DRMacIver's Notebook

No

No

Published
2025-05-02

People often talk about needing to be better at saying no.

This is treated as a monolithic skill or general character trait, but I think this might be another victim of metonymy, and there are actually a number of very different circumstances under which you might need to learn this skill. For example, here are a few:Claude helped with some of these, but I deleted about 50% of its suggestions and edited most of the rest.

  1. Saying no to someone who has authority and will legitimately pressure you to say yes.
  2. Saying no to someone who has authority but does actually want you to say no if you can’t do the thing but you’re afraid to disappoint them.
  3. Saying no to things that you do want to do when you’re too tired to do them.
  4. Saying no when you really don’t want to do a thing but know the person who would do it instead also doesn’t want to do the thing.
  5. Saying no to a friend who consistently asks for favors but rarely reciprocates.
  6. Saying no to family members who expect you to participate in traditions that you no longer feel comfortable in.
  7. Saying no to a romantic partner who wants to move faster in the relationship than you’re comfortable with.
  8. Saying no to a project at work that you could help on but isn’t what you want to be doing.
  9. Saying no to a child who wants something that isn’t good for them, despite tears.
  10. Saying no to participating in gossip or conversations that make you uncomfortable.
  11. Saying no to a request that you think is unethicaly.
  12. Saying no to requests for information that feel inappropriate..
  13. Saying no to taking on additional responsibilities when others aren’t doing their share.
  14. Saying no to providing help when you are legitimately the best person to do it but don’t have the capacity to do so right now.
  15. Saying no to providing help when you are legitimately the best person to do it when you could do it but really don’t want to.

For me, I’m pretty good at saying no in circumstances where I’m really over capacity, especially if I don’t particularly care about the asker. I’m also good at saying no even when there’s a power gradient.

However, I’m very bad at saying no to doing something when someone I care about would have to do it instead and also clearly doesn’t want to do it.

In some sense, I endorse being bad at that, you should do things for people you care about, but also that caring is (hopefully) reciprocated, and you should let them do that for you too, and that’s the part I’m bad at letting (or encouraging to) happen. Also you’ll often end up in specific instances where someone’s gotta and sometimes it’s easier to just do the thing than navigate who that someone should be.

Regardless though, this feels like a much more specific problem to engage with, for at least two reasons:

  1. You can look at a specific circumstance and actually engage with the concrete feelings around it much better than you can a sort of vague “I’m bad at saying no”.
  2. You can ask for help on specific circumstances, especially recurring ones, in a way that you can’t with the general. Rather than “I need to get better at saying no”, you can start with “I need to ask for help here”, and it’s a concrete enough problem that help will hopefully be forthcoming.