When to Say No to Opportunity

“Knowing when to quit, leave a toxic situation, demand more from life (…) is a very important skill that people who win at life all seem to have.” –Steven Bartlett.

Many of us grew up with a narrative of ambition that involves saying yes to every opportunity in fear missing out. While challenging our comfort zones is important for our personal growth, there is a fine line between lifting weights to build psychological muscles versus doing so to injure ourselves. Stepping back from reacting to this societal narrative and assessing what opportunities support versus distract us from what matters to us will lead to a more purposeful life.

This is easier said than done because we face social consequences for our decisions. We are seen as unmotivated, cowardly, ungrateful, or lazy when we don’t accept an opportunity that presents itself to us. We are seen as failures, quitters, perfectionists, too sensitive, or impatient if we leave a toxic office culture. We are seen as incompetent when we struggle to juggle many things at once using a brain that was never designed to multitask. We are seen as weak when we mentally collapse under it all after having been “strong” all along.

These views, though not always spoken, can be seen in many office cultures globally, which reinforces job insecurity. We may have been repeating these messages to ourselves before we even joined the workforce because mainstream formal education was designed to prepare us for a competitive global economy. It is no wonder that one of the common problems that clients bring to my therapy office is difficulty in knowing and asserting their boundaries.

I often tell my Arabic-speaking clients who struggle with saying no that we cannot pour from an empty dallah (Arabic coffeepot). It is difficult to be innovative when we are worrying about potentially losing our jobs after having said yes to too many things. By doing so, we will have raised people’s expectations only to disappoint them. They would get so excited for a good cup of gahwa (Arabic coffee) only to find nothing coming out of our dallah.

Many of us partly fear saying no because we are afraid of regretting it later. In existential psychology, it is said that whatever choice we make involves losing another choice. If we pick one path, we will lose another path. By having picked one opportunity, we will have lost another. Therefore, the fear of losing an opportunity is like the fear of being unable to count to infinity.

Since we cannot clone ourselves, how do we know where to invest our energy and when to step back? Consider these prompts for self-reflection or journaling as a first step:

• List the pros and cons of each path. Include “both/all” and “neither/none” as possible paths to consider.
• Which pro are you willing to sacrifice and why?
• Which pro can you not compromise and why?
• Which con are you willing to live with and why? Were there times in your life when you were able to deal with a similar con? What helped?
• Is your dallah empty? What helped you know that it is empty? What boundaries could give you the space you need to refill it?
• What do your responses to the above questions say about what is important to you? How have you stood up for this in your life? How long has this been important to you? What made it important to you?