ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2012 ON focusonsimple.co
I’m a pretty accommodating person, in life, in general. When someone asks me to do something, my first impulse is to find a way to be able to do it. However, this sometimes leads to me doing a sub-par job, because I’m trying to get it done amongst all the other things I’m trying to manage.
When someone asks “can you do this?” my response is “yes, I can literally do this”. But what I should be thinking first is “Is this aligned with my values + life goals right now?” Or “Do I want to do this?”. Then secondly, “Is it reasonable that I can do this, within the time frame I’m being asked to do this, keeping in mind that to which I’m already committed to” (ie., my goals + values).
Yesterday I had a text conversation that went as follows :
Other : “So you’ll be in the office first thing in the morning?!…”
Me : “We didn’t actually set a time for me to come in to the office. I can be in just after lunch. Appointment in the morning.” (By appointment, what I really meant was ‘I have other commitments I need to attend to’, however knowing the person I was texting with, if I didn’t have a ‘concrete’ commitment then my life was flexible…)
Other : “Ouch!…I thought we had. Any way you can come in earlier?”
Now, this is when my stress levels started elevating. I needed to be able to say “no”. I had things I needed to get done, preferably before lunch, + didn’t think running across the city in the midst of trying to get this work done because it was more convenient for someone else was the most useful or efficient use of my time. But I have a hard time saying “no”. My first instinct was to accommodate. Even though it would make it more difficult to meet the commitment I’d already made.
Eventually, I responded “If tomorrow afternoon doesn’t work, are you available Friday morning?”
It turns out the afternoon worked just fine.
Doing this contract stuff is a huge learning curve – learning about the way I operate, what gets me going, what causes me stress. + not the good, challenging stress – the kind of stress that makes you feel that you’re being pushed into decisions that aren’t in your best interest. I felt defensive for having to push back. I felt like I needed to justify my decision – be convincing that I couldn’t meet earlier in the day. But I shouldn’t have to do that.
The thing is, I could literally physically meet earlier in the day. I could have made it happen. But it wasn’t reasonable for me to do so. It would have caused other commitments to remain either not fully attended to or not attended to at all.
So yesterday’s lesson was that it is ok to make decisions based on what is reasonable, rather than on what is quite literally, physically possible. +, in fact, if I want to be successful at doing contract work – making clients happy – then I need to be absolutely clear with myself about what is reasonable in order to do a great job for each person that I make a commitment to.
I’ll save challenging what’s physically, literally, pushing-the-boundaries, possible for my own, personal, creative pursuits.