This past month I was volunteer part of a team putting on a large personal growth event.
“Chris, you’re an amazing speaker. When you’ve spoken in the past, you’ve always had the biggest turnouts. You said you want to increase your impact at the event so we’ve come up with an opportunity for you to do that by coordinating the speakers for this event”, I was asked.
Yes, “on paper”, it makes sense to ask someone with experience doing such things to help out in that way. The problem was… I didn’t want to do it.
The type of impact I want to make wasn’t fed by the idea of a more administrative role. I also like to do things that are new and scary for me, and sending emails out to people and scheduling speakers was neither new or scary. It seemed like a chore.
“Chris, you’ve asked for us to let us help you. We want to help you by giving you this opportunity.”
It did not land that way for me. I totally felt like I was being asked to help them, and this did not seem like them helping me at all. I did voice that.
However, I didn’t say the thing I truly wanted to say… “I’m going to pass on this.”
I silently wished for them to see that maybe this isn’t the best use of my talents and retract the offer. My silent wish didn’t come true.
In that moment I felt pressure to be a team player and support the rest of my team. Who am I to say no? So I said yes.
And then… immediate regret.
And then the next day I felt the biggest energy drain I’ve felt in a long time. I regretted volunteering at all. I thought this might be the last time I ever do it, because I don’t want to be put in this position again.
And then I judged myself. Why am I making this so hard? This is not a lot of work, and here I am making a big deal about everything and it’s like pulling teeth to send simple emails.
And then, just like I wrote recently, I asked myself “Is this real?”.
Is what I’m feeling deserved, or is it an outsized reaction? I knew immediately, my feelings were way out of wack.
And in that moment I realized why. The little boy in me, who never had anyone to protect him, had been failed in that moment by the adult version of me. He needed an advocate and I didn’t speak for him. I went against how I was feeling and was now paying the price for failing him. All he wanted was for someone to listen to him, for once, to be able to say no.
This desire to “run away”, and not volunteer again, this was also a trauma response. One I’m very familiar with that has flared up in my past. Thankfully this time I saw it as that and didn’t give into it. I can honor my past, and what happened to me as a child, and recognize that I’m now 47 years old and don’t need to act as the child to honor him.
With that recognized, I also learned that the no was going to leak out one way or another.
All the pain I was feeling, the energy drain, the self-judgement… this was the no.
And then I realized something else. The story I’ve told myself that “I say no to almost everything” is not true. The truth is I have an extremely difficult time saying no. So much so that I make it near IMPOSSIBLE for people to ask things of me.
Whether that’s through the distance I create between me and everyone else. The “pedestal effect” that I leverage where people are scared or too intimidated to ask things of me. The stories that they tell themselves that I shouldn’t be bothered.
It’s no surprise I often refer myself as a “Sage on the mountain”. That’s a peaceful life that creates a vast chasm for people to find and ask things of me. The flip of that is for the people that do I will serve them powerfully.
But it doesn’t need to be that way.
The better I can say no, the more I can advocate for my inner self, the more accessible I can allow myself to be. I don’t need to be sequestered away.
And that starts right now. I’ve already declined some requests of me. If you find yourself on the receiving end of that, just trust how much I do want to help you and the “easy” thing is for me to say yes. The muscle I need to work right now is my “no” and that’s the difficult task for me.
Where in your own life have you experienced “the no leaking out” when you said yes?
