Sometimes we have a hard time telling others “No.” Unfortunately, leaving it unsaid can become very costly for you. You lose time to do the things you really want, or need, to do. And you may even feel resentful towards the other person and yourself.
Telling others that you can’t acquiesce to their every request doesn’t have to be difficult.
Martina McGowan in the article “Saying ‘No’ in 6 steps” published on her blog Martina’s story provides us a few ideas you can put into use:
- Explain
- Delay
- Consider it
- Know what you want and need
- Suggest an alternative
- But…
Read full article on: http://martinamcgowan.com/2012/11/no-6-easy-steps/
Image source: http://martinamcgowan.com/2012/11/no-6-easy-steps/
Saying “No” in 6 easy steps
Martina McGowan in
very wise and useful for different circumstances, pear unfortunately sometimes it is really hard to say “no”
I love Martina’s work and this article is no exception. I think she has covered all the bases and it is a clear guide to saying NO with style.
I especially connect with the Delay tactic but I like to take it a step further. I often find that urgent requests are naturally very thin on details. People panic and all they think about is the end result and so they provide no background info about the issue. I use this to my advantage by asking them to supply all the relevant details, with the promise that my intervention will be more rapid when I get around to assisting them.
The result is that over 50% of the cases auto-resolve themselves because people will find the “solution in the question” once they start digging for the information I requested.
My other classic is to barter with the person asking for help. “Yes, I’ll help but I need to ask you a favour in return.” The majority of people walk away…it is a good way of filtering out the non-altruistic types.
Thank you very much, Enzo.