Your most precious resource: TIME.   How much of it, and your life, is influenced by your choice of saying either a “Yes” or a “No” to any given situation?  A great deal or not a lot at all?

 

“No” is an uncomfortable word for many people.  Despite it being just two letters long, it is a word that can be very difficult to say.  Let’s see why?

• You are a nice person.  If you say “No” it will mean disappointing somebody and that will make you feel bad.  So you don’t say “no”.  What happens?    You lose your valuable time and still end up feeling bad, but this time, with yourself.  Saying “No” allows you to do what you want, when you want, with your life.

 

• You are afraid to say “No”.  You think your boss will react negatively if you say “no” to the additional work.  As a result you say “yes” and accept it.  Subsequently, your boss keeps regularly coming to you with last minute pieces of work to be completed.   Saying “No” is the first layer of defence in keeping out the unwanted and stops you from becoming overwhelmed.

 

• You don’t know how to say “No”.   When we look at those people who successfully and easily say “No”, with no undue consequences, it appears that they have mastered an art form.   The reality is that these “artists” have most likely said “No” more often than they have said “Yes”.  Practice, practice, practice brings this skill to you.  Start today.

 

• You like your life to be busy.   It doesn’t matter what you are doing as long as you are doing something all the time.  You say “yes” to everything so that no opportunity is missed.   Saying “No” allows you to select exactly which opportunity to take.  This, in turn, raises the quality of your life.  Why?  Because you end up surrounding yourself with the people who are important to you and leave behind the hangers on who don’t enhance your life.   Create a busy quality life.

• You need to feel wanted so you do anything for anyone.  Accordingly, you don’t say “No”.  People love you because they can get exactly what they want from you.  Unfortunately, they may not respect you.  What respect do you want which saying “no” will provide?  You can only get this when people see what you stand for.

 

• Laziness.  You know “No” is the right answer but the effort involved in explaining “why” takes too much time.  It is easier, just this once, to say “Yes”, and promise yourself never again.  How many times is it now that you have said “never again”? Many? No doubt, the actual “yes” work involved has ended up far exceeding the work required for the “no” explanation?  If saying “No” is the right answer, say it.  It will save you time in the long run.

 

You have the Power of No – use it.

 

More from Positivity Toolbox:

“We are our choices.” ~Jean-Paul Sartre

 

“You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.” ~Wayne Dyer

 

“The critical question is not whether you’ll have luck, but what you do with the luck that you get.” ~Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen

 

“Choose your love. Love your choice.” ~Thomas S. Monson

 

“The key choices you make—apart from the natural talent you already have—will set you apart from others who have talent alone.” ~Beyond Talent: Become Someone Who Gets Extraordinary Results by John C. Maxwell

 

“Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you.” ~Beyond Talent: Become Someone Who Gets Extraordinary Results by John C. Maxwell

 

“I believe that fate is choices – it’s not chance.” ~Wayne Newton

 

“The most important choices you make are the choices about how you see yourself, the Universe, and your relationship to the Universe.” ~The Mind of the Soul by Gary Zukav & Linda Francis

 

“In the end, it all comes to choices to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.” ~Amber Frey

 

“So many roads. So many detours. So many choices. So many mistakes.” ~Sarah Jessica Parker

 

“And what has come of this big bang boom of options? Us—a generation that loves choice and hates choosing.” ~The Choice Effect: Love and Commitment in an Age of Too Many Options by Amalia McGibbon, Lara Vogel & Claire A. Williams

 

“A choister is a person who is inundated with choices and thinks the world is his or her oyster.” ~The Choice Effect: Love and Commitment in an Age of Too Many Options by Amalia McGibbon, Lara Vogel & Claire A. Williams

 

“If choices will always haunt us and there’s no way to ever be sure of a decision, the only way to find the right choice is to stop regretting and fretting the choices you’ve chosen.” ~The Choice Effect: Love and Commitment in an Age of Too Many Options by Amalia McGibbon, Lara Vogel & Claire A. Williams

 

“For all our concerns about right and wrong choices, perhaps the truth of it is you have to just make a choice in the end—not knowing if it’s right or wrong—and then make it work for you.” ~The Choice Effect: Love and Commitment in an Age of Too Many Options by Amalia McGibbon, Lara Vogel & Claire A. Williams

 

“Perseverance is a choice. It’s not a simple, one-time choice, it’s a daily one. There’s never a final decision.” ~Perseverance by Margaret J. Wheatley

 

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” ~Steve Jobs

 

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” ~Roy Disney

 

“Love is a choice. Total forgiveness is a choice. It is not a feeling-at least at first-but is rather an act of the will. It is the choice to tear up the record of wrongs we have been keeping.” ~Total Forgiveness by R. T. Kendall

 

“It’s up to you today to start making healthy choices. Not choices that are just healthy for your body, but healthy for your mind.” ~Life, the Truth and Being Free by Steve Maraboli

 

“All in all, we might think we like choice, but the question of which choices count and which do not is very, very tricky.” ~Book The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits by Kent Greenfield

 

“If you are just safe about the choices you make, you don’t grow.” ~Heath Ledger

 

“The more choices people have, the lower the ability to achieve happiness and the longer people take to make those choices, sometimes procrastinating into abject inaction.” ~Thrive! by Alan Weiss

 

“From a spiritual perspective, freedom from attachment to a particular outcome is the ultimate expression of liberation. We can choose the actions we take, but we cannot control the consequences of our choices.” ~The Ten Commitments: Translating Good Intentions into Great Choices by David Simon

 

“Authenticity is an alignment between your beliefs, your desires and your choices in the world. Desires change throughout the course of a life, but agreement between ideals, aspirations and deeds is key to a life of peace, happiness and success.” ~The Ten Commitments: Translating Good Intentions into Great Choices by David Simon

 

“Acceptance means focusing on the present while assessing the choices available to you in this moment. If there are many possibilities, make the choice that is likely to bring the most evolutionary results. If there is only one choice, take it. If there are no obvious choices, relax and accept the fact that for now, you cannot do anything.” ~The Ten Commitments: Translating Good Intentions into Great Choices by David Simon

 

“We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy.” ~J.K. Rowling

 

“Life’s all about making choices. You’ve made the choice to pick up the pieces and keep going, even when you’ve been devastated over and over again.” ~More by Heidi Marshall

 

“When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.” ~William James

 

“I don’t believe we own our children, they’re their own souls who make their own choices, we just guide and support them.” ~Elle Macpherson

 

“When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.” ~The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

 

“We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.” ~The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

 

“We seal our fate with the choices we take, but don’t give a second thought to the chances we take.” ~Gloria Estefan

 

“AS THE NUMBER OF CHOICES WE FACE INCREASES, FREEDOM OF choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice.” ~The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz

 

“We must begin to make what I call “conscious choices,” and to really recognize that we are the same. It’s from that place in my heart that I write my songs.” ~John Denver

 

“We don’t just get our choice; we get the consequence that choice creates.” ~Choices by Melody Beattie

 

“Choosing to take responsibility for ourselves and for the consequences our choices create looks like hard work, but it really sets us free.” ~Choices by Melody Beattie

 

“Letting go of our ideas about how life should go is a choice that sets life’s magic free.” ~Choices by Melody Beattie

 

“When we’re surrounded by things that look impossible, making a simple choice to do something that’s possible is a powerful thing to do.” ~Choices by Melody Beattie

 

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.” ~Tennessee Williams

 

“Sometimes we miss happy because we’re always looking for something else. We worry, we give in to fear, we compare ourselves to others, we’re planning and plotting, but happiness is here, it’s a choice, day to day.” ~The First Day of the Rest of My Life by Cathy Lamb

 

“Happiness, most often, is a choice. Make the choice to sit, breathe, and be in that moment.” ~The First Day of the Rest of My Life by Cathy Lamb

 

“The more bad choices you make, the less bad your choices seem.” ~Redemption by Karen Kingsbury & Gary Smalley

 

Life is the sum of all your choices. ~Albert Camus

 

You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.” ~Deepak Chopra

 

“[S]uccess is ultimately realized by people who make more good choices and recover quickly from their bad choices. Our personal and professional success depends on repeating good choices, day in and day out, and avoiding repetition of bad choices.” ~Monday Morning Choices by David Cottrell

 

“Positively dealing with the unexpected by looking for solutions, not excuses, is the choice you need to make.” ~Monday Morning Choices by David Cottrell

 

“We don’t get to chose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.” ~Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia

 

“The choices we make when we’re broken are sometimes the most awful of all our choices.” ~Coming Up for Air by Patti Callahan Henry

 

“But rarely have I made choices that made me feel I was really compromising what I believe.” ~Danny Glover

 

“[R]ecognizing and reclaiming our choices is a prerequisite to changing those choices. And changing our choices is at the heart of changing our lives and relationships.” ~Hurt People Hurt People by Sandra Wilson

 

“The hardest choices in life aren’t between what’s right and what’s wrong but between what’s right and what’s best.” ~Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

 

More from Positivity Toolbox:

If you can grasp the concept of choice you have the key to making a positive life your future! Freedom lies in understanding that you choose everything!  Even in deciding on “inaction” you have made a choice.  These choices will almost always have been influenced by your subconscious, but none the less they were your choices. Even if someone else has told you what to do, you chose to do as they said.

 

This will be pretty radical thinking for some people. If you have low self-esteem, the chances are that you will feel that you are where you are for a whole host of reasons but that it is most definitely NOT your fault. It is the nature of the beast that you will always look for someone else, or something else, to blame for where you are in life

Now is the time to accept responsibility for the things that have occurred in your life. Once you accept this you will be able to move on to understand that you can do things differently and make a difference to what happens in the future by making positive choices.

 

I will be honest and say it took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that it was my choices that caused my own problems, and I freely admit that I did look for ways to prove that it couldn’t be the case, but eventually I realized that it was really true.

 

For instance, I used to blame my ex-wife for making me so unhappy, and there would be some truth in that, but the reality is I chose to ask her to marry me! I could have chosen to leave my unhappy marriage many years before I actually did (and I would probably have saved both of us years of unhappiness in the process).

I didn’t have to choose the business deal that broke my personal bank – I had at least one other choice, but I chose to ignore it – it was entirely my choice. There is no point in blaming the guy who swindled me out of all that money – it was my choice that gave him the opportunity to run off with all my money!

 

This doesn’t mean to say that someone who was abused as a child is to blame or that someone who was victim of a crime chose to be the victim – there are occasions where another person’s choices can directly affect us and we really are not to blame.

 

I am not suggesting that as a child you were in a position to choose to leave your parents and escape an unhappy childhood! The point here is to understand and accept that in most cases, once you reached early adulthood, you could have chosen to do things differently.

 

You may well find this hard to accept, but it cannot be denied that as adults we have the power to make choices. If we have made the wrong ones, can we really blame anyone else for the consequences?

 

The good news is that once you accept and come to terms with this fact, you will also understand the implications for your future. If what happened in the past was a matter of choice, then you can also choose what happens to you from now onwards. It’s not too late to take control!

 

You need to understand that you cannot change what has gone in the past, and it’s pointless to waste time on ‘what ifs’. However, once you can accept that what has gone before is history and that there is no point in dwelling upon it you are in a position to move forward with a much more positive attitude.

 

Dwelling on unhappy memories from the past just fills you with negative thoughts. Thoughts of revenge are also incredibly negative. As author Jack Black say’s in his book ‘Mindstore’; “when you raise your hand to point your finger at someone else, just remember the other three fingers of that hand are pointing straight back at you!”

 

To learn more about how Think Positive Power can help you change your life, why not take a look at our training course: http://thinkpositivepower.net (there is a free option!) or subscribe to our free newsletter and get not one but two great free reports! You can sign up here: http://ithinkpositive.net

 

This article is contributed by Peter Ford of Think Positive Power.

 

More from Positivity Toolbox:

Today’s Positivity Quote:  “And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.  And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” ~Friedrich Nietzche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher and classical philologist. His amazing writing covers subjects such as religion, morality, culture, existentialism, postmodernism and philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzche‘s influence, as well as his radical, unrelenting questioning of society, is still felt very strongly in the modern world and his work is still debated and questioned every day. His writing is unmistakable, passionate, filled with irony and concepts designed to push the reader’s thinking, yet his relaxed style is approachable and intimate. His works are unputdownable page turners that demand quoting and rereading.

Did you know that Linguists say that in the English language approximately  1/3 are considered “positive” and the rest, “negative.”  Yikes! Words are powerful! Since there are indeed fewer positive words, they are, even more powerful.  There have been special positive words uttered by many and countless times those words have impacted us.  We call them “Positivity Quotes” and if you love positive words, click here for lots more, just like this one:  Positivity Quotes.

More from Positivity Toolbox:

Today’s Positivity Quote:  “I just love the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.”  ~Jason Mraz

Did you know that Linguists say that in the English language approximately  1/3 are considered “positive” and the rest, “negative.”  Yikes! Words are powerful! Since there are indeed fewer positive words, they are, even more powerful.  There have been special positive words uttered by many and countless times those words have impacted us.  We call them “Positivity Quotes” and if you love positive words, click here for lots more, just like this one:  Positivity Quotes.

 

More from Positivity Toolbox:

Did you know that writing goals down enhances the actual achievement of the goal?  It’s true!

In a study at Dominican University, participants that wrote down their goals showed greater success in achieving the goal.  What this study also revealed was how writing goals and sending them to a supportive friend (in writing) even further increased success in achieving their goals.

The study was done scientifically over a 4 week period of time with almost 150 people participating in the results that drew some seriously interesting conclusions.

 

The goals the participants set were items including, completing a project, increasing income, increasing productivity, getting organized, enhancing performance/achievement, enhancing life balance, reducing work anxiety and learning a new skill.

In the study, participants were divided into 5 groups:

1. Unwritten Goal – Participants in this group were simply asked to think about their goals and then go for it.
2. Written Goal – Participants in this group were asked to write down their goal and then go for it.
3. Written Goal and Action Commitments – Participants in this group were asked to write down their goal and set specific action commitments.
4. Written Goal and Action Commitments to a Friend – Participants in this group were asked to write down their goal, set specific action commitments and send their goals and action commitments to a supportive friend.
5. Written Goal, Action Commitments and Progress Reports to a Friend – Participants in this group were asked to write down their goal, set specific action commitments and send their goals and action commitments to a supportive friend as well as weekly progress reports to the friend.

The Results:

• Group 5 achieved significantly more than all the other groups
• Group 4 achieved significantly more than Groups 3 and 1
• Group 2 achieved significantly more than Group 1.
• Groups 2-5 combined was significantly higher than Group 1.

Conclusions:

• Participants who not only wrote down their goals, but also send a written progress report to a friend, accomplished significantly more than the other participants in the study. Participants that wrote down their goals, accomplished significantly more than other participants that did not write down their goals.
• The author of the study says that this means that there is “empirical evidence for the effectiveness of three coaching tools: accountability, commitment and writing down one’s goals.”

To learn a great way to set goals where you are more likely to achieve them, read here: Smart Goal Setting.

 

More from Positivity Toolbox:

Many studies have been performed analyzing the benefits of giving.  While the results are nothing short of amazing, they are also not at all surprising.  The consistent conclusion: Generosity equates with better emotional well-being and physical health.

“There is no better exercise for your heart,

Than reaching down and helping to lift someone up.”

~Bernard Meltzer

Stephen Post is the author of “Why Good Things Happen to Good People.” He talks about how giving is good for you and that it is scientifically proven.  he says:  “Giving is as good for the giver as it is for the receiver. Science says it’s so. We’ll be happier, healthier, and even – odds are – live a little longer if we’re generous.”

Makes sense!

 

According to our survey of several studies, here are just a few of the Benefits of Giving:

• Better overall physical strength.
• Reduction in anger and related emotions.
• Better functioning of the immune system.
• Reduced stress.
• Increased energy.
• More balanced cortisol levels.
• Increased activation of endorphins – our feel good emotions.
• An increased sense of calm and peace.
• Improved cognitive performance.
• Lower blood pressure.
• Lower heart rate.
• Greater life satisfaction.
• Decreased symptoms of depression.
• Improved overall emotional well-being.
• Reduction in bodily pain.

 

 

Here are three studies showing there are indeed benefits of giving:

Study at Duke University Medical Center:  Former heart patients visited current heart patients to simply listen and offer support.  The results of this study showed that the volunteers improved their health through act of giving.

Study at the University of Miami:  HIV patients who volunteered helping other HIV patients showed lower stress levels and higher immune functioning.

In a study at John Hopkins,  Linda P. Fried, M.D., who is the director of the Center on Aging and Health at Johns Hopkins said, “Giving back to your community may slow the aging process in ways that lead to a higher quality of life in older adults.”

Quotes on Giving