The Power of “No”

How often do you say “no” to things that could interfere with your goals?

Unfortunately, I don’t do it as often as I should because I worry that if I don’t “join” or “subscribe”, I will miss out on the opportunity to achieve something or even learn something amazing. As if I were waiting for someone else to make that happen for me. You know, the empty vessel idea. Argh!

I’m like my students who highlight everything on their papers silently declaring that everything there is important. Or, they think: what if it is important and I don’t highlight it? How will I know? Since they haven’t been taught how to determine importance and because doing so takes time, for students and their teacher, everyone opts for the “highlight all”,or most of it, choice.

That’s me when it comes to parsing through all of the things that come via email and social media feeds. It’s a kind of FOMO, but it’s also the inability to make decisions. And a way to sabotage myself by spreading myself so thin that I sometimes renege on the very responsibilities I agreed to. So, instead I choose everything without asking myself: what would happen if I say, “No”?

What if I didn’t make an automatic, impulsive decision and instead waited it out for a day or two?

What if I simply deleted all of the “free” offers that come my way that then turn out to have a paid subscription at the end with endless emails to follow?

What if I set my priorities to what really matters to me and that help me move my goals forward? But do I even know what my goals are? What do I want to achieve?

That will be my first step. Once and for all. No holds barred. Bold and exciting.

Sometimes when I’m in a workshop or reading the endless email subscription updates I receive, I think: I could have written about that because I’ve created exactly that in my own classroom! But they wrote an article about it or a book while I procrastinated instead of creating.

Something I read a long time ago in one of Elizabeth Gilbert’s books that still resonates with me today is: human beings are born to create.

And that creation is entirely up to us.

And. so I am off to create because that’s who I am.

Will you join me?

Crossposted to The Two Writing Teachers Tuesday Slice of Life Challenge