Knowing how to say no at work is one of the most underrated career skills you can develop. The fear is not that you don't know what the word means. The fear is what you think it will cost you: your reputation, your relationships, your standing on the team. So instead of saying no, you say yes, you overcommit, and then you quietly drown.

Here's the reframe: saying no is not the career risk. Saying yes to everything is. Every yes is a promise, and when you make more promises than you can keep, broken commitments are what actually damage your reputation at work. The people who are seen as trustworthy, focused, and self-aware are the ones who say no strategically, not the ones who say yes to everything and then deliver at a fraction of their capability.

In this episode, I walk you through five specific ways to give a strategic no at work, including what I call the honest redirect, the trade-off ask, the soft hold, the values-based no, and the no with the bridge. Each one is a real script you can use in a real situation, whether you're talking to your boss, a colleague, or a committee chair who just volunteered you for one more thing.

Here are the five techniques:

• 1. The Honest Redirect
  Instead of just no, say: I want to do this well, and right now I do not have the capacity to give it what it needs. Can we talk about timing, or is there someone better positioned for this right now?
• 2. The Tradeoff Ask
  When your boss adds something: I want to make sure I get this right. If I take this on, something else has to move. Can you help me decide what gets deprioritized? This reframes the no as a responsible prioritization conversation, not a refusal.
• 3. The Soft Hold
  Buying time without a hard no: Let me look at what is on my plate and get back to you by [specific time]. This buys you time to respond thoughtfully instead of saying yes in the moment and regretting it.
• 4. The Values-Based No
  When it is a genuine conflict with your focus or role: This is not the best use of my skills right now, and I want to make sure this gets the attention it deserves. I think [person] might be a better fit.
• 5. The No With a Bridge
  For relationship preservation: I cannot take this on right now, but I want to help you get this done. Here is what I can do... Then offer something smaller and specific. Not an empty offer -- a real one.

I also share a challenge for you this week: identify one thing already on your plate that you said yes to when you should have said no, and explore what it would look like to renegotiate it. Saying no is not about protecting your time. It is about protecting your word, and the people who do that well are the ones others actually trust.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

How do I say no at work without hurting my career? Because that's the real fear, isn't it? It's not that we don't know what the word no means. It's that we are terrified of what saying it will cost us.

Maybe someone just dropped another project into your lap and you're already drowning, or your boss asked you to take something else on, and every instinct in your body said no, but what came out of your mouth was, sure I can make that happen. Then you went home and stared at the ceiling, wondering how you're going to pull it all off.

Well, here's what I want to offer you today, that saying no is not a career risk. Saying yes to everything is definitely the career risk, because when you say yes to everything, you're making a quiet promise that you cannot keep.

In fact, you're making a bunch of quiet promises that you cannot keep, and broken promises, even the small ones are actually what damage your reputation at work. So let's dive in. How can we say no at work and still preserve everything that we want to have happen at work.

So yeah, let's dive in now. How do I say no at work without hurting my career or having it be a career limiting move? Well, I want to talk about who needs this message today.

This is one of the most common fears that I hear from new managers and high performers who are drowning in requests, and the people who get asked a lot for help with things or new projects or whatever, are the ones who can pull it off.

But I don't want you to pull it off at the expense of your sanity or at the expense of potentially broken promises, and we have been trained to believe that saying yes is how you get ahead, that saying yes puts you on the radar of senior leaders.

But that belief is costing people their performance, their credibility and their sanity. So what people are really asking when they say, What happens if I say no at work, is, will people think I'm difficult to work with? Will they think I'm not a team player? Will they think I'm not committed if I say no?

And I want to reframe this for you, the risk here, again, is not in actually saying no. The risk is in saying yes to too many things and then not being able to deliver on them, and you know, under delivering and not delivering at the level that you know you're capable of.

I know for me, sometimes when I over commit and I say yes to too many things, I come away from something feeling really disappointed in myself. And I say, yeah, that was like a b minus effort.

And when I'm feeling like it's a b minus effort, it's because I know I didn't I just wasn't able to deliver at the highest caliber that I know I'm able to deliver at. And usually, when I take a look at why, it's because I've over committed.

And I bet the same is true for you. If you feel like you're given a b minus effort some places when you know you could have given an A if you had more time or capacity, then yeah, you're probably over committing and then under delivering.

Now I recently heard Tim Ferriss, who is a podcaster and author of The Four Hour Work Week. You may know him from either one of those two places he was referring to, when we have a pattern of behavior of saying yes to too many things.

Well, he referred to it as promiscuous over commitment, and that phrase really stuck with me. So promiscuous, if you are in the habit of having promiscuous over commitment, you know who you are, and that will that will probably resonate and make you laugh a little bit too.

But leaders who say no strategically on the other hand and not having that promiscuous over commitment, well, they're seen as trustworthy, self aware, very much self aware, because they know they can't take something on and focused on the other hand, leaders who say yes to everything are seen as disorganized and reliable on the one hand, or if you still pull it off with a B minus effort.

And I mean to be fair, in some areas, my B minus effort is still a pretty high level of delivery. But that's not necessarily true for everybody. But even when my B minus effort might have risen above somebody else's A plus effort if I know that there was more to give, but I just didn't have the capacity because I was over committed.

Then I feel guilty about that, and I just know that that wasn't my best work, and I hate when I know that that wasn't my best work. And so if you're listening to this as a good chance you This is resonating for you, and you've got some of that going on as well.

So again, on one hand, people who say yes to everything can come off as disorganized and unreliable, but on the other hand, there's this pocket of us who say yes to more than we should, because we know we can pull it off, but it's coming at the expense of our sanity and the expense of, you know, just us being completely stressed out to make it all happen.

So the key insight that I want you to take away from this episode is that saying no is actually a form of communication about your priorities and when it's done well, it signals that you take your commitment seriously and that you want to deliver at that highest Echelon possible of what you're capable of.

And so we want to spend a little bit of time today to get you there. So I am here today to answer the question is saying no at work a bad thing? No, it is not, is not a bad thing, and it's not a career limiting move.

And I also want to give you some specific tools that you can use to say no and to do it confidently and in a way that's going to preserve your reputation at work. So saying no at work is not about protecting your time.

Let me repeat that, because it is so worth letting this one sink in. Saying no, at work is not about you protecting your time. You've got a calendar for that. Okay, you can hold yourself in integrity on the things you commit to yourself on your calendar, but this is not about protecting your time. It's about protecting your word.

Every yes that you give is a promise. Every no is a choice to keep the promises that you have already made. Again, I think this bears repeating. Every no is not about protecting your time. Every yes is a promise. Every no is about protecting your word. Every no is a choice to keep the promises that you have already made.

When you are implementing the strategic No, it communicates three things. Number one, I take my existing commitments seriously. I have already said yes to some people on some things, and I absolutely aim to deliver those yeses at the highest caliber possible.

The second thing a strategic no communicates is I have enough self awareness to know my limits, and that self awareness has to also for some of us, include some of that people pleasing, because those of us who have that promiscuous over commitment and a tendency to say yes too much are doing so sometimes from a place of people pleasing.

And if I have enough self awareness that I have a tendency to people please, I can now use that as a tool for discernment, and I can ask myself, before yes or no comes out of my mouth, I can ask myself, Am I tempted to say yes here from a place of people pleasing?

That's a level of self awareness. In fact, that's a very high level of self awareness. And then I know that I might be tempted to say yes to something because of that tendency for people pleasing. But then it also has me run that through the filter of, do I actually have the capacity for this?

Do I have the capacity to say yes to this and then deliver at the highest capacity, the highest caliber that I know myself to be able to deliver on? Okay? And then the third thing is, if I'm going to give a strategic No, the other thing that it's communicating, the third thing it's communicating is that I respect you and your time enough to not over promise something for me that I won't be able to deliver on.

Okay, so those three things, let me quick repeat them for you. So the three things that a strategic no communicates is, number one, I take my existing commitment seriously. Number two, I have enough self awareness to know my limits and to know that I might be tempted to say yes because I'm a people pleaser. And number three, I respect your time enough to not over promise.

Okay, now let's say you're ready to give a strategic No. How do you actually do it? Well, let's dive into some actionable takeaways. Okay, I want to give you a few specific things that you can say or do instead of giving a yes.

Okay, these are strategic nos, all right, and the first one, I call this one the honest redirect. Instead of just flat out saying no, say, you know, I'd really love to take this on, but if I were to, I would really want to do it to the best of my ability.

I would really want to do it well to the point that you would be so pleased with, you know, inviting me into this project, and right now I don't have the capacity to give this project or this initiative or this, whatever it is, what it needs. So can we talk about the timing, or is there somebody else who's better positioned for this right now.

And that can lead then into a strategic either kicking it down the road, because maybe it is really something that you would like to give a yes to, but you can't right now, at least not to deliver at the highest level of your capability, or maybe it really isn't, you know, the right thing for you, in which case you might then be able to go into a conversation with them where you can help them identify somebody who's better positioned, not only right now, but just better positioned in general.

Okay, so that's the honest redirect. We're saying, like no, because if I did, I know I don't have the capacity to give it what it needs right now. So let's engage in a conversation. Is the timing not right? Or maybe it's just really not me that would be the best fit for this.

Okay? The second thing that you can do is, I call this the trade off ask. So when your boss is asking for something, this is a really good, good one to use with your boss. When your boss is asking for you to do something and adding something to your plate, you want to frame it up, frame your response up, something like this.

You know, I want to make sure I got this right. If I take this on and my plate's already full, then something else has to move. We agree on that. And you know, most of us already have a pretty full plate, so pretty much, your boss is probably going to agree on that premise.

And then you follow that up with so can we engage in a conversation where we decide what gets deprioritized, because if I'm gonna take this on, then something else has to go or has to move to the back burner, and then what you're doing is reframing the no as responsible prioritization.

And it's not a refusal, because nobody really wants to say no to their boss, but when our plate is already full, it really does merit a conversation like this a trade off. If I say yes to this, then something else has to go. It either goes to the back burner or goes to somebody else, or just gets, you know, tabled indefinitely.

So number two is, again, what I call the trade off. Ask. Number three, we can think of as the soft hold. In this case, you're buying time without giving a hard No. Now I don't want you to do this as a passive aggressive maneuver. I want you to use this one when you really do need some extra time to think about it.

Okay? And sometimes you might need to decide if this is a strategic career move, if this is a strategic thing, if you could do some reprioritization so that you're not going to fall on some other commitments that you have, okay? But so when you're using the soft hold, you're buying time without a without a hard No.

But again, I don't want you to do this from a place of passive aggression. So it would sound something like this. You know what? Let me look at this is a really attractive opportunity for me. I don't know right now if I have the capacity to take this on. So let me look at whatever else is on my plate, and let me just take a really close and critical look at it so that I don't say yes to you and not be able to deliver to the best of my ability.

Okay? And then you're going to promise when you're going to get back to get back to them in the next 48 hours, I will be sitting down with my calendar and getting in extreme relationship with reality about what's on my calendar right now and whether or not I could deliver this for you within the next six weeks, six months, six days, six hours, whatever it is. And then I will get back to you by Tuesday.

Okay, so you're going to give them a specific time that you're going to get back to them. Now, here's the thing. You need to get back to them by the time you said you were going to get back to them. Okay? Otherwise, it's throwing your integrity and everything else into question.

So if you are going to give somebody the soft hold this technique, go put time in your calendar to actually have a think about it, to do that discerning thinking, and then give yourself a deadline by when you are going to get back to them, so that you don't drop that ball.

Okay? So this is going to buy you some time to thoughtfully respond instead of saying yes in the moment, because a lot of us, especially us people pleasers, we're going to say yes in the moment and then later regret it. So the soft hold creates that gap for you to take some time to critically think about it before giving a yes or a no.

The fourth idea here is the values based no when there is a genuine conflict with your focus or your role, or just who you are. You might say something like, you know, this really is not the best use of my skills right now. Or this doesn't line up with, you know, insert where my career is going.

Now, if somebody does come to mind who would be a better fit, because either they have the capacity or this is more in line with how they like to let's say it's, you know, community volunteering in your neighborhood, or your religious organization or a club or group that you're involved with. You might think of somebody else who is in that same organization who'd be a great fit.

And you might say, Hey, I think so and so would be a much better fit than than me, because they like, let's just say you get asked to be the treasurer of a professional association that you're part of, and if you know that that just does not align with the skills that you have, then you can say, you know, I could probably pull it off, but being the treasurer would just take a lot of extra capacity for me, because the numbers piece just does not come naturally for me.

Now, you know, I would research it until I figured it out, but that is really not the best use of my time, and I want to make sure that the finances of of this professional organization get the very best attention that it deserves. And so I think so. And so who has a history degree in accounting or something like that might be a better fit. I'd be happy to broker an introduction.

So that's a values based No. It's either your time, your energy, your skills, whatever do not are not in alignment with this opportunity. And then a fifth one I'll offer, and this one is more about relationship preservation. It's the no with the bridge.

So it's, I can't take this on right now, but I do want to help you get it done, or I do want to see that it, you know, actually happens. Here's what I can do instead. I can't do it myself, but here's what I can do instead, and then you're going to offer something that is a smaller time commitment, something that is in alignment with your skills and values, and something very specific.

So it's not an empty offer, it's a real offer. So I can't do this right now, but I would have like, let's say somebody is asking you again. Let's go back to that, like, maybe you're part of a professional association, and somebody's asking you to do a social media campaign for a program that's coming up.

And you might say, You know what? I cannot take this on right now, but I absolutely want to help you get it done. Here's what I can do. If you find the person who's going to do it, I can give them 30 minutes of my time to do a brainstorming session with them about what some directions for a social media campaign might take and how that might look.

All right, now, if you tend to be a promiscuous over committer like I am, and again, I'm giving props to Tim Ferriss for that phrase, promiscuous over commitment. If that feels like you, here is what I want you to do, and I'm doing it too this week. Identify one thing on your calendar or your plate right now that you said yes to when you should have said no to, and what would it look like to renegotiate that?

Okay, what would it look like if you actually renegotiated that? I want you to practice the trade off ask with yourself before you go try to live it. So what I'm asking you to do is to take something that you've already said yes to and explore the idea of renegotiating it, just so you don't drop the ball or give that person a b minus effort when you know you're capable of so much more.

So saying no is not a career limiting move. In fact, saying no is going to garner you more respect than saying yes to things that you do not have the capacity to take on and then delivering them at a subpar level. So saying no instead is the beginning of a more honest relationship with yourself and the people who rely on you at work.

Okay, my friends, I know if this landed for you, oh, you're probably feeling it right now, and this might be a hard challenge for you to take on. Just what would it look like to renegotiate something with yourself this week, renegotiate something with somebody else that you said yes to, so that it is no longer on your plate, or that a smaller amount of it is on your plate.

And you might be feeling really humble and feeling a little vulnerable as you take this on, but I know you've got this in you. I know you can do it, and remember these five ways to make a strategic no in the future. You can check out the show notes for this episode at https://janelanderson.com/267 for episode 267, and we will have these five episode these five ways of saying no, listed out right there for you, for your reference on the show notes page, as well as any other references that make sense. All right, my friends, I know you got this go out there this week. Renegotiate something that you already said yes to and go ahead and practice saying the strategic No, be well, My friends and I'll catch you here next week.

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