Why Is It So Hard to Say No at Work, Even When You Walk In With a Full Tank?

Recently, we talked about energy vampires, and I gave you a practice. Name what drains you and what fills you back up, and if you know one of those people is coming, talk yourself up first, with music or movement or whatever gets you there, before the energy vampire comes for you. It works, and I still do it. But it doesn’t answer why it's so hard to say no at work, and I have to be honest with you: it never was. What this covers: what the energy practice doesn’t fix, why we relabel fear as being reasonable, what the flinch is and where it comes from, and the two questions I ask before I answer. Why is it so hard to say no at work? Because at the moment you go to say it, saying no feels dangerous, and that feeling usually belongs to a much older moment than the one you’re standing in. Being tired makes it worse, but you can walk in calm and fully resourced and still hear yourself agree. A boundary, the way I’m using the word, is the line between what you’ll take on and what you won’t, said out loud to the person who’s asking. Most of us know where our line is. The trouble is in the half second between the ask and the answer. You walk in with a full tank of energy, and you still don’t say the thing. You watch yourself agree to take on the extra file, the extra task. You watch yourself smooth things over instead of pushing back, or apologize for a delay that wasn’t really your fault. “You can still walk in fully charged and still leave having agreed to do something that you didn’t agree to, didn’t want to ... Carry one more thing that wasn’t yours to really carry.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Why doesn’t topping up your energy help you set boundaries? Because topping up changes the state you arrive in, and it does nothing about the moment someone asks you for something. Topping up, as I use it, means deliberately raising your energy before an interaction you know will drain you. That was my advice last episode, and I’m not taking it back. But I have to be honest with you about something that this actually does not fix. It gets you through the meeting. It doesn’t get you out of the phone call or the visit, and it doesn’t stop you from saying yes when the true answer is no. Another problem lives underneath the energy one, even after you've refilled your energy: we’ve never actually set a boundary in the first place. A full tank just means you have more to give away. Why do we call it “being reasonable” when we’re afraid to say no? Because “fear” sounds like weakness and “reasonable” sounds like professionalism, so we pick the word that lets us keep our self-image. Underneath being a team player, there’s usually a flinch, and the flinch is fear. “That is not an energy problem, even though it still depletes our energy. That is a fear problem. And it’s worth naming because ... we don’t call this fear. We call it being reasonable.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Listen to how it sounds in your own head. I’m going to be a team player. I’m not going to make this a bigger deal than it needs to be. Those are the sentences firms reward, and they are also, a lot of the time, a way to avoid feeling the fear long enough to look at it. That’s an uncomfortable thing to say in a profession that treats “team player” as the highest compliment you can pay an associate. I’m saying it anyway. Some of what gets praised as collegiality is people who are scared to say no, and the people praising it benefit from that. What is the flinch you feel before saying no? The flinch is the split second before you answer when saying no feels dangerous, out of all proportion to anything actually happening in the room. You’ll feel it if you look for it, and once you’ve named it, you start to notice it in a lot of places. “There’s a flinch. There’s a moment where saying no felt dangerous. Not inconvenient. Dangerous. Even when there was nothing about the actual situation that warranted it.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout The person asking might be perfectly pleasant. The ask might be small. Your body responds as if declining it would cost you something you can’t get back. Where does the fear of saying no come from? Usually, it comes from somewhere much older than the request in front of you. If you slow down and ask yourself where you’ve felt that exact feeling before, you’ll often find it’s rooted in history. “It almost never belongs to the moment that you’re actually in. Yes, it feels current. It feels like it’s about this person, this ask ... But if you slow down and you actually ask yourself where you felt that exact feeling before, you’ll find it’s pretty old.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Maybe it’s your boss from 10 years ago, or a parent. Someone who taught you, a long time before your current position existed, that saying no would cost you something you couldn’t afford to lose. The feeling arrives in the present tense, which is why it’s so convincing, but the lesson behind it was learned by a version of you who had far less power than you have now. What two questions should you ask before you say yes when you mean no? Pause, and ask two questions before you respond. First: have I felt this feeling before, and what does it remind me of? Second: is what I’m afraid of actually going to happen here, or is it something that already happened a long time ago to someone much younger than I am now? The second question does most of the work. The person answering it today knows more and has accomplished more than the person who first learned the fear, and that’s worth remembering in the moment, because the flinch tends to make you feel like her again. Most of the time, as I put it in the episode, “the fear is real, but it’s just not a real fear about today.” Asking the questions lets it shrink down to its actual size, which is usually much smaller than it felt a second ago. Do you have to stop being afraid before you set a boundary? No. You set the boundary anyway, even if your voice shakes a little, and you let the questions shrink the fear rather than waiting for it to disappear. “You don’t need the fear to be gone. You just need it to be small enough that it isn’t the thing that is making the decision for you.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout So the next time you feel yourself about to say yes when you mean no, just pause, ask the two questions, and then say the no. Waiting until it feels safe is how most of us end up never saying it at all. What’s the difference between managing your energy and protecting it? Managing your energy is what the energy vampire practice does: it gets you into the room resourced. You measure protecting it by whether you leave that room having said what you actually meant, with your tank still full. You already did the hard work last time. You know who your energy vampires are, and you know how to walk in with something in your tank. The next piece isn’t about finding more energy or more time. It’s about understanding where the fear that stops you from setting the boundary comes from, so that the next time it shows up, you can treat the flinch as something old rather than as proof about the person in front of you. 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. 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