priorities Archives - The Sales Experiment

The Best Way to Say “Yes” is to Say “No”

Yesterday I received a Facebook message from an old friend.

The message was an invitation to get in on the most wonderful new opportunity (can you smell the network marketing opportunity about to drop on me?).

My buddy was pretty convincing. She didn’t take no for an answer. She assured me that it was the ground floor and she wasn’t inviting just anybody (appealing to the ‘early adopter’ in me while tossing in a dose of scarcity to pull at me a little bit).

As a matter of fact, she was meeting with a former/current insurance agent at a Starbucks around the corner from my office the next morning (which would be this morning). Couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?

I was tempted. Yes. I was tempted with the Seacret Revolution (click on the link at your own peril as you might get swept away with the business opportunity of a lifetime).

But then it hit me. I have two and a half blogs. I have a full-time sales and marketing position at a wonderful firm. I’m assisting a couple people with social media marketing efforts. More importantly, I have a family that I love and a few home projects that need to get done.

If I say ‘Yes’ to this opportunity, I’m saying ‘No’ to my effectiveness in one or more of these other areas.

Something would have to give.

I then remembered Michael Hyatt’s recent podcast on his 10 top books of all time (and another podcast of his dedicated to the book Essentialism). In both Podcasts, Hyatt discusses Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and this key idea:

When we say “no” to something, it gives us the opportunity to say “yes” to something else.

I love it when my epiphanies can be traced to content I’ve been consuming.

If I go to this 9am coffee to discuss this relationship marketing opportunity and get sucked in, I’m saying ‘No’ to being my best at my other responsibilities. Truth be told, I should exercise saying ‘No’ to a few of my current commitments. This fellow needs some margin.

We simply don’t have the mental, physical, and emotional bandwidth to say yes to everything.

The best way to say yes, is to say no.

I have no problem with people asking me for my time or energy or for my involvement. It’s on me to be protective and to filter new requests. That’s why we all need to be diligent around knowing and understanding our priorities. If someone presents us with a task or an ‘opportunity of a lifetime’ and it doesn’t fit within those priorities (or doesn’t truly pique our interest), then we must say no.

Audit Your “Yesses” Regularly

Something I’ve not been good at is auditing my commitments. Are there things I’m doing that I simply shouldn’t be doing?

What about you?

Are you over-burdened?

Does your schedule have margin?

Are you a “yes” person to the detriment of your personal health, your relationships, your family?

Audit your calendar and commitments to see.

Audit Your Clients

If you’re in sales, are you committing to prospects or clients for whom you can’t do your best work? If so, then make it a priority to start saying ‘No’ to those clients and prospects.

We don’t have to work with every person who can fog up a mirror. We can be selective. If we pile our books of business with clients that suck our energy, we can’t pour into those who appreciate what we do for them.

What Do You Need to Audit?

We could take this auditing and saying ‘no’ thing pretty far. Some of us might need to audit relationships, food choices, addictions, media, social media, or any number of things that battle against our ultimate goals and priorities.

What do you need to drop? What needs to take up less space in your world?

Learn to say ‘No’ so you can be all in with your ‘Yes’.

Until tomorrow…

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Reading and Listening

See You at the Top – Zig Ziglar

First Christmas – Joel Thomas, North Point Community Church

Everyday – Three Choices

Every morning when I get into my office, I have a choice between three options:

I can dive directly into my email inbox and get lost in others’ priorities.
I can work on what I traditionally call my 3 ‘M.I.T.s’ – my ‘most important tasks’.
I can carve out the initial time for my ‘M.I.P.s’ – my ‘most important practices’.

The easiest but least productive option is option 1. It’s so easy to pop open email and start firing off responses and answering questions and barking orders.

I’ve been training myself to select option 2: M.I.T.s – Most Important Tasks. I forget where I first heard this little acronym, but it’s a powerful habit. When you have a thousand different items on your to-do list, take out a blank sheet of paper and write down three items that are the most important items on that to-do list.

In truth, it hardly matters if these three tasks are the most important. Having three clear items on a big white piece of paper will help you get traction.

That’s a great practice, but I’ve had an epiphany.

Most Important Practices

While email urgency falls firmly into the ‘urgent, not important’ category (check out Stephen Covey’s time management quadrant), Most Important Tasks also smack of urgency.

Of course, as the name implies, they aren’t just urgent, but also important.

The problem is that they put you in the ‘urgent’ mode, and those vitally important yet not urgent practices get squeezed out.

Most sales, marketing, or leadership roles require some kind of thought work. Writing, planning, developing key relationships, and establishing goals and direction are all necessary for long term growth.

Those activities can only be supported by having a set of practices that keep them in the forefront.

When those practices are relegated to the end of the work day when all the urgencies are done, those practices never actually happen.

But when those practices are tackled with discipline during the first part of the day, the urgencies all seem to get taken care of as they would any other day. We lose nothing by prioritizing the ‘important, not urgent’ practices first.

M.I.P.s vs. M.I.T.s

I believe we owe it to ourselves and our overall work to spend time on the Most Important Practices first. Writing, making sales calls, and developing thought leadership projects have to happen when our brains are best equipped for them and before our days get obliterated by urgencies.

We can then move on to the Most Important Tasks with some email tossed in.

What Do You Do First?

What works for you?

How do you start your day so that you are your most productive?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

The Best Way to Say “Yes” is to Say “No”