days, maybe those years, when we feel overloaded, we’ve got too much to do, it helps to really be aware that everything we say yes to is a no to something else, right? Because we do have limited hours in the day. May:I have to write that down, because it has to sink into my brain. You’re right. Caroline:So, sometimes, we fear saying no because we don’t want to have the difficult conversation, but as a result we’re saying no to something that actually we should really be saying yes to, because it’s more important. Maybe it’s more important to something that’s deeply meaningful for us, or maybe it’s more important for other good reasons. But it’s getting into the mindset that every yes has a no attached, and every no has a yes attached. May:Yin and yang. Caroline:Yes, and actually there is a way of saying no that deals with the reason that most of us avoid saying no, which is that we don’t like being unpleasant to people. Suppose you’ve committed to go to a meeting and then suddenly you have to pull out; you realize there’s just no way you can honor other commitments that are really, truly critical to you unless you extract yourself. But you think, “Oh, I don’t want to have that conversation.” There is a way of having the conversation, whether it’s over email or in person, which is kind of all but guaranteed to ensure that you have a better conversation, and it goes like this. The way it works is that, if you’re trying to pull out of that meeting, you normally say, “I’m so sorry,” imagine you’re typing the email. May:Yes, “huge apologies”. Caroline:“I’m so sorry, huge apologies, I’m so sorry, blah, blah,” the challenge with that is that what you’re doing is you’re subtly putting the other person’s brain on the defensive. When people are on the defensive, they are not going to respond in as expansive or generous or thoughtful a way. May:You’re right, of course not. I didn’t realize I was doing that. Caroline:So what you do instead is, first of all you start with warmth. You often forget to do this when you’re freaking out about saying no to someone. You start with, “I hope everything is coming together well for the meeting, it’s going to be really great, important, blah, blah, blah.” Then you say your ‘yes’, what is it you’re saying yes to? “It’s really important to me at the moment to…” I don’t know. What is your yes? May:Well, I was working on my book at that time. Caroline:Okay, right, so, “On my side, things are going great with the book, there is a lot going on, it’s quite intense, and no complaints, but it does mean,” and this is where your ‘no’ comes in, “It does mean that I’m having to make some tough choices about what I’m doing, and I’m so very sorry” â€" then you get to say sorry. May:So I get to say sorry? Caroline:You get to say sorry. May:But not first. Caroline:But just not at the top. May:Okay. Caroline:And then you end with warmth â€" again, we often forget to do that. Say, “I do wish you all the best. If there is anything I can do, if there is someone else I can send in my place, blah.” So it can be a tiny bit longer, but not that much longer. The trick is just that you don’t start with the negative. People often say to me, “Well, this positive no,” as it’s called, “Don’t people kind of know what you’re going to say?” And the answer is yes, probably, they’ve probably guessed that the reason that you’re getting in touch or that you’re talking to them is that you’re needing to extract yourself from a commitment. But the very fact that you start with something that is warm, and then you talk about something that is important to you, in a positive way, it can’t help but pique their interest. We know that that’s how the brain’s reward system works; it responds to a lot of things that are not at all what we’d normally think of as rewards, and it includes information and novelty. So, you pique someone’s interest. It’s not that they won’t be disappointed, it’s not that they’re not sorry that you can’t do this thing- May:Yes, exactly. Caroline:-but your ‘no’ lands in a brain that’s in a fundamentally different state, so to speak. May:Right, it’s open to that, and it’s open-minded. Caroline:It’s more open-minded, it’s what, in the book, I call ‘discovery mode’ rather than ‘defensive mode’. May:Ooh, I like that, discovery mode, yes. Yes. We should all be in discovery mode more of the time. Caroline:Yes, so discovery mode is when your brain is more focused on rewards than on threats, and then very subtly saying the things you’re excited about, even though it means you’re needing to say no, it’s enough to off-set the negativity. May:Yes, and I think also, I know that when people have to say no to me, it helps if they explain. If they just say ‘no’ then I have to guess; do they hate me? Is it that my thing is stupid? Whatever it is. So I think that might also help. Caroline:Absolutely, and you’re absolutely right, to explain. So the thing to try out is just to re-sequence your email, and not to start with ‘I’m’ sorry’. Absolutely say sorry, but just start in a different sequence. I often end up typing and having to like, space, space, space, where I add in. Start with warmth â€" what is it you’re saying yes to, and why is it important? What is it that you therefore, with regrets, with huge apologies, have to say no to, end with warmth. May:Yes. Terrific. So that’s my favorite tip. You should read her book and see what your favorite tip is. I’m dying to know. Watch the full interview where we talk about the following topics: Creating more time Through “single tasking” (5:20) By saying no in a way that preserves relationships (11:50) How to handle difficult people (17:20) How to feel and convey confidence (29:10) Two sure-fire ways to have a better day (38:20) Download the full interview transcript (PDF) Learn more about Caroline’s work here I hope you find these actionable ideas as useful as I did! Now, I know this is a different format from my usual blog posts, so leave me a comment to let me know what you think. And in the meantime, have a good day!