Shay 2.1

This is the second post in this week’s series on Balance.

In yesterday’s post, I spoke about how engagement  was the key to balance.  I’ve written in other places about the value of controlling your time through saying no to unnecessary obligations.  Lest I appear to be contradictory or hypocritical, I’m going to talk a bit more about the balance between saying yes, and saying no.

Making a yes or no decision can appear simple on the surface.  There are only two options, it’s a binary choice, you can do some mental math based on the implications and arrive at a justified conclusion with relatively little effort.  But, what you can’t know, is the outcomes that may result from this decision.  Sure, you can predict, forecast, and draw on previous experiences, but there is great power in both saying yes, and also in saying no.

Saying Yes

I had a chance to experience first-hand the power of saying yes last week, during my time at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.  It would seem that this entire event is based on the premise of saying yes.  You are exposed in rapid-fire succession to ideas, people, conversations, and inputs of all sorts.  Each of these things presents an opportunity for engagement, to which I would encourage you to say yes.  Say yes to talking to that person who looks like they might be interesting.  Say yes to that talk that may or may not be relevant to what you’re working on.  Say yes to stopping by that booth that looks a little confusing.  You have very little to lose, and very much to gain.

But this is a controlled environment; an invalid experiment, perhaps.  I was at the conference for the sole purpose of engaging, of saying yes.  I was there to explore the ideas, people, and opportunities made available to me, and I was temporarily relieved of my regular duties of work, school, and everything else.  Situations like this are rare, and must be used to their full advantage when the come along.

The short-term benefits of saying yes were readily apparent: interesting conversations, meeting new people and ideas, and exploring opportunities to create, continue, and cultivate relationships.  The long-term benefits are a bit more difficult to define, but will likely be just as positive.

Saying No

Saying no can be an incredibly powerful tool.  That’s why I advocated so strongly for the power of saying no in my earlier posts on this very blog.  In fact, I would argue that saying no is a more powerful tool than saying yes.  By saying no, you ensure that you are not engaged with whatever it is you said no to.  Most times this works out well – you say no to projects that you can see are headed in the wrong direction.  You say no to offers that are too good to be true.  You say no to obligations that you can’t possibly meet, or to promises that you can’t possibly keep.

These are good and valid reasons for saying no.

But – be aware, saying no carries a much greater finality than saying “yes”.  If you understand this, you can use it to your advantage, but just be sure that you understand the door-closing power of “no.”

Balance | Yes & No

You can’t say yes to everything in “real life” – but that doens’t mean that you should always say no.  Saying yes signals your willingness to engage with the infinite number of outcomes that may result from your agreed-upon activity.  Saying no signals that you are not willing to engage with those outcomes, be they good or bad.

There are clearly times to say yes, and times to say no.  The challenge becomes deciding when to say which.

As a general rule of thumb, I like the “nothing to lose” decision matrix.  Do I have something significant to lose by saying yes to the proposition before me?  If not, say yes.  If so, do your own personal risk calculation, and decide if the potential positive outcomes of your yes decision outweigh the potential negative outcomes.  If so, say yes.

Let’s be clear, however: “nothing to lose” is not an insistence that you adopt a “live fast” mentality.  Quite the opposite, really.  What “nothing to lose” means is that you are willing to explore the outcomes of the engagement because they are not tangibly detrimental to your current situation.  Once they become tangibly detrimental, the equation changes, and perhaps it’s time to say no.

Here’s the bottom line: say yes more often than you say no, and be willing to engage with the outcomes of those yes decisions.  When you know that saying yes will be problematic, say no.  If you can’t see a problem, say yes.  What do you have to lose?