Women have been bearing the burden of guilt since the beginning of history. Adam takes a bite of the fateful apple and—oh sure, blame it on Eve. The original guilt. And unfortunately, we women make it easy. We silently put “getting kicked out of paradise” on a long list of things to feel guilty about over the ages.

Guilt is such a daunting problem for women as they try to change the way they work that we feel it demands a chapter all its own. But this is a good news chapter. We’ll help you see how one insidious emotion can prevent you from getting the professional life you really want. Guilt can stop you from leaving the office at 3 P.M. to make the school pickup, even though you’ve finished your workday’s tasks. It can keep you from turning down those extra assignments your male colleagues just don’t want to do. It can scuttle a day off, even though you’re owed it.

Look—we have a natural gift for emotions of all sorts, and as we pointed out in chapter 1, that can work in our favor. But unleash too much of a good thing, too much intuition and empathy, and suddenly you’ve fallen into a pitched battle with that destructive menace, guilt, and its evil stepsister, the need to please. Here we’ll hand you a map to guide you around all of these guilt-ridden pitfalls so that you can actually reach your New All.

Believe it or not, there are women out there who have harnessed their emotions and put them to use working for their benefit, instead of against it. You’ll see in this chapter that you don’t have to adopt a program of incense-filled meditation (though again, if that’s your thing, by all means…), but that you can take concrete, realistic steps to banish this cunning, negative emotion, and at the same time, keep the positive, quint-essentially female ones that make you who you are.

Like all things, it takes practice and dedication. Fortunately, if you’re a professional woman, you’re probably very good at those two things. In this chapter we’ll take a hard look at your emotional bad habits, give you a process that will get the principal culprit, guilt, out of your life, and then teach you the empowering positivity of the word no and how to wield it. The ability to use that critical little word, no, is the ultimate sign that you have your guilt-infused emotions in check. It means you can really start to ask for what you want.

Linda Brooks, our part-time partner at that tony New York law firm, says the biggest challenge to what she achieved was almost certainly emotional. And she counsels associates who want to follow in her footsteps that they have to be ready to withstand emotional riptides.

“I do think that person is going to need a little bit more confidence than the associate standing next to her,” she says. “You know, it takes balls to stand up halfway to partnership and say ‘I want a life!’ And to say ‘I want a life, and I’m going to be a partner and try to do both things.’ I think that’s wonderful, but I do think it takes a little more confidence, to not get paranoid and feel guilty and throw up your hands when things start to get tough.”

Guilt: The Useless Emotion

Think of it this way—we now know that our brain structure and chemistry make us more evolved, more able to anticipate consequences, and more ready to empathize with others than men are. The proverbial sixth sense is a woman’s sense—it’s the ability to tune in to and understand unspoken things that men don’t even know exist.

But the downside is our guilt. It’s really the flip side of all of that good stuff. Because we are so empathetic and connected, we’re also hyperaware of what could be or should be or what might have been or should have been or who could be feeling what and—of course—why it’s all our fault.

Amazon.com can provide you with hundreds of guilt-banishing tomes to help with these issues. And it takes a tome (at the very least) to excise guilt completely from your mentality. Right now, we’re only taking on a narrow, but critical, slice of the jumbo-size American woman’s guilt pie: you must learn to keep that useless emotion from standing in the way of your goals—from forcing you to say yes to more work than you want. You need to feel good, not guilty, about getting what you want from your career. In fact, guilt is more self-indulgent than self-correcting, since it alone doesn’t actually help you, your coworkers, your kids, or your boss.

This is an area where you are negotiating with yourself not your boss. But if you do it properly we guarantee it will save you huge amounts of time at work.

The key, then, is to be aware that guilt, when you haven’t actually done anything wrong, is a useless emotion. Keep repeating it to yourself: just junk guilt. Just junk guilt.

Guilt Trips: The Classics

If you’re not sure whether or not guilt has a stranglehold on your work life (or any other part of your life), check out our most popular guilt trips. Sound familiar? Most of you will see that you have some work to do.

Or

Or

Or

If you recognize this thought process, or worse, have answered yes to any of the above questions, or even more alarming, have actually changed behavior in a situation like this—don’t feel guilty! Please. Read on and learn how.

You Are Normal—a Normal, Guilt-Obsessed Woman

Christy Runningen, a Best Buy corporate talent coach in Minnesota, learned just how destructive and hard to shake guilt can be, even though she is one of the lucky ones. She’s working in what Best Buy calls a ROWE—a Results Only Work Environment. It’s the brave new world we mentioned in chapter 2 and that we’ll explore further in chapter 7—where time on the clock has become irrelevant, and all that is measured is output. A mother of three young children, and someone who struggled with capricious bosses for years, Christy has seen her life transformed by ROWE. But, she says, the hardest part of making even this fully sanctioned flexible situation work has been changing the guilt-inducing voices in her head.

Listen to all of that. It’s just an incredible waste of time. Think about all of the time you sit around obsessing like Christy, wondering what the “right thing” is, what your boss or colleague or whoever might think, instead of focusing on getting your work done or hanging out with your family. It eats up our minds, and it saps our energy. Enough.

We put some of the most guilt-ridden and guilt-conquering female minds to the task of developing a method of getting over time-consuming guilt. Almost all of us agreed that the onset of unreasonable guilt is like an emotional attack—something that gains its own momentum and is driven by its own logic. Fending off any attack requires that you gain the initiative, which means you need to quickly identify what’s going on and then confront it. Our Guilt Bashers help you head off guilt fast.

Guilt Bashers

Guilt is a sneaky emotion. Unlike anger, love, or sorrow, it has an ability to work behind the scenes without your really noticing. This means that you first need to identify that it’s actually there—that the undercurrent of emotion behind this flurry of negative, self-blaming thought is guilt. From there, the steps toward getting guilt out of your thought process and daily life are relatively simple.

 

STEP 1 ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

 

You first need to identify what’s going on. You’re feeling as if you did something wrong. But did you? Ask yourself:

 

1. Did I actually lie, deceive, or really let someone down?

 

Maybe you’re having some healthy guilt—which is really more like remorse. If so, and the situation is already in the past, do something about it, and then please, MOVE ON. Send a card, write an e-mail, make a call. Apologize, explain, whatever. Get it out of your mind and put it someplace else. Dwelling on it doesn’t help anyone, and most importantly, it takes up your precious time.

 

2. Am I guilty of guilt exaggeration?

 

Often a feeling of guilt is justified, but its response is blown out of proportion. Imagine someone doing to you what you’re feeling guilty about. Nine times out of ten, you’d probably say to yourself, “Yeah, that wasn’t the best thing they could have done, but it definitely wasn’t the worst either. I’ll get over it, so should they.”

 

3. Am I suffering from inappropriate guilt?

 

Most of the time, we reckon you are. Perhaps your boss is suggesting, even though you are supposed to be off on Friday, or at a lunch, or coming in late, that it would be helpful for you to cancel your plans and pitch in with someone else’s project. You’re feeling queasy and guilty. You start down that familiar path, hearing that well-worn internal dialogue with yourself that can spiral into nuttiness. “Oh, I should probably give up my day off or my lunch hour or my trip this weekend.” “I was wrong to ask for that day off, time at my son’s school, a late morning.” “My boss clearly believes I’m a slacker, lazy, or lack ambition.” “I’m letting down my boss, the team, my gender.” “Maybe I’ll lose my job, my respect, my identity.”

When you are starting to spin this way, learn to recognize it before you get dizzy with guilt. If you can identify the onslaught, you are already on your way to having a healthier emotional life. You can see what is inappropriate. The day, lunch hour, weekend off was yours. You will lose time if you give it up.

“I’m getting so much better at recognizing that part of this is my own thing,” says Linda Brooks, the New York lawyer. “The paranoia and self-talk that says ‘I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be available 24/7.’”

If you are having trouble sorting out whether the guilt is justified, then getting to the source of the “should” can help. Remember this: guilt is one of the basic human emotions that people in public or professional life will use to get you to do what they want. It’s a very sharp, very sophisticated emotional tool—one that bosses love to wield. The explanation is simple: in situations where you’re entitled to your break, to your vacation, to asking someone else to do a project, your boss knows that it’s unreasonable to take away that right. So that’s where he uses guilt to get what he needs.

Avoiding this kind of tactical guilt—which you might otherwise call “bosses’ guilt”—is a matter of breaking down any feeling of “should” into legitimate shoulds, where you actually failed to fulfill your obligations, and illegitimate shoulds, where you had no business fulfilling a request in the first place.

Lauren Tyler, a private equity banker at a top New York firm, who some days seems to be managing a small circus as she handles her high-level job, three children, and two stepchildren, says her industry thrives on an all-or-nothing competitive spirit. “You have to develop a thick skin. I know I’m doing my job well and I don’t have time to angst,” she says. “It’s not always easy, but I’ve learned to get things done in my business life and my personal life, without a lot of hand-wringing.”

So ask yourself: is the guilt you are feeling at a particular moment serving you and your own moral framework, or is it serving someone else and their wants and needs? If you come to the conclusion that you’re being guilted so someone else can gain, throw the guilt away.

 

STEP 2 WRITE IT ALL DOWN

 

Early in the guilt-bashing, time-winning process, you will find that thinking is not enough. It will be hard to hear all of those familiar guilt thoughts and unfamiliar guilt-conquering thoughts and make sense of them. So get out that pen again.

1. List exactly what you believe you should feel badly about. Your personal classic guilt trips. All of them.
2. Stare at the list. Now, on another sheet of paper, make another list. A list of guilt busters. All the things you should feel good about. (That rarely occurs to any of us, of course.) Examples: “I asked for the day off.” “People are allowed to have days off in the company.” “I am only going to lunch, not to China.” “I’ve been doing a great job lately on the Brenner report.” “My boss is not going to dwell on this—he’s got a lot more to think about.” “Managers usually try to get all they can from people, and when they fail, they move on.” “It’s his job—it’s not personal. ““He does not think I’m a bad person.” “I’m going to seem more powerful for sticking to my plan.”

You see where we are going here. We’re reminding you how to keep things in perspective. Eventually we should be able to do it without the help of exercises. But sometimes we need to stop our minds from spinning, put it all on paper, and have a look. It really does help.

 

STEP 3 PICTURE YOUR BOSS IN DIAPERS

 

Think of bosses as crying, whining children who need a bit of discipline. Forgive the analogy, but it is really quite similar to training little ones. The first time a tantrum or refusal to go to bed crops up, or, let’s say, an unreasonable work request is made, you will feel horrible and guilt-ridden at “letting down” your child/boss. But once you power through the tears/pressure, which lasts much less time than you imagine, you’ll soon realize you’ve gained power. You’ve set not only boundaries but also a precedent for the future. Further, you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it a long time ago. The next time, your child/boss will cry/demand less. The time after that, they might not whine/make an unreasonable demand at all. And you’ve got power—not to mention a tension-relieving inside giggle at your supervisor.

 

STEP 4 CHANGE THE SOUNDTRACK

 

Pretty soon, you can drop all of the paper and lists and funny mental images and do it all reflexively. You’ll easily understand where your mind is going BEFORE you start to spiral. Then you’re really saving time. You can cut off the whole long-winded, emotionally draining process at the start, and move on.

 

Another way to think about it when these negative thoughts crop up: you need to literally change the “thought-track” in your head. Change your internal message. Instead of running a negative track about all of the things you haven’t done and the reasons why you have to meet unreasonable requests or you might be forever doomed, you turn on the positive track, which reminds you of all of your accomplishments and power. If you keep that on a continuous loop, then your angst will float away.

Christy Runningen of Best Buy says the only way she stops it is by literally forcing her mind onto better terrain. “It’s so easy to get overwhelmed and think, ‘oh I should be doing this, or I should be doing that,’ or ‘I feel guilty, it’s ten o’clock on a weekday morning and I’m not working at this very moment,’ Christy says. “Well for me the key is backing up and taking a look at what I am responsible for. It doesn’t matter if I’m not doing it at this very second. I’m meeting every work goal, and that’s what matters.”

 

STEP 5 COMPROMISE COUNTS

 

There are times when you will feel unreasonable guilt, and you should not have to “give in,” but the reality is that you won’t always get to do things your way. Don’t always focus on an all-or-nothing outcome. That in itself can create lots of tension. At these moments, instead of letting your guilt force a dejected “cave-in,” look for a split. You may be able to get part of what you want. “I can’t come in Friday because I’ve already made plans, since I asked for the day off last month, but I can work through my lunch today. I hope that helps!” This sort of olive branch seems powerful, can leave you feeling good, and still preserves the basics of what you need. And when you do have to compromise—for goodness’ sake don’t feel guilty about doing so. You haven’t sold yourself short or failed, you’ve just compromised! You’ve lost some time during your lunch break but at least you’ve won your Friday.

 

STEP 6 PULL OUT THE RHETORICAL GUILT SHIELDS

 

We tend to think silence and a smile are the best guilt-deflectors, but if you just can’t help yourself, here are some ready-made scripts you can use to avert an assault from coworkers and bosses.

No—Just Say It

Once you’ve tamed your inner-guilt monster, you are ready to welcome that most wonderful of words into your vocabulary. We’re certain you barely use it. But it’s a potent combination of two letters that could routinely save our sanity. Go ahead. Say it. You know the word we mean.

NO.

Are we simply allergic to it, terrified of the consequences? What do we really think will happen if it becomes a regular part of our speech? Maybe the world would be rocked by an Armageddon of hurt feelings? Perhaps our pictures would be blasted through cyberspace as modern-day Leona Helmsleys? Or worst of all, people might be—disappointed?

Maybe. But here’s the fundamental problem. When we are so eager to please everyone and avoid people being cross with us, we end up saying yes to a lot of things we don’t really want. This of course means we end up spending more time working than we really want. And that’s why you are reading this book.

“In the past I tended to be a ‘yes ’person,” Stephanie Hampton, the Marriott spokesperson told us. “I’d say ‘yes’ to just about anything and everything, in the belief that I was building a reputation for myself as a can-do, go-to person. I looked around and noticed that a lot of successful people don’t say ‘yes’ to everything; they are more strategic. They say ‘yes’ for a variety of reasons. True, sometimes it’s based on who’s doing the asking. But most of the time successful people choose to say ‘yes’ to strategic or value-added work. So now I think about whether a project will put ‘heads on beds’ or otherwise enhance the brand reputation of Marriott. If the answer is no, it’s usually just busywork, and I try to find a way to say ‘no’ without saying ‘no.’”

Our New York lawyer, Linda Brooks, says she still backslides. “I think people don’t like to be told no, so I have to get a thicker skin and resist the urge to please everyone, because I sit there and think, ‘oh my God he hates me now,’ and ‘he’s never going to give me another deal’ and ‘I’m sure the partners are going to vote next week to kick me out of the partnership because I said “no” to that deal.’ My head goes there. So it does take a bit of thickening of the skin. But it does get easier.”

You may not believe it now, but tossing off no will become second nature. It’s a must-have tool for implementing Womenomics. You’ll see in the upcoming chapters how much use it gets. Once you’ve really set your goals, you will be much clearer about what you want to tackle and what you don’t want to take on. It gets refreshingly simple actually—that weekend assignment, no; those extra hours, no; that promotion with all the travel and increased responsibility, no. You will learn not just to say “no,” but also to think no, mean no, and act no.

And yes, employing it may mean you disappoint, anger, and annoy. But it will also mean you are happier, healthier, and more straightforward. It’s certainly a better situation for you and, also, therefore, for everyone in your life in the long run. Even the recipients of your nos!

 

CLAIRE I’ve always been an ardent people pleaser. For some reason, I grew up with the sense that saying yes as much as I can is more important than anything else. Disappointing people, letting them down—just the thought of that can send me into guilt spasms for days. I came to believe that being thought of as a “nice” person was the ultimate achievement. And I still believe that compassion and caring are at the top of my list. But I’ve also come to understand that my “yes” behavior could be intensely frustrating and stressful to me, my family and friends, and the people getting my “yesses.” I was constantly taking on more than I could handle—and then having to back out of projects or commitments—making the very people I was trying to help angrier than they would have been in the first place after just hearing a “no.” Once my son was born, I started to understand that I had to cut back on my people-pleasing, since I had someone who wanted and needed my attention so much, and he was clearly my priority. But I was still trying to do too much until one incident radically changed my outlook. I’d said yes to a trip out west for a story that I knew was not a top priority, but I didn’t want to “let down” the senior producer who’d asked me. I was juggling other projects, one of which then went on the air to tepid reviews. On top of that, my husband and I had barely seen each other, and my son was quite clingy. I came back from the trip with my typical chest cold, which my doctor finally told me she believed was stress-induced, since I managed to get it seven or eight times a year. I spent two days limping around the house, fighting with my husband instead of having a nice weekend with him as we’d planned, and I was too sick and tired to go to my son’s first swimming lesson. And I finally had to tell the senior producer I just could not finish her project, which had her livid, to say the least. It was an ugly period, for sure, but a critical awakening for me about the power, and the necessity, of no.

 

We’ll walk you through some very situation-specific ways to say “no” in chapters 5, 6, and 7. But first, you must have the psychological grounding, the mental readiness to deploy this powerful instrument without fretting about what people think of you when you use it. You really will come to believe that no is not negative. It’s as positive as it gets.

Recognizing a NO Moment

You probably already have a very good internal radar as to what constitutes a reasonable request and what does not; what is part of your job, and what is inappropriate. It’s funny how we all know immediately after we say yes that we made the wrong move. How many times have we said: “Why did I say yes to that?” We knew beforehand too. You just have to become a better sleuth.

Asking yourself these questions will help you make a rational evaluation of the consequences at work. They dig inside your emotions to get to your gut instinct—which is almost always right but just hard to uncover.

The best opening question to ask yourself is, very simply:

If you realize that the request is completely unhelpful to you, then you’ve got a definite no moment on your hands. You might have to figure out how to say “no” (see the sections below) but the no should be said.

If the request actually does have value to you, and can be helpful to you, then there are a few follow-up questions to ask yourself. First, try to calibrate the importance of the request in terms of a bigger picture by asking:

In many cases the answer will be that, no, it doesn’t. And here you also need to factor in smaller questions such as—do I actually have the time and the skills necessary to do it well? Otherwise, it could have a negative impact on your career! But you might also find that you believe that it is important to your career, and that you can pull it off. You’ve no doubt learned by now that if something is going to affect your career, then it’s bound to affect other things in your life. And, thus, the next question:

Be honest here. You may know you have a tendency to fear the worst, and assume every change in your schedule will be a personal tsunami, leaving your children whiplashed and virtually orphaned. Or you may typically assume you can handle everything, only to see it all come crashing together in an ugly way later. Know yourself, know your tendencies, and think through what you really think will happen.

Lauren Tyler fairly pulsates with a welcoming, magnetic energy. Her nature is one of the things that make her so successful, but at the same time it’s something she’s come to understand can leave her overburdened and a target of unnecessary requests. She’s spent twenty years honing her process of reaching no, and keeps it simple with a variation on the above three questions. “At this point I always ask, ‘Does it help me do my job? Or does it help my kids?’ If the answer is no, I don’t take it on.”

Robin Ehlers of General Mills easily weeds out the obvious nos with the above questions, but she has also learned to recognize that there are things she’s inclined to turn down because they seem daunting, but which she actually enjoys, professional and personal. “Even if it seems hard and it might be disruptive, is it something that I’ll actually enjoy doing in the end? That’s what I try to figure out,” she says. “Like Monday night I had thirty people over for this charity dinner, and I was like, ‘I can’t believe I did this.’ But I actually enjoyed it, and I’ve also learned not to worry about the house looking perfect or the food being great.”

That moves us toward asking the more personal questions. They deal with your instinct, your gut feeling, your intuition, your sixth sense. Think of them as an emotional litmus test.

If there is that unpleasantly nervous feeling—something more than just “butterflies”—then you need to stop and figure out what’s going on, since this is an emotional red flag. The fact that you can physically feel the pit lingering there is an indication of how strong your doubt is.

If you have an inkling that you’ll be angry or feel some kind of resentment toward yourself, then you should seriously consider saying “no,” since any self-directed anger indicates a feeling of self-betrayal.

Lastly, make sure that you actually feel positive about the request:

Here’s where looking back to the past for clues, which is what Robin does, can be helpful. Are there other situations where you’ve thought something might be hard, or unwise, and then in the end you actually were happy you said yes? Part of this, again, is knowing yourself well and recognizing when your reaction is simply a fairly meaningless habit, or actually constitutes real warning bells.

Gear Up for the No

In time, the detective work that will lead to a decision about saying yes or no will become much easier. And obviously, there’s no standard formula to use to reach that decision. We can’t tell you that if you respond a certain way to five out of those six questions, for example, you should shout “Forget it!” at the top of your lungs. But we do know that with practice, and by constantly using those questions as an evaluating tool for each potential no situation, making a certain kind of decision will start to feel natural. Eventually, it will be fluid and even unconscious, in the sense that you’ll be able to perceive all the important elements, all the positives and negatives on the field, in the blink of an eye. Your nos (and, accordingly, your yesses) will be confident, un-hesitating, and forward-moving.

But this does take practice. Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy way to train for the no, and it doesn’t require you to rapid-fire that two-letter word at your boss until it feels natural.

The Womenomics-Approved No

The key to this kind of no is the delivery, since you’re trying to communicate a very clear message in an inoffensive way. It’s a difficult task, but it’s doable. The things to remember, which will always serve you well:

Mind your manners: Make good eye contact, smile, be friendly. Remember, you are saying no. You can afford to be gracious.

Keep it clear: If the request is unclear, ask for immediate clarification. “What are you asking exactly?” “Who else might be able to do it?” “Who will be able to help?” Keep it all crisp, and speak in an objective, information-gathering tone.

Take your time: It’s always OK to buy time, especially while you get used to this new state of affairs. “Let me think about it and go over my obligations and get back to you.” “I can’t talk right now; I’m on the other line. Can I call you back?” You will often say a better no or yes if you have enough time to think. Just remember: if you decide to say “no,” don’t hesitate. Any hesitation leaves an opening for the person making the request.

Keep it simple: The fewer words the better. Ideally, we could all get by with a simple no and turn and walk away, à la Clint Eastwood. That’s the real power move, but in our experience, it’s unrealistic. So we’ve come up with a more nuanced no, which we’ve come to call our

 

NO SANDWICH

(You’ll soon be addicted!)

 

ON TOP

Breezy and sincere apology or praise

“I wish I could help.” “Ordinarily I’d love to.” “That’s just what I’d want to do.”

 

THE FILLING

Crisp, plain hearty NO meat

“I have other obligations/deadlines/plans/meetings.”

“My schedule won’t let me take that on.”

 

THE BOTTOM

An alternative

“What about Tuesday/next week/Carrie Logan/hiring a temp?”

“I could assign Bert to that if you like.”

 

Plans. Have them. A lot of them. We love this method. Remember, saying you have plans, the filling layer of our sandwich, does not mean you are engaged away from home, or even at an office event. Having plans can mean a date with your favorite book or TV show, dinner with the kids, or an afternoon of lying around. You don’t owe anyone the details. Use it constantly.

Cite a policy. If you need more help finding good NO filling for your sandwich, it can help to come up with a set of personal policies. They can be handy comebacks for both personal and work requests on your time. “Oh, I wish I could, but we have a family policy that we don’t go out during the week,” or “Friday night is our movie night, I’m sorry.” Even for work requests: “I make it a policy never to travel more than once a week. Will next week work?” “Our family policy is no business breakfasts until the children are out the door to school. What about 9 A.M. coffee?”

Policies sound official, and even citing a family policy at work makes you seem organized and thoughtful. Further, it can make the no less personal and random. You are not saying “no” to the person—but rather blaming the policy. It can remove the sting. And best of all, you may find it actually helps you come up with a better set of priorities!

The diplomat’s no: There are many ways to say “no” that don’t require you to actually utter those two fatefully combined letters. You should be able to say “no” outright, if that’s how you feel, but the truth is that sometimes you won’t have that confidence. And other times, the diplomat’s no is simply part of a more effective strategy.

You can also think of it as a burden shift. It’s actually a critical part of the bottom layer of our NO Sandwich. It’s ideal if you can say yes to part of the request, and no to part—then you get credit for being a “yes” person, but you get to handle things more on your terms. Using a time frame is often your answer. “I’d love to. I’d be able to get it to you three weeks from Monday. Will that work?” “Absolutely, you’ll have it tomorrow. But I’ll have to give you the Condon account next week. I assume that’s OK?”

“I often say ‘I’d love to help, but these are my priorities right now,’” says Christy Runningen. “‘Can I get back to you next week with this piece of it? Here’s what I’m up against, so can we push this part of it to Thursday?’” It’s honest, and it shows you’re trying to compromise and often can encourage them to find other solutions.”

Robin Ehlers often likes to rely on her “calendar.”

“Just the other day, somebody called me from Minneapolis and said we’re taping this segment on one of our food products on November 14th and wanted to make plans for me to be there. I just told her, ‘You know, I’ll look at my calendar and see if I can work it in with some other appointments and let you know.’ And it’s one of those things in my mind I went through like this: ‘Okay, so what’s the big deal about me being there? Yes, I should be there as a representative for General Mills, but I’m not going to get any business for it. You know, I might meet some people at the station, but there’s nothing there for me down the road.’ So I just kind of walked through and decided I probably won’t go unless I can tie in something else valuable with that.”

Here’s our New York lawyer’s version of the diplomat’s no:

“‘Oh, I would love to. Oh my God, that sounds so interesting. I wish I could, let me think about that and get right back to you.’ Then I call them back and I say, ‘No, I can’t.’”

Christy Runningen also likes questions.

“Whenever I get that cringing feeling inside as I start to hear an overwhelming request, the first thing I usually ask is: ‘Why do you need my help? What is it that you’re trying to get to?’ I have a master’s degree in psychology, and so I tend toward questions. And often we find out together that there’s another solution.”

 

KATTY This is a really hard one for me. I hate the idea that people won’t like me, so I’ll bend over backward to accommodate and please people. I’m also terrible at confrontation, and you don’t need a PhD in psychology to see the two are related. I used to avoid saying no to people, but now with four kids and a job I’ve just had to force myself to do it. I’m still not very good at the bald-faced NO though. I still fear the negative reaction that it will provoke. So I get around it by dressing up my nos in soft language. I don’t have the confidence yet to say, “No, and by the way you were out of order even asking that,” so I’ll say, “That sounds like an interesting opportunity, but I’m afraid I have too many commitments.” I should work on the blunt NO, though—I think it would ward off further requests.

 

Take the bull by the horns: Once you make your decision, it’s yours to fight for. You’ve gone through all the processing, probably some soul-searching, and you’ve found the answer to what once seemed like a Sphinx’s riddle. So, go after it with confidence. Don’t water down the delivery with problem language like “I think…” or “maybe if…” or “I’m unsure about…” You’ll get trapped!

Say it early: Be active about any no, once you see it’s in range. Again—being definite and firm makes you seem organized, in charge, and on the offensive.

 

CLAIRE I’d been envisioning this particular train crash for months, and it would knot up my stomach every time I thought about it. The Republican National Convention was conveniently scheduled for the first week of September 2008, coinciding exactly with the first week of school for both of my children, then three and six. My husband had to be at the convention too, but even if he could have stayed home, I would have wanted to be at home to help with the emotional preparation for both kids entering new classes. I think most parents know getting ready for that first day, and being there when they get home to hear the tales of excitement or woe, is critical parent time. In my mind, I’d decided there was simply no way I could be away. But I also knew ABC would almost certainly expect me to be at the convention. Finally, I decided to jump in BEFORE they started planning convention coverage. In late May, I sat down with the executive producer and told him bluntly there was an approaching issue. I told him I knew this could be a problem, but that there was simply no way I’d be able to go to the Republican convention for them. And I told him why, leaving no doubt about where I needed to be that week. Firm, but not combative, was my goal. He thought about it and mulled it over, thinking to himself who might go and what that would mean, and then he said, “We should be able to handle that.”

I was walking on air the rest of the day. It was such a burden lifted from my shoulders. And I really believe because I got in there early, it made a difference. Had they already put me on a list and started planning work for me, they would have been more invested in my presence, and then it might have been a showdown.

The Beauty of Boundaries

Part of the beauty of saying “no” ’is that you’re doing much more than staving off an unwanted assignment or a new responsibility or obligation. The rush of confidence and even the slightly otherworldly sense of well-being that arrives after a decisive no moment comes in part from the knowledge that you won’t have to cram a round-peg assignment into the square hole of your schedule. But also, that feeling of calm mixed with pride is a feeling of moving forward as a person, of having grown a bit.

The reason why this feels empowering is that being able to say “no” when you mean it represents an ability to set boundaries. You can even see this by pegging your own growth as a person to the kinds of domestic and personal boundaries you’ve been able to establish over the years. While many of us have done a great job of setting boundaries at home—and especially if there are kids in the house who depend on having boundaries set for them—we’ve often neglected to transfer the same ability to our workplace. But boundaries at work are just as important as the ones at home, if only because what goes on at the office has such heavy repercussions on what goes on at home. Your bosses and your underlings need boundaries every bit as much as your five-year-old. The clarity helps their decision making and their ability to work well, and in the long run it will generate enormous respect for your maturity.

And best of all, it’s a reinforcing behavior. Think of each no as a small dot—part of a bright line you are drawing around your life and priorities. Each no not only makes the next easier, but it also starts to ensure you’ll have to say them less often. You’ll come to understand this even better in chapter 6, where we discuss in detail the many benefits to your professional reputation that NO offers. Saying “no” will make you seem more confident. When you put a value on your time, and you are clear about it, others will see your time as valuable too. A healthy distance from guilt, and a healthy use of no will ensure you are respected. And in the end, respect is far more valuable to you at work than being liked.

A Twist of Obligation

Lots of women, ourselves included, dread saying “no” because of the tangle of emotions that we discussed above. For many women, there is an added barrier to the self-affirming no: it’s the social, or maybe we should say sociological, obligation.

Melissa James understands the emotion of sociological obligation as well as anyone. Melissa is a rare individual in many ways. She’s one of the few African American women who have risen to the upper echelons at investment banking powerhouse Morgan Stanley. In fact, she’s one of only a small group of African American women in the whole cutthroat, macho financial industry to have reached those kinds of professional heights.

Beyond her professional achievements, Melissa also managed to get smart about her life, about balance. To speak in the language of this book, she managed to change her perspective and came to look at her life and job through the Womenomics lens. At one point early in her career, she took the initiative, sat down with her boss, and asked for “more flexibility.” After explaining what she had in mind by that somewhat ambiguous two-word phrase, her boss said something mildly shocking: “That’s great.” They had no intention of losing her.

She’s since moved back to full-time work as the global head of loan products for the company, but she remembers that at the time, it wasn’t bosses’ guilt or professional self-doubt that she had to deal with. For the most part, it was something else.

“I think there are a whole bunch of issues about being a minority of any kind,” Melissa told us.

“Whether you’re a minority by virtue of your gender, or by virtue of your ethnicity or whatever, there are issues. There’s more baggage, there are more challenges, there are more obstacles. It’s more difficult in certain respects. Maybe it’s easier in others, but on the whole it’s more difficult. And you can feel a greater sense of obligation to achieve or to do things well, like, ‘I have to do things well because I am such a rarity, or I’m doing this for the entire race, or all African American women, or whatever, so I can’t give in now.’”

Think about this for a minute. Melissa is a person who had overcome all the odds to get to where she wanted to be. Not only this, but she also had managed to take control of her life, get time off, pare down her workload, and still remain a valuable player at a high-stakes financial firm. And yet, she still felt guilty.

Women’s emotional waters run deep. Melissa, despite years of hard work and substantial, traditionally defined success, didn’t become the ball-busting corporate ice queen that you see in the movies. After jumping (or, in her case, leaping) the professional barriers, she went on to face personal ones—years of troubled pregnancies and negotiations about work-life balance. After getting past the personal barriers she went on to focus on her obligations to society as a whole. But she emerged the victor.

“I’m extremely happy about where I am,” she told us, “and that is not to say that I have everything I want or there is something that is ideal or that is perfect or that there’s not angst or ambivalence, but when I look at things in the scheme of my own life and I look at the success that I’ve enjoyed and the seniority that I have, the responsibility that I have, the money that I get paid, the whole package of workplace flexibility that I have, this package really works for me.”

We couldn’t dream of a better example than Melissa James of what can be achieved, both professionally and personally, with the right approach. Melissa, and all the rest of us, need only go one step further: instead of feeling an obligation to do more and more, we need to turn that driving emotion toward feeling pride for what we’ve already done. Instead of feeling guilty, as we imagine what our female predecessors might think about our choices to scale back the work hours, or what our ethnic community or even family might think, we need to understand that most of those people would be awed by what we’ve already accomplished, which is that we’ve earned the ability to decide. Exercising this ability means saying “no” when you need to and not falling into a guilt trap for doing so. And, in fact, exercising this ability will help to build a world our successors will be thankful for.

Over the next three chapters, we’re going to map out the path to building this world for you—the world of work-life freedom—from the baby steps of buying minutes in your day to the gigantic strides of completely overhauling your work deal.

We’ll start small and accessible. There are things you can do today, with no confrontations or meetings or favors asked, to win yourself more time. We’ll look at your home lives and your work lives to see how you can cut tasks down and be more efficient. Then we’ll get strategic and, yes, psychological again, and look at how you can buy freedom for yourself and help your employer with an attitude change. You’ll learn, for example, to pick those plum assignments to maximize your impact and the company’s benefit. And then we’ll talk about how to really renegotiate the whole deal. How you can plunge in and shake off the tyranny of nine-to-six, or eight-to-seven, or seven-to-nine, or whatever your personal prison is, once and for all.

news you can use

1. Guilt is a useless emotion that keeps you from achieving work-life sanity.
2. Changing the guilt soundtrack in your head will open the door to a powerful, life-changing little word: No. It’s one you need in order to master Womenomics.
3. If you don’t say “no” to some things you will end up doing everything.