The Power of Saying ‘No’

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Whether you are a young professional fresh out of college or a seasoned veteran entering your first day at your new company, making a strong first impression will always be one of the biggest priorities at the workplace. It is, in itself, an inauguration to the position and professional brand you want to establish the minute you walk through those doors. But as much as it is important to please those around you, it is absolutely imperative that you learn the concept and power to say ‘no’ to certain things.

In today’s society, we are driven by our ideals and endeavors to be the Jack-of-all-Trades at whatever company or organization you are affiliated with. While I will never reprimand a person for giving it their best to a particular position, I will say that when it comes to success, success and all of its glory will come when you know how to pick your battles. To this, I mean saying ‘no.’

Like many others, saying ‘no’ can be an incredibly difficult thing. With the word yes, you are not just accepting new and exciting opportunities, but also assuming new responsibilities for leadership and growth. While the positive gains will always favor that of saying ‘yes,’ you also have to live in the realm of reality. Not everyone can do XYZ while also managing an entire company. Understanding the limits and negative impacts that the word ‘yes’ can have can save you from undoing your success.

To start, as much as saying yes gives you opportunities for success, it also gives you ever-growing responsibilities for stress and anxiety. With a new task, you will be forced to assume various roles that go beyond the standard. Now, it never hurts to assume those particular roles. But if you know said-opportunity will hinder your work, it is your job to evaluate whether or not the overall return on investment and sacrifice is worth the hassle. Yes, you will need these chances to grow, but you also do not want to risk your own personal work because of the addition assignments you take on. Make sure you know your limits. Many young professionals are blinded by the opportunity to move up within the ladder that they end up shooting themselves in the foot because they were not paying attention to their initial responsibilities.  If you know the additional assignments are too much for you, just say no. The only harm a simple ‘no’ can do is that the new assignment will be given to another person.

Now to speak more about saying ‘no,’ the one thing every business will tell you is that quality is, and will always be, better than quantity. It is a simple concept taught to us throughout our formative years but has somehow lost its way when it comes to the corporate environment. While handing a bunch of tasks and completing them will always be seen as an achievement, nothing can showcase your strengths and professional development than the quality of your work. The simple reason is that quality is everything. It provides a stronger attraction and holds a more lucrative profit than anything in the world. When it comes to saying ‘no,’ you want to make sure that those opportunities you do say ‘yes’ to will not impact the quality of your current work. Yes, the work itself will change because of the amount of task you will be assuming, but if you know that the standard of your work will greatly suffer, then say ‘no’ might be your best option. Think of this in baseball terms, if you want to knock it out of the park, one home run will always be better than two doubles. Make your standards and your quality your top priority. Anything else should be secondary unless you know you can handle both tasks.

Lastly, after assessing the request and evaluating an opportunity’s benefits, make sure you say no in a proper and respectful way. Harvard Business Review goes over this concept and outlines specific tips that can help you through this process. First and foremost, after politely declining the opportunity, still show a willingness to pitch, even if it is in a small way. The ability to still be an asset will showcase your versatility and respect within the office. In addition, practice saying ‘no.’ The more you do it, the better and easier it will become. Make sure you are cognizant of your tone and provide a specific logical reason for bowing out at the opportunity. The more transparent and understanding you can be, the better.

What to Learn from Failure

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The road to success can be a very difficult and arduous task. As a young professional, you will face a variety of different obstacles. But the one biggest obstacle that we all face in life is failure.

While failure itself has a negative stigma associated with it, the concept and overall idea provides great lessons and insights about ourselves. Many people have even gone as far as to say that failure is the great teacher. While true in a way, accepting the concept of failure is harder than that it seems. Why? The problem is that failure is not just cryptic in its nature, but also it is downright damaging. Trying to figure out its lessons is no easy task, especially when you are nursing a bruised ego and are trying to move beyond the frustration, disappointment, and demoralization of the situation. For some people, it takes a few weeks. For others, it takes almost a year. But as much as you can refer to those moments with resentment and hopelessness, it is imperative that you, as an individual, accept them as they are if you want to grow both personally and professionally and move on to greater things.

Now to do this, you need to see these disappointing moments as windows of opportunity. As difficult as it may be, framing these incidences in this manner will allow you to learn and uncover those hidden teachable moments so that you can not just move on, but also grow in a bigger and better way. To help you deduce what exactly those lessons are and how they can help improve your chances of future success, I have provided various guidelines so that you can understand, plan, evaluate, and execute later on down the road.

To being, think back and reflect on those moments. Ask yourself those overarching questions of what happened and why did the result end the way it did. By challenging yourself with those hard-to-ask questions, you will be able to dive deeper into the minuscule flaws that you could have refined to help rectify the situation. Now, this is by no means a way for you to regret anything that you have done. What was done is in the past. The only thing you can do now is to learn from those mistakes and move forward. If there is a way where you can change your style of work or change your style of thinking, do that. If not, try thinking of other alternative routes that can help you get to your end goal.

Once you have self-evaluated and reflected on your goals, it is now time for you to reevaluate your planning and preparation for the next step. For some people, this is just the next project. For others, this is for their next job. Whatever is the case, make sure you spend your planning on the basis of your personal and professional goals. If the task and or job was similar to that specific moment of failure, try and strategizing of various ways of how you can avoid those similar mistakes. Remember, learning to anticipate for hurdles and problems will be your biggest asset starting anew. In the grand scheme of things, a vast majority of people spend a little time planning and deciphering these moments and continue to run into the same obstacles and unexpected circumstances. To prevent that from happening to you, utilize what you know and leverage it to your benefit.

After strong and strategic planning, try and focus on variables in your own control. During the early stages after a failure, you can often feel very passive and helpless going into a variety of situations. That fire that was once there seems to be only a flicker of light that may or may not be extinguished. While the dark times can be suffocating, do not allow that perceptual distortion to push you out of your locus of control. Instead, leverage what you know. Much of this goes back to the strategic thinking and self-reflecting portion of this blog, but to start executing specific objectives will give you the confidence necessary for controlling your failure and putting you back on the path of success.

Keep this in mind; failure is a part of life. If you don’t fail, you don’t learn. If you don’t learn, you will never change. See these moments as not the opposite of success but as a part of your growth and success in the future.