How To Say No

In this podcast, the Pretty Spiritual team talks about saying no. Sharing personal stories and spiritual tools, this podcast attempt to help you to navigate this messy, imperfect, beaufitul life. This audio exudes wisdom, authenticity and humour.

Transcript

Thanks for joining us here on Pretty Spiritual where we're attempting the unthinkable about how to navigate this messy,

Beautiful,

Imperfect life with spiritual tools,

Principles,

And our own personal stories.

So we're not experts,

We're not religious,

We're definitely silly.

We're honest,

Real,

And willing to share.

So join us as we connect,

Bond,

And grow together.

Hello everyone.

Hey,

And welcome back.

So glad to be back.

Holy moly,

We're so glad.

So today we are going big.

We are going to talk about saying no.

What?

Has anyone ever done that?

I don't know if I've even heard that word before.

Wait,

That's an option?

Is that a real word?

No.

So I picked this topic.

All three of us have struggled with or currently struggle with people pleasing.

So saying no is an area where we get all kinds of opportunity to practice,

Especially when we don't want to.

If you are really comfortable saying no to people,

We are impressed and inspired.

Teach us your ways.

Teach us your tricks,

Please.

And you know,

We love getting your emails.

Oh,

We've been getting some great ones.

It's the best part of our whole life.

Just send them to us.

Yeah.

So send your saying no triumphs or challenges to Pretty Spiritual Podcast at Gmail,

Or you can message us at Pretty Spiritual Podcast on Instagram.

Slide into our DM.

Hey,

Don't say no.

I got to stop with the no jokes.

No,

We need all of them.

I think I speak for all of us when I say saying no has been this hard one skill and it is subtle and it keeps evolving over time.

I was doing a little bit of research about it and some psychology articles I was reading said not being able to say no can be linked to low self-esteem,

Low self-confidence.

It's often common in women because women are raised to be helpful and kind,

But that doesn't mean that all across the gender spectrum,

Saying no isn't hard.

Also when I researched this,

The other thing I found is that there are 100 million articles on the internet about how to say no.

So from health and psychology sites to pop culture sites,

They're like,

Five simple steps to say no.

How saying no can improve your life.

I read them all and they did not teach me.

I need a lot of help still.

Yeah.

So why are they here?

It's really hard.

It's just hard to say no.

We also acknowledge that just because we read an article or listen to a podcast doesn't mean that it's going to solve it all of a sudden.

So whether it's hard for you to say no because of trauma or social conditioning,

We just want to share this has not been an overnight matter for us.

It's ongoing practice.

So if you are experimenting with these tools,

Be really gentle with yourself.

Forever gentleness.

Yeah.

That's what we're into.

So on that note,

Pony,

Tell us about your experience with no and what's new in your life with it.

Lindsay Pony here.

That's my name.

Reporting from duty.

I'm checking in right now when I really want to check out folks.

Let me tell you what has been like for me and the idea to say no.

I honestly didn't know that no was an option.

I land on the side of coming off incredibly assertive,

But the other part of me is so desperate for love,

Care,

And affection.

I would do anything to get that.

So whatever you asked,

Whatever you needed,

I was known as a yes girl.

I remember the first time I heard that term,

A yes girl.

I was like,

Oh my God,

There's a name for me.

Here I was saying yes all the time when I could hear myself inside screaming no.

What a long slow process of uncovering and discovering only to say yes all over again.

In a way,

It served me until it didn't as these things often do.

Now to look underneath the yes and answer the call to know that's courageous and how I mean,

Seriously how for me what's underneath the saying yes when I mean no is needs.

So what are some needs that I am needing some unmet needs that I'm needing to get met.

So some of those needs are the needs to be seen needs to be acknowledged needing to matter.

If you're like me,

You need a need sheet that describes the needs you may have.

And if so,

Get ready for our very exciting website that's not up yet,

But soon will be very soon.

It's going to be so soon.

And when it is,

We're going to have a sheet of needs and feelings and all kinds of really cool stuff.

We're working hard y'all.

So and all of it will be free resources.

So that's coming one day and all this is to say when I'm caught in a people pleasing mode.

So people pleasing,

Which I didn't know until recently I am doing one of those modes is saying yes when I want to say no.

It's a simple reminder that it's time for me to do some self examination and see what I'm needing and see if I can spend that time nurturing that part of myself.

Because what I need to do is get my own needs met.

Instead,

I'm spending the time moving your boxes or pulling every weed you have or picking up your grandma like whatever it is.

She needs a ride.

You're the only one that can do it.

She's so old.

Why don't you pick her up?

The other side of saying no,

That it's a bit more slippery for me and my personal flavor of people pleasing is to intuit your needs before my own.

This has taken me years of therapy to identify.

What happens is I will attempt to know what you need and want in the moment before you could ever ask.

I'm cracking up just at the idea of this,

Of me being like a mind reading fortune teller genie.

Gypsy lady.

I'm going to know what you want before you know it and then I'm going to also grant your wishes.

You might need to borrow some of my velvet.

You're going to take on that role.

Because underneath these intentions and motives,

If I'm brave,

I can look and see I'm trying to make myself safe in an uncertain world.

This is a strategy for certainty and safety and control in my mode of people pleasing.

That's essentially what's underneath that and why I'm acting out in this behavior of saying yes all the time when I want to say no.

That's been my clunky experience.

I love it.

Just to add to your clunky experience,

Pony keeps reminding me that no is a complete sentence and it's so helpful.

Thank you,

Pony.

Ella,

What's the scoop with you?

I hate saying no so much.

It is one of the hardest things for me to do.

I identified a lot with what Lindsay was sharing about.

Yeah,

I have these experiences where I say yes with an action when the answer is no.

Then I set myself up for victimization,

Resentment,

All of these really heavy burdens that are then on my shoulders to bear.

Saying no is so uncomfortable for me,

I think,

Because I have this idea of the person I'm supposed to be,

How a spiritual person is supposed to be,

And that others' needs come first and taking care of myself can be selfish.

Just the old ideas that when we're trying to try a new behavior,

They can rear their heads and sometimes confuse us about what's the quote unquote right thing to do.

I got to have an experience with this recently where I had a friend who was having a crisis and I needed to go into work.

I was at work,

Which means I'm not available.

I let the urgency of what was happening for my friend dictate my answer.

I got pulled in with this urgency and feeling like I couldn't say no.

It didn't work out for me.

It left me feeling like I had hurt myself by saying yes when the answer was really no.

For me,

That's the outcome pretty much every time when I say yes when the answer is actually no.

I don't feel taken care of by myself afterwards.

When I look back at how these things unfold,

What's really interesting is there's this place where I have the intuition or the information that the answer is actually no.

Instead I get hooked in some way by urgency or need or thinking a certain way about how I'm supposed to be showing up and what's okay and what's not.

What ends up happening is that I hurt myself trying to please others.

I'm just at a point where I don't get to do that to myself anymore.

Saying no is so hard.

How do we even do that?

Saying no is hard.

When I don't say no,

I hurt myself but I also get resentful.

I don't even know it because I think,

Oh,

I'm being helpful or this is good.

This is the right thing to do.

I find out that it's not when I am simmering in resentment and discontent.

That's my red flag.

I was thinking about how it reminded me of me abandoning myself in favor of showing up for others.

I think that ties into the resentment.

I'm so hopeful that if I show up for you,

Then you will show up in the ways that you don't even know that I need.

Those unmet needs I was talking about are things like that.

It can be so tricky but to show up for yourself first.

Yeah.

It's scary.

It takes practice.

It would be so great.

Getting ready for this recording,

I was thinking about no and I was thinking of it in the outward sense of saying no to invitations or saying no when I can't do things.

One thing I read is,

If someone asks me for help or for a favor,

It is my right to refuse just as it is their right to ask.

I was like,

I don't think that's right.

That's incorrect.

That's how much I want to say yes all the time for whatever.

There's that flavor of saying no but then I have this other deeper way that I've been thinking of saying no to.

I have a hard time sometimes saying no to how people treat me.

In the past and before I had some of the tools that I had,

I would have these weird conditions on when I could say no because I would get into relationships with people that had the counterpart to my unhealthy submissiveness.

I had this subconscious belief that if I said no,

I couldn't say no to people being rude to me or abusive behavior.

This wasn't all people but really specific people that I would kind of intermesh with.

It's taken me a long time to realize that I can actually say no to people who aren't kind to me.

It doesn't need to be a big tantrum no or a big outburst but it just in the way that I interact with people,

That's the shift in the no.

This is all really slow.

What I'm learning is it's really healthy to say no and it gives me a sense of inhabiting my body and that instead of making life dangerous,

People might not do what I need and then I'm not okay.

Saying no actually makes me really safe and it lets my body know that I have its back.

Now that we're just talking about all this nos,

Let's say yes to life.

Get it,

Girl.

Oh,

God.

What are the tools?

Because it's easy to talk about saying no but it's really hard to practice it.

What tools are you girls using?

Lindsay,

What is a tool like now in your life?

I can say that this has been a long journey and I am inching my way towards the idea that saying no is an option.

Through just this last week,

There's been so many times at work where I'm just like,

Yeah,

Yes,

Yes,

Of course,

Yes,

Of course,

Yes,

I'll do that,

Yes,

Stay late,

Yes,

I can make that happen,

Yes,

I'm a magician,

Yes,

Yes.

What do you need?

I got it.

How to say no,

How to implement no,

What are some tools?

Well,

First and foremost,

I must pay close attention.

I hate this so much.

Practice and mindfulness of habits,

Our intentions and motives,

Ways we attempt to get unmet needs met,

Need special care and attention for me.

If I am not in tune with my mind,

Body,

Spirit connection,

I may never realize my people pleasing attempts to get love and attention I need.

My first plug forever and always is meditation as a prerequisite.

Let you know that it's okay for things to be hard and difficult and to take a moment and to pause.

That's where meditation can help remind me that there is a safe place inside me that I can go,

That I can pause,

That this is an option for me.

That has taken a very long time.

Sometimes I don't remember it.

I force myself to do some type of little meditation,

Whether it's five minutes,

Does not need to be perfect so that I can be here with my mind and all of the ways that it really gets to go in so that I can pause,

So that I can remember there are definitely some tools here that can help me at least get closer to being aware of my yes person personality.

Recognizing my people pleasing is tied up in my self worth as in I'm worthy because of what I do rather than who I am.

I'm thinking love must be earned.

Improving my relationship with myself instead of fighting for approval of others.

When I say yes to others,

I need to make sure that I'm not saying no to myself.

What's really important is to know that if you said yes and you realize whether it's right away afterwards or a whole day later,

Maybe it's even a week,

You can turn right back around and say,

You know what?

Actually that's going to be a no from me.

I feel another episode coming on about boundaries somewhere in here.

I made a little note,

But somehow this is all connected as spirituality is.

Just practicing,

Trying stuff,

Knowing that I don't have all the answers.

Maybe I have a couple tools and if not,

I have resources and people I can turn to and friends I can call.

The end.

It's so perfect,

Pounds.

The beginning.

I love how you talked about changing our minds and that that's allowed.

It totally is.

I think we have this idea that we're supposed to know that's the right thing to do all the time.

Where did that come from?

So frequently.

I just want to,

If that is something that you experience,

Because I definitely experienced that myself.

If you think you're supposed to know the right thing and then you're like,

Well,

What do I do?

And then you get stuck because you're not sure and you're supposed to.

Just don't.

We don't know the right thing to do and we just try stuff based on our intuition,

Based on motives,

Whatever they might be.

Then we get to learn from it.

I don't think there's another way to grow spiritually except by trying stuff.

I just want to give permission to myself and whoever else is out there to not know,

Change your mind,

Try something,

Try the other thing.

Be messy.

And to just start to say no to little things,

Even if they are things that you want to do.

Even if it's okay,

Because it's hard to grease the will just to be like,

Oh,

I say yes all the time and now tomorrow I'm just saying no to whatever it is.

So it could be little things of like,

Could you pick that up?

Oh no.

Do you want 2% milk?

No,

I want whole milk.

Just little areas that you could say no in so that it's within practice might be helpful.

What about you,

Ella?

What are some tools that you're working on?

So I have one kind of opaque spiritual tool and then I have a bunch of little practical tools.

So the big spiritual tool like Lindsay was talking about is intuition.

And for me,

What this comes down to,

What the saying no debate thing comes down to is what would it be like to deeply trust myself?

What would it be like to rely on my intuition,

Even when it feels like I'm not allowed or I'm doing it wrong or I'm dropping the balls?

What if I just leaned on that and leaned into that?

What happens when I don't do that?

When I get sucked into how I think I should be or what I think I should be doing,

I'm giving my power away.

So what's it like to hold on to my power and in fact,

Lean into it?

So a prerequisite for intuition means I'm inside of my own body,

Which gross,

Who wants to do that?

And oftentimes how that unfolds for me is I will be holding two options in my mind and heart and I'll notice myself kind of passively thinking about going one way or the other.

And then I'll notice either this tightness or release in my body.

And that's for me,

Most of the time,

That's how intuition manifests.

It's like this physical sensation that's tied to one of the directions or the next right action or something like that.

And then I also have a bunch of practical tools because I did not know how to say no.

And sometimes I just need a tool that gives me a little space so that it feels easier to say no or say yes.

Because it's still really hard to do in the moment.

And oftentimes I'll say things like,

Let me get back to you.

So people will ask me to do something and I'm like,

Physically not up for it because I'm having a lime flare,

Which is in the past month plus.

And I say,

You know,

That sounds really fun.

I want to say yes,

I have to get back to you.

And generally people seem to take that pretty well.

Another thing that I really like to look at,

Like Lindsay was saying,

Is my motives.

Because usually that's how I get hooked into saying yes when the answer is no is I have some kind of sneaky underbelly motive.

Like I want to do spirituality right.

Or I want you to think that I'm,

I don't know,

Like I'm superhuman or something like stop.

So when I look at my motives,

Usually that shows me a lot about what's actually happening for me.

Like,

Why do I feel like I'm not allowed to say no?

Why do I feel like I,

What is happening for me internally that like makes me hook into that urgency?

Why do I think that I'm not allowed to trust myself and take care of myself right now?

And when I am,

When I'm really like looking at motives and communicating what I find,

Even when it feels really like messy and off the rails to me,

It actually turns out fine.

People seem to prefer hearing the truth.

And you know,

My experience with friendship and relationships in general is that when I trust someone to say no,

When the answer is no,

Then they're a safe person to be around.

Because I know that when we're hanging out,

The answer is yes.

And if I,

You know,

Like unsafe and indirect people for me,

It just doesn't work.

Like I need you to be able to trust yourself and ask for what you need and then do what you got to do.

If the answer is no,

Or if the answer is yes,

And I strive to be one of those people because I want others to feel safe around me.

So beautiful.

So much hard work.

We can do it.

We can do it.

We can do it together.

We're all just trying stuff.

We're team captain sometimes because my major activity is like laying on the floor.

I call on Pony as my team captain because I don't really know if I've got one of those in there.

So I just borrow her.

Love the enthusiasm.

Love it.

Love the energy.

Those tools are so great,

Ladies.

And what I hear from both of you is the ability to say no isn't this linear progression.

So some people and some situations,

It's easier for me to say no in and other people just bring up slipperier stuff.

And so those are the areas where I'm going to have to keep practicing.

The other thing I heard is we don't have to be perfect at saying no.

How Lindsay was saying,

We can change our mind.

Take it back.

We don't have to be perfect.

Because I notice I get angry at myself if I didn't say no in a situation where I wanted to.

I will punish myself later mentally instead of just saying,

Oh,

Wow,

That was hard for you and you did the best that you could at the time.

My tools,

Like both these girls said,

Theirs are not overnight matters.

I've had a lot of professional help.

Get some.

Get some.

But for me,

Saying no requires mindfulness like Lindsay was talking about and Ella was talking about,

But also requires courage and honesty.

Because I often know right away what my response to something is,

But then it's the ability for me to communicate that to someone and potentially make them unhappy.

That is the really hard part for me.

Also if I'm in a situation where someone's being unkind to me,

Sometimes that's a little bit murkier.

Like I almost buy into it too.

I'm like,

Yeah,

I deserve you.

I definitely think you should be being a jerk right now.

So that one's a little murkier for me.

And this mindfulness tool we're talking about,

It just gives me some room to feel like,

Oh,

Kind of have some understanding around stuff.

One tool that has helped me with saying no and for having the courage and the honesty to say no has just been prayer.

So a brief example of this is my wife and I travel a lot and she recently had to travel to Malaysia for work and she wanted me to go with her,

But it was a really short turnaround time and I wasn't up for it.

And I knew it would disappoint her and I really enjoy traveling with her and I wanted to make her happy.

So she asked me if I wanted to go and immediately everything in my body was like,

No,

Not to say I wouldn't love to go,

But it just was too much.

But I didn't have the courage right at that moment to just say no because I didn't want to disappoint her.

Instead pretended that I needed to think about it and that wasn't my most graceful move,

But also sometimes we can just say,

Can I think about it?

And so that can be a tool for getting the courage to say no later if you don't know what to say in the moment.

So this went on for a couple of days and the poor woman,

She needed to buy plane tickets,

She needed to make plans and I'm just being scared.

I realized I needed to pray about it.

I took a shower because sometimes it's really helpful to have water.

Full body reset,

Love a shower.

Yeah,

And kind of some clarity.

And I just said a prayer and this clarity came up like,

You can be an adult that says no.

And she's this awesome person to practicing no on.

Like we were talking about practicing on a barista and telling them which type of milk you want.

Like she's a safe person that I can say no to and I know that I can disappoint her or say what I need and that our relationship is really strong.

So that's another tool is practicing on safe people before you go into the uncharted waters with the people that are really slippery and that are confusing.

And the one other tool I have is accountability.

So there's a person in my life who is a slippery person for me and what I mean by that is they trigger my codependent hooks.

It's not sexy,

It's not glamorous,

But I feel like this person needs my help and when they put things on me,

I readily accept them and I need to put them before me.

I had told Lindsay and Ella about this relationship and I had had a boundary.

Spoiler alert,

We're going to have an episode about boundaries.

And clearly codependency perhaps.

Oh,

Good Lord have mercy.

And so this person reached out to me and it's a relationship that I'm not healthy in.

And so it's smarter for me just to not engage in it because there's other people that can be more helpful to this person than I can and I can be helpful to me by not being in this relationship.

So this person reached out and asked me for help in a certain way and I wanted to say yes so bad.

Like everything in my stomach was like,

Yes,

Absolutely,

You're asking and I need to say yes.

But I had already created this kind of safety and accountability by talking to my wife and Lindsay and Ella about it.

And so I could almost like felt them there with me and it wasn't like anyone would be upset if I said yes,

But I just knew like,

Oh,

This is how I can take care of myself.

And it gave me the strength that I didn't have by myself.

So a tool,

Not just accountability,

But like safety and numbers,

I guess.

Like you can call on teammates to help you if things are hard or if you know you're going to have a no conversation or if you want to pause and say,

Let me talk about it with you in a little bit and then you can go call your team and say,

Hey,

I need to say no.

I'm scared.

Send me some strength.

And so these girls didn't even know it,

But they were with me on that phone call and I was able to say no really gracefully and not be in a relationship that is not healthy for me.

It's so cool.

Miraculous.

So we're going to make mistakes,

Right?

We're going to say yes when we're not sure whether the answer is yes or no.

Yeah,

But maybe by next episode.

Definitely.

I'm hurting by then.

If I am going to say yes when the answer is no,

Which I am like,

I'll do it again.

Maybe today,

Maybe tomorrow.

Let it be born out of a place of love.

I can really beat myself up about saying yes when the answer is no.

I did it because I really wanted to be loving to someone because I care about a relationship and I want to be kind.

I would take that any day over my old kind of icky motives.

What someone has said to me before is why would anybody else's feelings or needs be more important than yours?

And it sounds so simple.

Right now I'm in a really bad mood.

So I'm like,

Yeah,

That's so easy to apply.

But when I'm not,

Everyone's feelings and needs are more important than mine.

So that's where the awareness and the mindfulness come in to see where I naturally land.

And for me personally,

This all has to do with some just programming that happened for survival.

So here I am.

Well,

Next week is very exciting.

It's a topic that's near and dear and close to my heart and I wish would go away.

You can relate to this.

I'm not sure,

But it has to do with how to be perfect.

Why am I trying to be perfect?

Why am I not perfect?

This is known as.

.

.

Wait for it.

Wait.

Perfectionism?

Perfectionism?

Insane self-management of being perfect?

Who knows?

Let's address this next week.

Bye.

Bye.

Nice to meet you.

Reviews

Real, insightful, supportive! Thank you sisters 💕

This was perfect for me as I’m struggling with a friend I love dearly but is manipulative in changing my needs and wants to fit her own agenda. Thank you. It helped to be able to say no to her for something that is very important to me.

Clarity creates strength and safety. Saying no is such a powerful tool! Thank you❤️

I say yes to no!

Thanks ladies! Holidays = great No practice and it does get easier- especially with help ❤️ grateful for all you share!

Ladies, was just listening to this, literally from the other side of the world, very early in the morning and thought constantly, "this is like me, oh, that's a good idea/tool, done that a million times...". So, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR, for sharing your experience and honesty!! Love from MUC

As always, wonderful ladies!!! So many tools to add to my collection. Thank you for your humor, your honesty & your kindness!! I feel like I have some new friends in all of you 😁

Really useful tools, thank you ladies, love you 💜x

Perfect! Thank you

Excellent. Opened my eyes to my deficiency in self love. The extent of expressing love to others in directly proportional to my degree of self love.

Y’all are divine Divas that dish delicious spiritual food. The world needed you.
Thanks for showing up😇