Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Oct/Nov2019 Aspire Magazine | Page 54
“Love yourself enough to set boundaries.
Your time and energy are precious.
You get to choose how you use it.”
– ANNA TAYLOR
And in truth, most of the time I felt good about
saying yes. Saying yes gave me a sense of
purpose and contributed to my feeling needed
and important. The more I said yes, the
more opportunities for saying yes appeared.
Before I knew it, I was overwhelmed with
responsibilities and leadership roles. I was
the room mom, soccer coach, book fair
coordinator, and lead volunteer for multiple
organizations in addition to running my own
business and working for nonprofits.
Saying yes became my default mode and
even though I carried cute post-it notes that
read “Stop me before I volunteer again.” I
would inevitably come home from meetings
with new volunteer roles. When I would
share with others what I was doing, people
were always so impressed and said it was
amazing how much I could do.
I found that there is tremendous social
pressure to say yes and just as much positive
reinforcement for doing so. Unfortunately,
this is unsustainable and the more I said
yes, the less and less time there was for
me. Over time I became resentful about all
the roles and responsibilities I had taken on
and often felt exhausted and overwhelmed.
I was stretched beyond my capacity and
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as a result thought I wasn’t doing anything
well. I felt like a failure. I looked around and
it appeared that everyone else was able to
do it all and wondered what was wrong with
me that I was struggling?
Have you ever felt this way?
Well if so, you are not alone. In addition
to my own experience, I have heard from
hundreds of women over the past ten years
of teaching self-nurturing practices that
have experienced this exact thing. Caring
for everyone in their lives except themselves
left these women feeling exhausted,
overwhelmed, and totally ineffective.
When I realized that saying yes to everyone
was part of my pattern of self-neglect and
was unsustainable, I got curious about how
to transform it. The most obvious choice was
to start saying no. So how could I strengthen
my “no” muscle and let go of feeling guilty
and selfish in the process? How could I
begin cultivating the art of saying no and still
nurture others?
I decided to institute a new practice - only
saying yes to things that brought me
joy. I loved this new boundary. It gave me
www.AspireMAG.net | October / November 2019