Saying "No" Is Also Work

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0:32Amy Wilson:Come on, I'm not doing that. What fresh hell. Laughing in the face of motherhood. Fine, I'll just do it again. I'll do it all myself. With Margaret Ables and Amy Wilson. The only reward for hard work is more work. A podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas. So you don't have to. You have to make this one because one person said they were nice three years ago.

1:01Amy Wilson:Hello, everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we're going to talk about how saying no is also work. Not as much work as saying yes, but it's totally also work. Maybe sometimes it is, though. Yeah, I agree with this statement already. Amy, we're going to start before saying yes or no to saying mailbag. It's mailbag time. Oh, yes. Wait a minute. Time for mailbag. Wait. Wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Check the mailbag. This mailbag comes from Jennifer in our Facebook group, which you can always find at facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash what fresh hell cast.

1:39Amy Wilson:Jennifer says, I just want to give a huge thank you to Margaret and Amy for helping me strengthen my relationship with my husband. I started into the podcast late and I am slowly catching up. I specifically remember Margaret saying how she would always greet her kids lovingly when they came home, but did not extend the same greeting to her husband. Truth. I was doing the same thing and I made a conscious effort to change. As a result, I feel my husband and I are closer now that we have been in a while. And I think that overall, I am much more of a happier person. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.

2:14Amy Wilson:Oh, and both of you have helped me be a better mom to my ADHD son. please don't ever stop doing the podcast i don't know what i would do without you oh my gosh well we're entering our 10th year of doing the podcast no signs of slowing down so no stay with us tell your friends love that good reminder for me to do a little back to one with that with my husband can't say i've been tail waggingly greeting him every day when he's coming home from work and so it's good to remember my own advice sometimes it is a good thing i saw something i saw on social media recently and they were showing people lighting up like coming through the um the door after you get your bag a baggage claim it's my partner it's a trend on tiktok it's my partner before and after seeing me and they're filming people yeah and then they look up and they see them and they light yeah and let's just say i'm like um i'm not sure that i would give or receive that kind of reaction at the airport on other side of that equation with my partner after many, many years of being together.

3:19But what if you did? It's not that hard to be happy to see somebody.

3:22Amy Wilson:It's a good, easy, back to one. It's just greet your husband like the dog greets your husband. I'm happy to see you. Hello, hello. How great to see you. Not good. You're here. Get in. Something weird is leaking out of the faucet, you know? And listen, we all do both and that's fine. You don't have to be the tail wagging dog every day. It's not realistic. It's a good back to one. All right. So this week I wanted to talk about this. This was something I thought about when I was working on my book, Happy to Help. And I've thought about it more since then. I feel like I'm understanding something new about saying no for the first time.

3:57So often when you're the kind of person who says yes too often, has too much on your plate, which is probably everybody listening to this podcast has more going on than they know how to handle and is on the receiving end of requests to do still more. We all do a lot. And on top of that, are being asked to do even more than that. Right.

4:15Amy Wilson:You say in the book, if you want something done, give it to a busy person, right? Right. We all know the people to give work to. Yeah. And even if you're really scrambling, they're going to hand you that flyer for, don't forget, it's turkey day, sign up for the, you know, it's still coming your way, the asks. And traditionally, I think there's a very pedantic thing that comes from the outside. It's like, so just say no. So just get better at saying no. So stop being such a loser who can't say no and become a winner who can say no. And I'm here with the hot take that I think nobody is good at saying no, particularly women.

4:52We're bad at it. There are some people who are not askable. There are some people like, I'm not going to ask her or him. They'd never say yes in the first place. Some people are very good at not having previously said yes and never having volunteered for anything. But that's different from saying no. That's different from I might have done this before. I might have done this in the past. Now I'm going to give you a different answer, even though you're expecting a yes from me. That's very, very different.

5:18Amy Wilson:Yeah. And I would also say very strongly that saying yes and no is not binary. Like saying yes is not always good. Saying no is not always good. And they're not either always bad. Right. You need connection with other people that comes from saying yes. We talk about kin keeping and all of this work of keeping people connected. That comes from people who don't lead with no. That's important work. Right. And if we were all just like, I'm amazing at boundaries, we would have a lot of problems. Right. You have to have communication and connectiveness to have a functioning society. Right. You're both expected to do all this work of connectivity and saying yes and doing more than you can handle.

6:03and then being told what a loser you are that you don't have boundaries. When I'm saying the boundaries are, it's not as simple as that. So there is this professor of philosophy, Kate Mann, feminist philosophy, that's her thing. And I just started subscribing to her sub stack, which is called More to Hate. Pretty funny. I'll put the link in the show notes. Love it. And she had this recent post where people were really, it really crystallized this in a new way for me. The post was called Our Boundaries Will Not Save Us. She says, as a fellow parent, there are simply too many things to do and not enough hours in the day, regardless of the worthiness of the cause or your commitment to community.

6:41Or at least this is true for some of us, some of the time who are subject to the biggest asks during the periods when we are also the most pressed for time already. And she refers to Corinne Lowe, who we just had on the podcast a couple of weeks ago about her book, Having It All. Corinne Lowe talks about the squeeze where your demands at home and your demands at work as a woman tend to ramp up simultaneously. And I think that's really most people listening to this are in that particular squeeze, maybe way busier than people who aren't in your particular stage of life with your particular set of demands.

7:14This is a particularly demand heavy set of people that tend to do this work and listen to podcasts like this. So we really are busy and we really are asked to do more than other people. Those things are just true. And what's interesting about this post is she goes on to say, here's the thing. Saying no has its own costs, both social and psychological. We fear being punished for our sins. We feel guilty for refusing however nicely. We feel we are not doing or being enough. And she calls this naysaying labor. So that gave me the idea to talk about this, that this idea that saying no is also work.

7:45It's also a form of labor. It isn't either you say yes and you have to do all this stuff or you say no and you sit in a lounge chair. You're better off. Yeah. You're relaxed. you're relaxed and you're done and it's one and done i think it's just none of those things and i was glad to see a very smart philosopher raise that same issue agree with you yeah it's we often

8:03Amy Wilson:talk about being at the tip of the spear of these huge systems that are like okay the caretaking is done by women you know we were just talking about studies of how many women are caretaking people other than their own kids whether that's a parent whether that's a special needs kid whether that's any number of factors and that this huge system that depends on female labor to shore up places in our society where people are not cared for falls to women. And then it's like, well, you could just say no. It's like, well, actually, I do have an elderly person in my family who would starve to death in their apartment if someone didn't bring them food.

8:50Amy Wilson:If everybody else is setting boundaries, I either have to just get very comfortable with the fact that someone I love is hungry and cold in an apartment or have to figure it out. It's not as easy. It's not like the problem is whether we're saying yes or no. It's problems that are coming to our doorstep in huge forms. Right. And specifically to our doorsteps for reasons we talk about every week. Yeah. These aren't imaginary problems. So let's talk about some of the reasons why saying no is hard, particularly for people like us who do a lot. Kate Mann argues that saying no is hard, not because people are terrible, but because people are generally very decent.

9:30Because I would argue the work to do out there feels really overwhelmingly large and important right now. Yes. Like, what do you mean you can't come help us volunteer for X or March here? What do you mean? Everything is of crucial importance. You're not allowed to opt out for a moment. So I think this is a moment where it's hard to say no. And also the costs of saying no are, studies prove, harder for women. In fact, it's held against women more when we say no than when men say no.

10:02Amy Wilson:This resonates with me. And I think it's intergenerational. all I know a young person who is starting their first job and is just exceedingly competent in every way. Went to a great school, wildly bright, great writer, got hired to do X, but is now showing up in an office where they're excellent at everything. And they're finding that they're now being asked to do things that are outside of the job they were hired for because they happen to be good at it. For example, organizing the baby shower for X, who is about to go on leave with the baby and finding in some ways, it's an admiration thing that like, you're amazing at everything.

10:46Amy Wilson:You could redo our email chain system. And it's like, okay, but I got hired to do this very other job. And there is something of like, this is ladies work putting together the baby shower. This is women's work because you're so good at organizing stuff. The no is not just I don't want to. It's like I could spend my life organizing baby showers when I have been hired to integrate the IT systems at this company, which is actually what I'm good at. And so the no, it's heavy and not saying no has huge consequences for your career. Yeah, exactly. Not saying no is huge consequences, but so does saying no.

11:30Right. Exactly. Then you're not a team player. So there was this study, Catherine Ridgway O 'Brien. She decided to examine gender differences in the ability to decline requests in the workplace. So a particularly germane study. So in her study, she had people watch an interaction on a video. And in the interaction, somebody in the workplace was being asked to take on an additional responsibility by their supervisor. And she switched it up in the dynamic. There were male supervisors and female supervisors. There were male workers being asked to do more and female in every combination. So across all the groups, people rated the worker who said yes to the additional responsibility as being a better worker than the worker who said no.

12:13So generally, like saying yes accrues greater benefits to you. You're seen as a better person by the average person watching for saying yes instead of no. But the thing that was really interesting about this study was the lowest ranked worker by a mile was the woman who said no to a male supervisor. Sure. She got way lower marks than the male worker who said no to a female or male supervisor. Like the lowest of the low by a mile was the female worker who said no. Right. Because there's so much behind it, right?

12:48Amy Wilson:You're saying no, because you'd rather be home with your kids. You're saying no, because we've talked about this so often that markers for females and markers for males are just very, very different. A male wearing like a collared shirt and a vest over it with the company load, like that's a look. But a woman, there is no neutral neutral wear for women. Like if you're wearing the boy's outfit, you're trying to do a bit. And if you're wearing something else, it's like, oh, you look great or bad or what. There's something about the way you look. And I think the neutral no from a woman is much harder, obviously.

13:25No, we're conditioned. I know a young woman who is just entering the workplace, her first job and her job is going so great that some of the other people in her analyst class have not been given a huge assignment yet. And she's already been given two because she's so capable. She's quote unquote winning. Yep. Right. And they're like, wait a minute, why do I have none and you have two? And she's like, why indeed? But she is not in a position in her first job, in her first year to first job to say, hey, I got to, I got to ease up. I'm going to set some boundaries and have everybody be like, wow, you're such an amazing person.

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17:07Amy Wilson:When I first graduated from college, I was trying to be a writer and everything else, but I was working as a paralegal because you could really work like four months and make a ton of money because there was so much overtime. And then I could take a lot of time off to do the things I wanted to do. That was my kind of lifestyle choice at the time. And I was fresh out of college and like eager beaver. And I was going to show everybody how great I was as a paralegal and work so hard. And my kind of wizened older colleague at some point just gently like put his hand on my shoulder and said, I'm going to teach you a lesson that's going to pay off for you in life.

17:44Amy Wilson:The only reward for hard work is more work. I mean, I get it. There is a point at which it is a race to nowhere. And I do think of that phrase sometimes. I think we're conditioned to be pleasing and like, we have to show we belong here and we're better than the boys, if anything. But then the flip side of that is, OK, give it to her. She doesn't care. She won't complain. Right. And the solution to that is not. So just say no. The next time somebody asks you to do something like, OK, now an expectation has been set up, one in which you maybe took part, but one that which the entire world accrues to you, eager beaver, young woman who is willing to work harder to prove her worth.

18:28Just say no. Just say no. Really? Is that really how that's going to go for that? It's just so facile to say to somebody that the way to fix this expectation that you do more is to simply refuse. and that's going to change everything. Because even then, when you set a boundary, I've certainly had the experience of, no, I'm not going to be able to do that now. And I talk about this and happy to help too. The reaction isn't, oh, you'll see, everybody's going to rush in. There's plenty of people happy to do that project or that canned goods drive or that drop off the meal for your elderly relative.

19:00You'll see, you're just not letting people help. And you're going to say, no, there's often a vacuum that's created when you say no. people don't believe you people push back people think you'll change your mind people are like what do you mean and you have to then sometimes sit with the feeling of like okay now there isn't going to be now the boy scouts aren't going to go camping this weekend because i said no woohoo

19:21Amy Wilson:right it's tough and some of those are glass balls right like there's the image of like glass balls and rubber balls that you're juggling and the idea is you can let the rubber balls fall because they'll bounce, but the glass balls, you can't, some of those things are glass balls. And I think the other thing that happens a lot is, well, I'm going to take a step back. I'm not going to be the leader of the organization, but then I'm going to get 40 calls from people asking me how to do things. And I've said this a lot, like, I don't want to be the quarterback. It's like, I stand at the ready to help.

19:54Amy Wilson:Just tell me what to do. And I'm like, what I want is for you to figure out what to do and tell me if you need any help. It's not easy to extricate yourself from situations where you have been the person coordinating stuff. Oh, it is not because it's like, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. It's still you. We can still go to you with questions. It's still you. And listen, if that person is your elderly parent who needs a ton of health care, everybody kind of knows that you're the default person. Just say no. Okay, well, then what happens? Like, I just try to sleep at night knowing that my elderly parent is alone with no food?

20:32Amy Wilson:Like, what? Yeah. Kate Mann also says, and I think this is true, that it's hard to say no. And it's actual, there's work involved in saying no. She talks about the actual labor of deciding if I'm going to say yes or no. How is this going to go? What will happen? Is this a glass ball or a bouncy ball, right? That is actually work. It's not nothing to do that mental calculation in your head every time somebody asks you to do something. So let's talk about why this is a problem. I think you and I are good and mad about it, but yeah, I'm very angry. So that must mean it's a problem. I would argue that the individual fix is presented as the only solution.

21:10Amy Wilson:Sure. You're at the tip of the spear and whether you say yes or no determines how this turns out. Right. If kids are too addicted to social media, then just get them off social media, mom, right? If you young person at work are being given too many jobs, well then fix it. Fix it by saying you don't want to. That's the only solution that's offered. I'm going to quote Kate Mann here. When one half of the population are asked for too much and punished for not giving more, holding the line and saying no does nothing to redistribute the work equitably or to make us seem like less of a B-I-T-C-H for refusing to do some part of it.

21:46Amy Wilson:Right. And the fact is the amount of work can be actual. And so someone's going to do it. You know, I mean, that's the problem. It is the tip of the spear thing of, well, we don't have another option for how to figure out where people are going to live when they're on a fixed income in hard times. Or we don't have another person to figure out what course of treatment your person close to you in your life is going to pursue now that they've just been diagnosed with something. So the idea that it then falls on you to say yes or no to participate in that is absurd. Like, okay, I guess I'll just not care that my beloved person was diagnosed with a kind of cancer.

22:33Amy Wilson:I'm not going to research it. I'm not going to figure out the best way of treatment. Of course you are. Right. Or I'm not going to say you can move in with us when the cancer treatment center is 10 miles from your house and 80 miles from their house. These aren't optional. These are not optional. The dialogue is that you're too weak to not say yes. But the reality is you are a person for whatever reason that is competent and capable in an area. And therefore, people are going to look to you to solve certain problems. Yes, there are people on the chain who are like, that's not realistic. I'm not going to do it.