Two weeks ago I taught the same lesson twice in two days.
Same material, same words, same me. Once on Thursday morning, and then again on Friday evening, because the Thursday session landed at midnight in the UK and I couldn't stand the idea of my European Tired & Wired members missing it.
That's the story I told myself. I told myself it was about access, time zones, fairness.
And some of that is true.
But after a bit of reflection, I realised there's a second version. The version where I looked at a handful of people who couldn't make it, felt something tighten in my chest, and started rearranging my week so that nobody would be disappointed in me.
I haven't done a confessional for a while, so here's one 😅
A couple of weeks ago I wrote to you about never letting myself reach zero, and about ‘rest’ not needing an excuse. Here's what I've been wondering since. One of the reasons I never get anywhere near zero is that I keep adding things back on. I keep filling up whatever space I make for myself.
And almost everything I add back on is for somebody else.
Most of us who do this don't think of ourselves as people-pleasers. We think of ourselves as reliable. Considerate. The one who notices what's needed and quietly handles it before anyone has to ask.
That's the difficulty with this one. It doesn't feel like a problem. It feels like being a good person.
The ‘yes’ isn't a decision. It's faster than a decision.
Watch your ‘yes’ happen one day. We might find that the words are out before we've checked the diary, the energy, or whether we have the faintest desire to do the thing. We're already agreeing while some quieter part of us is still in the back row going, “hang on”.
That's not a choice being made badly. That's a reflex.
We all know fight, flight and freeze. There's a fourth one that gets far less airtime, and the therapist Pete Walker gave it the name that stuck: the fawn response. When the ‘danger’ in the room is another person's displeasure, the body's fastest route back to safety is to make them happy. Quickly. Ideally before they've finished the sentence.
And it works. It works brilliantly.
Because somewhere a long way back, for some of us, one person's mood might have affected the mood of the whole house. And if you got good at reading that mood, at anticipating it, at being easy and helpful and no trouble at all, you got a calmer afternoon. If you got it wrong, you might have paid for it. A stern look. A cold shoulder over dinner. Being the reason the evening turned.
So your nervous system filed "someone is unhappy with me" under ‘dangerous’, and it built you something fast to stop that happening. At the time it was the smartest move available to a small person with no other options.
The trouble is the reflex never got the memo that it's OK to stand down. It's still running for many of us, at full speed.
Here's the bit I keep having to relearn.
The question isn't "should I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’?" That's the one we think we're stuck on, and we can turn it over for days without moving. The more useful question (and the more uncomfortable one) is this: am I choosing this, or am I just trying to avoid the feeling of someone being disappointed in me?
Because those two produce exactly the same ‘yes’. Same word, same smile, same thing in the diary. One of them costs you nothing. The other one costs you your Friday evening and a bit of your self-respect.
And the honest part about my two sessions: I still think running the second one was the right move. Furthermore, I'm going to keep doing it, once a month, so that my European members get proper contact with me instead of just a recording. That's fair. I also want to do it.
But here's what I noticed while I was deciding.
I very nearly offered to do it every week.
I could feel the sentence forming. An evening a week, every week, indefinitely, and I'd have said it out loud before I'd worked out a single thing about what it would cost me. Not because weekly was right. Because once a month felt like it might not be quite enough, and not quite enough is the feeling I've spent my whole life getting away from as fast as I can.
So I’m holding it at monthly, on purpose, and I will grip the arm of my chair a bit to do it 😂
So, three things. I've been using the first one all fortnight.
1. Have one sentence, and never vary it.
Write a single holding sentence, memorise it, and make it the only thing that comes out of your mouth when someone asks you for something. Mine is: "Let me check what's already in the diary, and I'll come back to you tomorrow." Not "I think I can probably do that." Not "yeah, that should be fine." One sentence, the same one, every time.
So imagine it's a Tuesday, someone catches you at the end of a call and asks if you'd pick up the extra piece of work. Old you says ‘yes’ in about a second and a half. New you says the sentence, goes away, looks at the real week in the real diary, and comes back to them tomorrow morning.
Why tomorrow, and not later the same day? Because a few hours only gets you as far as knowing the answer is ‘no’, and that was never the hard part.
Sleeping on it is what gets you as far as being able to say it.
The discomfort of disappointing someone spikes early and then settles, so if you answer while it's still spiking, you'll talk yourself into a ‘yes’ just to make the feeling stop. By the next morning, the feeling is smaller, and the answer is exactly the same one. That night is where the ‘no’ becomes sayable.
Why the same words every time? Because you're not trying to out-think the ‘yes’, you're trying to interrupt it, and a reflex is always quicker than reasoning. The only thing that reliably beats a reflex is another reflex, and reflexes are built by repetition. One sentence, said automatically, is something your mouth can produce while your brain is still catching up. Variety is what makes you improvise, and improvising is exactly how the ‘yes’ gets back in.
2. Name what the ‘yes’ costs, out loud and specifically.
The holding sentence buys you some time. This is what to do with that time.
Before you answer, say the trade out loud to yourself, and be specific about the second half of it.
"If I say ‘yes’, that means less time for me" is too vague to feel.
"If I say ‘yes’ to hosting means ‘no’ to the first free Saturday I've had since May" is specific and feels real.
Why it works: the person asking is right there in front of you, with a face and a hopeful expression. The thing you'd be giving up is invisible, unnamed, and hasn't happened yet. Your brain isn't weighing those two fairly. A ‘vivid’ thing beats a ‘vague’ thing every single time. Kahneman and Tversky's work on loss aversion found that we feel a loss about twice as much as we feel the same size of gain. But a loss you haven't named isn't really a loss yet. It's a faint sense that something's slipping. Saying it out loud makes it specific enough to go on the scales.
3. Two truths and a counter.
This is the one for after you've decided to say no, when your chest starts having opinions about it.
Say two things that are true, then add the counter:
"It's true they'll be disappointed. It's true I can't be in two places at once. And I'm still allowed to choose."
The whole tool is the word "and". Not "but". "But" cancels the first two and starts an argument you're going to lose, because they were both true. "And" lets all three sit in the room at the same time.
Why it works: when the fear of someone's disappointment turns up, it doesn't arrive as one thought among several. It arrives as the verdict, the entire picture, case closed. Putting two other true things beside it doesn't argue it away, which is just as well, because arguing with it tends to make it louder. It only stops it being the only thing on the table. This is a gentler relative of the reframing work in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with the arguing taken out of it.
And if none of that touches it, that's worth knowing too.
Because sometimes the ‘yes’ has nothing to do with the diary. Sometimes being needed is the only way we've ever been sure we're wanted, and no holding sentence is going to shift that. That one doesn't move for a tool. It moves slowly, mostly with other people, over years.
But you don't have to have finished working on yourself before you're allowed to say ‘no’ this week. You can be halfway through it, or barely started, and still put one thing down.
If this feeling is familiar, I made a short video on saying no without the forty minutes of guilt afterwards 👇🏾
▶ Watch: Guided Meditation to Stop People Pleasing - The Daily Coach
And if the ‘yeses’ all come back to visit at two in the morning, wanting to talk about how you should have handled them, try this sleep meditation 👇🏾
▶ Watch: Let Tonight Be Kind to You | Vagus Nerve Sleep Meditation to Feel Safe
