Why Do I Always Say Yes at Work?

It’s 4:50 on a Friday. Your boss leans into your office and says, can you take this on? I need it for Monday. And before you’ve even had a chance to think about it, you hear yourself say, of course, not a problem. If you’ve ever typed “why do I always say yes at work” into a search bar, that’s the moment I want to stay in, because something happened in your body right before the thought fired that led you to say yes, even though you wanted to say no. The short answer: You always say yes at work because of a belief you’ve carried since childhood: if I say no, they’ll stop seeing me as someone they can count on. Your nervous system can’t tell a boss from a parent who sent you to your room, so it runs the same fear loop, and the overcompensation that follows leads to burnout. What happens in your body right before you say yes at work? Something physical happens before the yes, and it happens before the thought that fires it. Maybe there’s a drop in your stomach, maybe your shoulders come up, or maybe the words tumble out of your mouth so fast you don’t notice anything at all. If you can’t name a signal yet, that’s okay, because most of us were never trained to notice them. What you’re feeling in that second is your nervous system protecting you. The question I want to raise is: from what? Why do I always say yes at work, even when I want to say no? You say yes because underneath your “of course, no problem” there’s a belief about what happens if you say no. For a lot of us, it sounds something like this: if I say no, they’ll stop seeing me as someone they can count on. “There is a belief that you have carried around with you for probably most of your life, and you just don’t realize it yet.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout Your version might be worded differently. If I say no, they won’t see me as a team player, or maybe I won’t get hired back. Whatever the wording, that sentence or some other version of it is what fired your yes, and it fired before you’d consciously decided anything. What do we do after saying yes to protect how we’re seen? We compensate. Once we’ve said yes to protect ourselves from what we believe someone will think about us, we do everything we can to prove ourselves. “We cancel our weekend plans. We over prepare. We send the email at 11 o’clock on a Sunday night just so the person on the receiving end can see the timestamp.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout The Sunday-night email gives it away. The timestamp is the point, because it’s evidence someone else can see that you were the one they could count on. Should you stop saying yes if you’re early in your career? No. Especially if you are a junior coming up in your career, you have to work hard and prove yourself, and the last thing I would tell you is to do the opposite. What I’m asking about is the root belief about yourself if you say no. That belief makes all the difference between going down the road of burnout and making a conscious decision to take something on or not. Where does the belief that saying no diminishes your value come from? It comes from the meaning you made, as a kid, of what happened when you said no. As we grow up, we reach a certain age where we stop just having experiences and start interpreting those events in a way that makes meaning about who we are, and our nervous system and our mind take that meaning and bury it deep in our subconscious, where it becomes part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. [ADD SOURCE for the research, or reframe this as your own observation.] Here’s how it went for me: “I remember growing up that if we were asked to do something and we said no, we were punished. If we said yes, and we did a good job, we were rewarded.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout At that point, we were already learning who we needed to be to get the reward, and at such a young age, the reward is love, validation, and acceptance. Then we become teenagers. Maybe you had a group of friends who wanted you to do something you knew you didn’t want to do, so you said no. Were you laughed at? Were you no longer in the loop, part of the group? Maybe you walked away feeling that your decision somehow meant you didn’t belong, or you weren’t good enough anymore. Why does a childhood fear still drive how you work as an adult? Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between you as a younger person who says no and gets sent to your room, let’s say without dinner, and an adult sitting behind the desk. So it runs the same fear loop it has been running your entire life. By fear loop, I mean the protective reaction your nervous system learned back then, firing again in a new room. Fast forward 10, 15, 20 years, and the meaning you formed as a child still lives within your nervous system. “That same fear, that same feeling of being excluded, it’s still there. It’s just wearing a suit.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout When your work ethic is driven by fear, you’ll constantly react in ways that make you overcompensate so your nervous system can return to safety. And the yes on Friday at 4:50 is one of those reactions. How do you question the belief behind the automatic yes? You ask yourself questions afterward, starting with how you actually felt in that moment and when you first remember feeling that way in your life. That’s what I started doing when I found myself repeating the same behaviour pattern. Then comes the harder question. In that moment, as that person back then, with the knowledge and capacity I had, is it really true that I was less than, unwanted, or that I didn’t belong? And more importantly, is that still true about me today? When I finally allowed myself to answer honestly, I found something I hadn’t expected. “Every piece of evidence that I had for this potential outcome was evidence that I took from other people’s reactions. None of it was evidence about me.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout It was the belief that had been running my life for decades. What should you do the next time you hear yourself say yes? Stop and check in with how you’re feeling in that moment. If your body is giving you a signal, listen to it, because that is your first clue that you’re living your life based on a past conditioned version of yourself. If you keep overriding that signal and saying yes from fear, you will ultimately burn out. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com