The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop People-Pleasing, Reclaim Your Boundaries, and Say Yes to the Life You Want: A Simple Plan to Stop People ... Boundaries, and Say Yes to the Life You Want

Product Information

I work with clients who are deeply perplexed by how working with someone has unsettled them into uncharacteristic behavior or deep anxiety. Every single time the person in question bears some similarity to a parent, caregiver, sibling, or another significant person from their childhood. When Victoria, a then-thirtysomething senior executive at one of the world’s largest companies, overheard her peers gossiping and bitching about management at an internal conference, she reported them for not behaving in a way that upheld company standards. What happened next deeply upset and confused her: Management reprimanded her peers, and as those peers worked out that she was the informant, they distanced themselves and engaged with her only when it was absolutely necessary. Title: The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop People-Pleasing, Reclaim Your Boundaries, and Say Yes to the Life You Want

The joy and relief of saying no: how I learned to stop

Stress produces the hormone cortisol, and chronic stress produces too much of it, disrupting the body’s processes, putting our health at risk, and creating illness.2 Natalie Lue is a leading voice on healthy boundaries. This is a beautiful, compassionate resource. Highly recommend it to you.' Your boundaries are your needs, desires, expectations, feelings, and opinions because these represent who you are and how you want to be, your values, preferences, principles, and priorities for living your life happily and authentically. They are your yes, no, and maybe, so in essence, the more you represent who you are by showing up and stepping up authentically and honestly, the healthier your boundaries are. If you’re not authentically saying yes and saying no when you need, should, or want to, you become incongruent with your values because you are not embodying your character or honoring your preferences and priorities.Sometimes we experience a period of chronic stress that means we’re operating close to or above that threshold.

The Joy of Saying No by Natalie Lue | Waterstones The Joy of Saying No by Natalie Lue | Waterstones

Full Book Name: The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop People Pleasing, Reclaim Boundaries, and Say Yes to the Life You Want Each file contains details of the event, such as what happened, how we and others responded, and sensory information from the environment. Encasing those details is the emotion associated with them. And this is every event, and although we don’t remember most, our nervous systems do. If the adults were up to no good themselves but wanted to keep up appearances outside the home, wanted their child to make up for their past “bad” deeds, or wanted to keep their child from following in their footsteps, ensuring that their child was obedient and abided by their version of goodness was paramount. It’s why we hear, “No one knows what really goes on behind closed doors” a lot, as appearances really can be deceiving. It’s also why parents and caregivers may have focused on chastity, limited the child’s social life, micromanaged their schedule by cramming it with achievement-driven activities, or stopped them from having friends altogether. My workload soon started to get out of hand. I was making so many promises that I couldn’t remember who I was letting down from one day to the next. Every time the phone rang or my inbox pinged, it was another person asking for help or chasing up the help they had already solicited. My wonderful portfolio career, filled with interesting and engaging projects, had turned into a roll call of accusations. All the individual projects seemed to merge into a ball of pain. I realised I had developed a subconscious animosity towards the people for whom I was working. Instead of being clients or colleagues, they had become an annoyance. If complying with something means you can’t be an adult and healthily meet your needs at the same time, you need to say no.My late acupuncturist and mentor, Silvio Andrade, helped me understand what was going on in my body as I was baffled as to why it felt as though I couldn’t handle additional stress even though I thought I was okay. Here’s the truth: What I thought was being “good” and “helping out” was people pleasing—using “pleasing” to influence and control other people’s feelings and behavior to gain attention, affection, approval, love, and validation or to avoid conflict, criticism, stress, disappointment, loss, rejection, and abandonment. Not feeling our feelings, aside from disrupting our emotional intelligence, also creates stress. We avoid our feelings to not deal with the stress of something, not realizing that this avoidance is a stressor. And the suppressing and repressing of ourselves to please others means we ignore and distrust our wonderful bodies instead of listening to them. We comply to “keep the peace,” not realizing that there’s no peace inside us. And because we’ve gotten so used to being this way, we think we’re “fine,” not realizing we lost our sense of “fine” and our limits a long time ago. Unquestionably and unconditionally complying with so-called authorities and being expected to prioritize pleasing them might have worked if one thing were unquestionably true: that all authorities were loving, caring, trustworthy, and respectful, and that they didn’t abuse their power. Obviously, that’s not the case. Some arrived at playing their role because they received positive reinforcement for being quiet, being polite, playing nice, not being selfish, being keen to please, not being like someone else who didn’t behave as well, going along with things, getting good grades, being popular, or being highly regarded. This created nervousness about disappointing anyone who seemed very invested in their being this way.

Goodreads Loading interface - Goodreads

Whether overtly or indirectly, you often have an issue with saying no through your words and actions. You do “good” things, but for the wrong reasons. I’m Natalie, an author, self-esteem coach, and relationship expert. I help you discover how to have fulfilling, loving relationships with yourself and others.While some instances of people pleasing are obvious because we know that we’re doing something to be liked, allergic to saying no, praise hungry, or maybe behaving like a performing seal on steroids, many of our people-pleasing habits are out of view yet insidious, such as the following: During the Age of Obedience, somebody somewhere was policing or dismissing our feelings; labeling our facial expressions, personalities, introversion or extroversion, behavior, appearances, intellects, talents, or aspirations as “good” or “bad” and in effect guilting, obliging, scaring, and shaming us into being whom they wanted us to be. It was socially acceptable to physically “discipline” and punish a child whether in public or private, or to say whatever you wanted without thought for the emotional and mental consequences. Emotional, mental, and physical connections were not a priority or the norm, so the desire for attention, affection, and nurturing were seen as surplus to requirements. This means that whatever your style of people pleasing and how frequent it is, your people pleasing is driven by hidden motivations. You’re not doing something because it represents your true values and intentions and how you feel but because of what you’re trying to get or avoid.