Ep 72: The Freedom of a Hard No

Here's the thing, every time you say yes to something, it means you're saying no to everything else. That is how we turn those shimmering ideas into concrete realities, by setting boundaries.

In this episode, we will talk about the concept of a "hard no" and how this clear, compassionate form of rejection can keep us aligned with our goals.

Where's your hard no, where's your hell yes? The better you get at recognizing them, the better life becomes and the better you'll get at following through on making your ideas real.

Stay tuned and get ready to give the world some hard NO.

What you'll learn in this episode:

Recognizing where your hell yes and your hard no is
How to manage societal pressures and the artistry of making choices
How to develop belief in your vision
Why it is easy to say yes to the things everybody else is doing

Mentioned in this episode:

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle

How to connect with Marie:

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.

Well, hey, everybody, Welcome to Episode 72 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. Here we are, together, talking about what it feels like to say, hell, no, that's what we're doing here together today. Hell, no, that's what we're doing here together today.

This is a super important topic that I have experienced my own growth within multiple sorts of like. It's like I'm passing myself a baton over the years, and I do it, I run a lap and I get better at it, and then I pass myself the baton to start all over again and I figure out how to do it in a new way that I didn't know I wasn't doing it.

So this is like hand in hand related to the boundaries baby episode, but it's just, it's a different kind of angle on something really important, because when we are turning ideas into real things and remember you, even if you listen every single week to this I'm going to remind you that when I say that what we're talking about on this podcast is any idea that you want to bring into reality, be that a recipe, repainting a bedroom, writing a book, starting a business, changing a relationship, changing your self-concept for who you are.

Any of those ideas start as a glimmer of possibility in your mind. You have to develop a belief in them, a vision for what it will look like when that thing is real. Then you have to believe in the after, until it is real. You have to believe more in your glimmer of possibility than all of the refuting evidence that the world will give you because it's not real yet.

As you take action to make that thing real and you learn failure tolerance we call it failing like you mean it fail over and over again, you iterate, you evaluate, you do retros on what's working, what's not working, until that thing is real and it's glorious and it is fun, and in doing it you become who you want to be.

I say that because in the normal day-to-day of life, when we're not engaging in this process of turning our ideas into real things, we are reacting instead to whatever the world happens to be giving us in that moment, whatever arbitrary stimuli we are getting from other people, the environment, culture, communities we're a part of. We live in reaction to those things.

There is nothing wrong with that and that is an option. Always, my suggestion and my offering is that life is so much more meaningful when we determine our own North Star and our own destination. And again, that can be in these small day-to-day pleasures of life or it can be large creations that we're coming up with, but that is the purpose of what we are doing here is we are learning the process that innovators use to have that moxie, that empowerment to decide what we want in our lives, decide what we want to experience, what we want to create, who we want to be, and then learn through doing how to take the steps to make those ideas into the life that we are living, the person we are being, because it feels so good.

And that is evolution, my loves, that is evolution and that is contribution. That is living a life on purpose, the life that only you can live, and that is what we are doing here. The life that only you can live, and that is what we are doing here. And within that, every time we set that star, that North star, and I like to think of these North stars like we can think of a North star as our life's purpose, but I like to think of them as like a constellation, right, like I have some idea for what I want my marriage to be like, my partnership with my person, and that's one star in my constellation.

And then I have an idea of what kind of parent I want to be to my beautiful littles as I walk by them, as they figure out who they are and what this life's all about, and that's another star in my constellation. Then I have this work that I'm doing my podcast, my life's work that I'm doing to try to contribute to humanity's evolution through my own exploration of all of this right and my offering of trying to be a support to other people who want to explore it with me in their own lives, and that's another star in that constellation.

So, as we set these constellations, start this constellation up. All these stars, maybe one of them is like my health habits, right, and maybe another one is what I want my home environment to be like. Maybe a tiny one is how clean I want my car to be Like. There's all the things right. We have all of these little goals that are ideas that we want to make real, and nothing is too small, and nothing is too big.

The same process works for all of these little goals that are ideas that we want to make real, and nothing is too small, and nothing is too big. The same process works for all of them. So, whether it's like, you know, tidying up and being a little tidier, or being a little messier, letting yourself loosen up, or whether it's really, you know, creating a podcast or something, all the same process and mindset. This work works for all of them. But here's the thing the same process and mindset, this work works for all of them.

But here's the thing when you say yes to the vision, to the glimmer of possibility, and you sort of commit to that vision, for one of those stars in your constellation, that means you got to say hell no to every other way that that part of your life could look. So, if I know that my partnership with my person, with my love in my life, my husband we happen to be married, but whoever like, whether you have a partner or not.

Some relationship in your life, for me it's him. I know that I want the two of us to make each other bigger and better and stronger and I want us to decide that we are each other's person in exactly the way that we are. We don't want to try to make each other into something else, but we do want to lift up and support and heroicize and reinforce and have each other's backs for the best version of ourselves, as defined by ourselves, not by the other person.

You know, if he says right now my husband is wanting to record some music, a band that he toured with for a long time and they're a couple of record albums, are reproducing some of their songs and they're writing some new songs. So, his band has a big fan base and they're doing these kind of like kickback songs and some new ones and he wants me to record him tonight.

Doing a part of that music project is to do some videos and I'm going to record him and that's what he wants to do and I'm going to do everything I can to make him comfortable, to make him feel good as he's recording, to support him as he's doing that, because that's what he wants. That's his best self-coming out and that means I'm going to say no to the other little pieces that pop up right in me.

There's going to be pieces that you know in a life together that feel like we should be doing the laundry. I'm going to say hell no to that. There are other parts of the relationship right when, if there are parts of me that come up that want to be critical to him, but I know that's not in his best interest, probably not related to this, but something else I'm going to say hell no to that.

I'm going to work with myself to be in line with a vision that I have for the type of partner I want to be to him, and it takes work in all the different areas. If my North star for my health habits are to get some form of exercise every single day, sometimes I'm going to have to say hell no to something really fun that I want to do because I am committed to staying strong as I move through my life and as my body ages.

So saying yes to certain things means saying no hell no to other things, and what I notice is that it's surprising to people that I coach, and it has been so surprising to me too, because sometimes, as we get better and better at prioritizing the focus of our energy and our attention, and as we get better and better at saying yes to the things we really want, yes to ourselves, we get better at saying no and it can feel like backward progress. And it can feel like backward progress.

I know what are we talking about. Well, sometimes that hell no is like feeling less comfortable in certain situations because we have gone farther along in the path of determining what ideas we want to make real. Who do we want to be? What do we want our life to be like? What are the projects we want to focus on? A garden or a book or whatever? It is right.

And as we get clearer and clearer about what we value, we also get clearer and clearer about the things that we do not value, the things that are not in line with who we are becoming, and so sometimes the ick sets in y'all. Sometimes we used to be okay with things that we are becoming, and so sometimes the ick sets in y'all, like sometimes we used to be okay with things that we are just not okay with anymore because we're living our lives for us.

We can become, through doing this work, the hero of our own story. We can become the main attraction of our own lives. When a lot of us were taught to not do that, a lot of us were taught to people please, and you know, take care of everybody around us, but we can do that with love and compassion. We can take care of people, but the most important thing is that we are living our lives as the hero of our own story. Our lives as the hero of our own story.

So when we are living in a way where we're making, you know, setting a dream, believing in ourselves, saying no to the other things, living our life in a way where it's for us, we might not really want to go to the parties we used to go to or have the friendships or relationships we used to have. Or, in the relationships that we do have, we might find ourselves not being okay with things that we used to be okay with. We might find ourselves not liking certain places that we used to like. When we finally feel safe and clear enough on what our yes is, we feel safe enough to know what our no is too, and that makes the nervous system work.

It takes mindset work, but some of the work that I do with my people and that you'll learn about on this podcast is also nervous system work, where you're really working to tolerate emotions and not shove them down. But when we do that, then we get less and less tolerant for bullshit. It's true, we get less and less tolerant of bad behavior, and it doesn't have to sound like what I just said. It doesn't have to sound judgmental.

Sometimes it might feel that way, but it might just feel a lot clearer what our hell no is like. That's not okay with me anymore. We just might not want to waste any more minutes doing things that don't feel good to us anymore or that don't feel right and having a super strong hell no.

Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth he calls it a high quality. No, this book I listened to many, many times. I haven't for probably 10 years, but I love the book, highly recommend it. And in a new earth he talks about a hell no as a high quality. No, there's no judgment in it. It's not critical of the other person. It's strong and it's courageous and it's compassionate. We're staying in our lane, but it's a no, it's just a hard no.

I was in this group the other day where a person was talking about how her mom was in a conversation with her and she said hey, yeah, for me that's a hard no. And her mom later said you know, that was just so impressive to me because I don't think I've ever had a hard no. Some of us have never learned that we get to have hard no's. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything bad about us, but there are some reasons why it's hard.

It can be hard to say no to things like food and alcohol and habitual changes we want to make, not exercising, when our yes is a certain thing that we're aiming at. It can feel hard to say no at the moment to those types of things that are old patterns or the things that everybody else are doing. Because it's so much easier to say yes to that stimulation in front of you that matches what everybody else is doing or that matches your old habits, because it's urgent, it's right in your face, because it gives you a dopamine hit a lot of the time, because you can see the direct impact of doing it.

So maybe going out and joining a group of people gives you a direct feeling of being a part of a group, even when you know that group doesn't really make you feel good in the long run. The immediate feeling of inclusion and belonging might make it easier to say yes when you know really, it's a hell no, that you don't actually want to be in that group of people because they don't bring out your best or everybody else is eating certain foods that don't feel good in your body.

I know a lot of people that are really lactose intolerant. But it's really hard for them because lactose tastes delicious and we all have stuff like this. Tastes really delicious and everybody else is having it. Yeah, I have a couple of friends that really laugh about it and make fun of themselves where, in the moment, they just know that they don't want to do it. It's a hard no for them because they're going to pay for it for 24 hours, but they. It's hard at the moment because it gives them a dopamine hit. It's delicious, it's a way to do what everybody else is doing. You feel included and you feel belonging.

There are a few flags. I'm going to tell you now a couple of things that are a few flags that can tell us when we are saying yes, when we actually mean no, and then I'm going to give you a couple of examples and tools that you can use to help you with the hard no, because the hard no is hard to do at first, but the more you do it, the better it gets. Let me tell you, because every time that you say yes to something, it means you're saying no to everything else. Every time you say yes to doing something with your time, it means you're saying no to everything else.

So, if you're not saying yes to the things that are in line with who you want to be in your life, if you are saying yes to things that are not in line with that, that means you're saying no to who you actually want to be. So, right now, I'm saying yes to this podcast because I love it, because I'm committed to it, because this is my work in the world, because I love all of you, and I'm saying no to going for a walk right now.

I would love to walk in the twilight. I'm saying no to playing catch with my son and reading on the couch with my daughter, but that's okay, because this is in line with who I want to be and my commitment and my consistency.

By the way, we had COVID for the whole past week and I sat on the couch because I didn't really want to watch things, but I had no energy and I sat on the couch and I read and read, and read and read, and this is like my life prior to children, I used to read so much. Now, usually you know, if you listen to the podcast, that I am reading things like about philosophy and mental health and leadership and a lot of nonfiction and a lot of thought leadership. Not this week, y'all. I read sci-fi.

That is not in my wheelhouse Usually it's not how I spend my brain power but I read this article about how the makers of Game of Thrones are making a new show based on a fantastic ending to the show, and my husband was really into it and I don't know if I would have watched it otherwise, but he was really into it.

I love watching things with him and I love the very limited amount of time that we have to watch shows together or movies or anything. I love to choose the ones I really want to watch, and so the other thing that I love is reading something before I watch it, and so I decided I'm going to read these books, because I never read sci-fi, because it's candy and not it is not goal-oriented at all, and I think that's good for me and because it'll mean, you know, watching something by some really legendary producers that I know eventually I'm going to want to see, because everyone's going to be talking about it.

I'll be curious about it. It's going to be culturally relevant, I believe, and because it means spending great time with my husband. So, I read this book called the Three-Body Problem and I read the second book. So, I read like a thousand pages sitting here on this couch this week with my daughter, because my daughter reads nonstop. She reads hundreds of pages every single day.

She will be walking I've said this before in the podcast across the sidewalk with a book in her hand, opening up a car door with a book in her hand. She wears a shirt that says book nerd and she looked over at me and she was like what you read so much I didn't know this. And I said, yeah, this was me before kids baby.

And she giggled and it was so fun and that was a hell of a yes for me.

All right, so now I'm going to tell you some signs that might come up when you're trying to say no to something, something that is a hard no, and you are experiencing the discomfort of it. I'm going to show you what it might be like give you some ideas. First, when you are saying no, or you're trying to say no, or is there any part of you that's wanting to explain your choice, defend your choice or apologize for your choice? Defend your choice or apologize for your choice.

That is really normal when you're developing the skill of saying no, of having hard no's, of valuing your own no and your own yes. Number two are you wanting to judge other people's choice or judge the other option to boost yourself and make you feel better about your no, rather than just valuing that you have a hard no, and you have a hard, yes? As we're getting more and more comfortable trusting our own yeses and our own no's, these are things that might come up. We might want to judge the other options to make it a little easier. We might want to explain or defend our own yeses.

Are you complaining to yourself or to other people about missing the other options or going into FOMO? This happens to me all the time. This is my flag. That shows me that I need to go even farther in the direction of my yes and farther away from my hard no is when I start to get FOMO, like, oh, maybe I should do that other thing. Oh, maybe if I do this, I'm not going to hang out with everyone, I start to get FOMO, but I like to remind myself, and I want to remind all of you that if any of this happens, just remember you're choosing one ice cream flavor.

If you think about going out to get ice cream and you see all of the ice cream flavors out in front of you, they are all delicious. Maybe not every single one of them is your favorite, but let's say there's 20 and let's say, like you know, a good 15 are options. You feel like different flavors on different days.

Other people feel like different flavors on different days. It's all right. But developing the skill to really check in with yourself and say what do I want right now, say yes to that flavor and say no to everything else with strength and courage and resonance and just commitment, that's what we're going for here. And some of you may be laughing at this and be like what are you talking about? Of course, I can choose my own ice cream flavor and say no to other things, but y'all, I have gone to restaurants where people cannot order their own food, where they want everybody else to tell them what they should eat.

I have been in lots of relationships where people just have a lot of discomfort in choosing and sticking with their choice. Now, maybe that's not you, but there's a spectrum here, and the more comfortable we get with choosing our yes and giving a hard no to everything else, the better life gets, all right. So, I'm going to give you a couple of examples and then an exercise you can do.

Okay, one example of getting more comfortable with your nose and a growing pain that this might look like as you get better and better at turning your ideas into real things. That committing to your constellation, to the glimmers of possibility and the different areas of your life, for what you want your life to look like, is that you might have friendships change.

I've had a couple of friendships that I've just sort of let fade away and I've either been very direct and said this isn't what I'm looking for anymore, or I've just kind of faded out of them. One of them was a friendship where I just noticed that this person that I had spent some time with for a couple of years was very manipulative.

Work myself on myself and getting clear and clear about my values and what's okay with me, and getting clear and clear on where my edges are, my yeses and my nos. I started to realize, wow, this does not feel honest, this does not feel direct and honest, and one of my top five values, my top five pillars, is honesty. It's truth being real.

Once I started to let that one fade away, there was another friendship with someone I totally adore and I realized that with this friendship came a lot of body shaming, most of the time not directly of me, most of the time of other people. But I just didn't feel good about it. It's not in line with my values. I believe in compassion and honesty and acceptance of people as they are in non-judgment. Those are all super important to me, that we don't make ourselves better than others by taking other people down.

So I just kind of stopped spending as much time with that person because I felt the ick, the discomfort, and in these friendships there was a part of me that felt like I was kind of being I don't know. It felt like a backslide at first to me. Why do I feel uncomfortable with these people? Why I don't know.

I used to be okay with everything, I used to be more easygoing. And that is what we're talking about today is, as you get clear and clear on what you want and who you want to be. Sometimes you're not going to want to stick around in situations that you used to be okay with. All right.

The last example that I want to give and I'm going to close out today with an exercise that you can do. The example sort of reinforces. This exercise is look at your calendar and how you're spending your time, some of the things on your calendar. If you use a calendar or just if you want to look at how you're spending time in your days, they might match what you used to be okay with.

But as we get clearer and clearer on our constellation, on the glimmers of possibility for everything we want in our life, the things that are most important to us, who we want to be, what we want to do with these moments that we have in this body, on this earth, we start getting better at saying no to things. We start getting better at spending time, these moments of our life, on the things that match our priorities, that match who we want to be right. And so, one exercise that you can do, and I'll give you the example of how this sort of showed up in my life recently is you can make a list of your top five priorities.

For me. My number one priority in my life is always mental and physical wellbeing for myself, because we have to be okay ourselves, take care of ourselves in order to take care of anybody else or anything else. My second one's my husband and my kids. My third one is my programs, my clients, my work in the world, this podcast. My fourth one is friends and family. And my fifth one is sort of like environments.

It's like my home environment. And then sometimes I trade it back and forth with adventure. So, where my body is in space and I kind of shift between whether I'm traveling or my home environment, I shift kind of what that is right now it's my home environment. So those are my five priorities. Our priorities can shift.

I like to keep priorities for a month or so and then look at them, say what are my priorities this month? What are my priorities for next month? The top three usually never change. Sometimes they do when I have something big, I want to focus on.

But then I look at my calendar. If my top priority is self-love and self-care, is my physical and mental well-being, how much time am I spending supporting that? That means exercising, meditating, which means doing exercise. That actually works me out but also exercise that relaxes me. That means sleeping in when I need to. That means reading books. That means whatever it means to create a happy Marie. That means, you know, sleeping in when I need to. That means reading books. That means whatever it means to create a happy Marie. That's number one.

And if there isn't enough on my calendar for that, I know I'm out of line with my priorities. I know I'm not in line with my hard nose and my hell yeses. Then my husband and kids. They always take up a lot of time on my calendar. Let's get real.

But if they did, I would know that I was out of line with my priorities, my programs, my clients, and then my friends and family and my home environment or my travels, my adventures. So, I looked at my calendar. You can make your list of your top five priorities and then look at your calendar and see are you in integrity with your yeses and your no’s?

Recently I looked at my calendar and I realized that I had overtime. I knew that this was happening, but I sat myself down and really, you know, had a good talk where I looked at my calendar and my volunteerism had gone up to 20 hours a week. Now I was volunteering for my children's school, which I love and is really, really important to me, and doing a couple of other things that were really important to me, but what I realized is that is like number six my kids are number two on my priority list but I realized that I was doing this in the name of them.

But what was actually happening, my friends, is that I was volunteering and not, you know, I was not paying attention to them or spending time with them because of all the work I was doing for their school, 20 hours a week.

It also had taken up my exercise time for months and months and my time with my friends. It had crept in and sort of, because there were lots of things that needed attention. It took up more and more space on my calendar and these top priorities of physical health and my friends and family had just slipped off for a couple of months and my friends and family had just slipped off for a couple of months.

And instead of these things that give me a lot of happiness and an infusion of wonderful energy in my life, having lots of time for my work, for my podcast, for my groups, for my coaching clients for this beautiful work that I do. I was doing less of that and more work that didn't feel great, more stressful, stressful work, supporting a lot of stressful situations because they were urgent, because they were stimulation that was right in front of me and people asking for help and I kept saying yes because things felt so urgent, until it took up more and more and more and more of my time and I knew it was happening.

But I finally had a moment where I sat down with myself and I was like yo, you are out of integrity, girl. I talked to my husband about it, and he said, yeah, you love your work. My husband is beautifully supportive and he also says your work is a gift to the world and you are, instead of doing that thing that makes you so happy and that's good for the world and the people around you, you're doing something that makes you stressed out and that is good for the world but, you know, not great for our family.

We don't see you as much or you're in your office in a meeting instead of hanging out with us office and a meeting instead of hanging out with us. And it was taking from my exercise and my friendships, which are things that give me beautiful, beautiful, you know positive energy.

So, this is an example of where a hard no became more and more clear. You know, I told you I get better and better at this over time, which you, I'm sure, will, or do too where we experienced this ourselves in the same sort of patterns of behavior over time. I'm a person that really likes to contribute, and so I found myself a little over contributing and so I came in and I righted the ship, and I organized my calendar again.

I still contribute to the school, but I'm way pulling back my hours. I've gotten out of the situation where it needs as much of my attention, and I am pulling back and balancing myself to be more in line with my hard no's and my hell yes's.

So, you have two tools that I've given you today. First, just the idea. Where's your hard no, where's your hell, yes? They're all over the place. Can you feel them? The better you get at recognizing them, the better life becomes and the better you'll get at following through on making your ideas real, those glimmers of possibility, saying no to everything that's not them, so that they can become the world that you're walking around in.

You have the tool of understanding the little flags that might come up that tell you when you're struggling against your no and your yes. And you have this concept of how easy it is to say yes to the things everybody else is doing, or things that feel like immediate gratification. And then you have a priority list tool that you can use to look at your calendar and look at how you're spending your time.

What are you saying yes and no to, and is it in line with what you want to be doing? I would love to hear how it goes. I want to hear all your hard no's and where they get you. This, by the way, is coming up so much in my group coaching program.

We've been focused on it for a good month now, which is why I wanted to bring it to you today. Get out there and give the world some hard no's, my friends. It feels incredible. That's what I've gotten for you this week and I will see you next week.

Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.

Bloom Your Mind

Ep 72: The Freedom of a Hard No

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