No. It's a simple word, but it can be so difficult to say. Whether it's a favor asked by a friend, or even an unethical request from a colleague, many people will say "yes" because they hate to let others down and saying "no" makes them feel uncomfortable.
And we worry that saying no will change the way the other person views us. If you have a reputation of being a helpful and accommodating person, it is even harder to say no because you don't want to hurt that good reputation, says Adam Grant, a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
"Every 'no' is a missed opportunity to make a difference and build a relationship," Grant wrote in a column for The Huffington Post.
Saying no is a rejection and a lot of times it does hurt feelings. But even so, psychologists say, most people probably won't take our "no" as badly as we think they will. That's because of something called a "harshness bias (严重性偏向心理)" —our tendency to believe others will judge us more severely than they actually do. For those people pleasers, Grant says there's a big difference between pleasing people and helping them. "Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests. It's about saying yes to some of the people (generous givers who will return your favor, but not necessarily the selfish takers) some of the time (when it won't compromise your own goals and ambitions) to some of requests (when you have resources or skills that are uniquely relevant)."
Always saying yes can make us overcommitted and put us under too much pressure. Saying no helps us protect our own priorities, psychologist Judith Sills told The Wall Street Journal. Another important reason to say no, Sills says, is it keeps us from giving in to peer pressure. "To have your own values, sometimes you have to say A 'no' to people with whom you don't agree," Sills says.
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