Saying NO requires being assertive and having high self-esteem and self-confidence.
You will be happy with yourself once you learn to say NO when you are asked to do something you don’t want to do.
5 things you should know about saying NO
Saying no may require practice. Specially for people that were trained in their lives to say YES to everything it is hard to say no but practice helps even in little things.
When you are offered with something at the shopping centre you can just practice and say “no, thanks” without having to explain 1000 things to the shop assistant.
Say no implies being honest. If you start saying lays to justify yourself you will feel really bad afterwards and then the lie goes bigger and bigger in your attempt to cover the initial lie. This is a great cause of stress that I have observed in many people. If you are just honest with the others and to yourself there is no remorses. You said No I can’t because you can’t.
Being calm. Having the feeling of answering fast and being afraid of silence is normal. You don’t have to rush with your answer. A good tip when you want to say no is to give yourself time to think. Let’s say you are asked: Can you mind my daughter on Tuesday? You know you want to say no because that causes you a lot of stress but you don’t have to rush on a NO you can just say: “Let me remember if don’t have any plans yet for Tuesday. “ When you say that phrase you give yourself time to find a genuine reason to say NO. Then you can go and say: Actually I can’t help you on Tuesday. You don’t have to give her a whole explanation just saying you can’t is enough without 200 justifications.
Being polite. Many people misunderstand the fact that learning to say NO to others equals to Not Being Polite. If saying no is a new thing in your life you don’t have to be rude and still say no. We have to remember that we live in a networking world so we don’t want to hurt others first, we never know when we might need something from the others and most importantly we don’t want to feel bad about our wrong behaviour.
This is part of Key Coaching Training to train yourself to success.
Learning to say NO means learning to be happy with yourself!
