The power of 'no'
BACP Workplace, October 2024

Last year, I noticed that I had become more fatigued and it was hard to find enough energy to look for another person to carry out a task that I (on reflection) should have been saying ‘no’ to. Instead, I kept on saying ‘yes’, albeit in an increasingly defeated tone. I found ways to fit people and projects into ever tighter spaces, and I felt compelled to say ‘yes’ to whatever it was that I was being asked. Internally, I’d hear my voice saying, ‘Because I can help, I should help’. I justified this by telling myself that, ‘The care-seeker probably wouldn’t find help anywhere else’. I noticed that there were some people who were good at asking me for help or care, and how often I lacked the energy to resist their requests.

And then, having worked like this for a long time, I stopped and came face to face with my exhaustion, my workload and my work/life balance. I had to confront what I might be avoiding by carrying on being frenetically and frantically busy. Experiencing burnout, I discovered that maybe, unconsciously, I was avoiding being me, avoiding living my own life. Instead, I had somehow become my own tyrannical boss. 

A human cost 

Whether you have experienced burnout in your own working life as a practitioner or you’ve heard your workplace clients recount similar experiences, I imagine that what I’ve just described might sound familiar. According to a recent study by Deloitte, poor mental health is costing UK employers £51 billion a year, and 63% of respondents are experiencing at least one characteristic of burnout.¹ 

In all the organisations I work with, and at the University of Leeds, where I work as a senior staff counsellor with my manager, Dr Sally Rose, we were seeing increasing numbers of clients presenting with burnout, feeling overwhelmed by their wide job remits, and reporting attending meetings but not being able to ever do any of the work generated by those meetings, unless after work or at the weekend. Clients spoke of the increasing demand that they be present and productive at work, while job vacancies remained vacant, leaving additional work for depleted and overstretched teams. Some frontline roles found themselves dealing with yet more crisis and complex needs, and a pressure to keep trying to do more with less. We saw clients straining under the load of their work and life burdens, feeling unable to say ‘no’, or not daring to say ‘no’. We also heard of managers who say, ‘It’s fine to say “no”’ and then when staff did so, they experienced disapproval or even open hostility. 

As an organisational response, we designed a workshop for staff to help those people feeling overwhelmed by their responsibilities and obligations, at work and at home, which left them feeling unable to simply say, ‘no’. However, at the same time that we were rolling out the training to staff, in a parallel world, I too was feeling overwhelmed and struggling to say ‘no’ at work. 

This article draws together both the theory and my lived experience which helped inform the workshop and the talk that I gave at the Health and Wellbeing at Work Conference earlier this year at the NEC, Birmingham. I hope it will be helpful to practitioners working with their clients to support them to say ‘no’ at work and that it can also be usefully applied in their own lives, personally and professionally. 

Why don’t we say ‘no’? 

To answer this question, I think we need to go back to the beginning. I’m co-author of To Be Met as a Person at Work – a book that explores the effect of early attachment experiences on our work relationships. Those of us who fear saying ‘no’, worry that doing so will lead to us not being professionally needed or ‘valued’ anymore. Therefore, our resistance or inability to say ‘no’ could be directly linked to our need to seek approval from others.² 

51bn: According to a recent study by Deloitte, poor mental health is costing UK employers £51 billion a year¹

63% of respondents are experiencing at least one characteristic of burnout¹

Of course, this will be different for everyone and depend upon the individual conditions in our early significant attachments. In my case, I understand that when a person seeks my care or support, or when I identify a need in another person, my attachment system is aroused and conscious, and unconscious patterns and processes fire into action. My overactive or defensive caregiving system may inhibit my confidence or competence to say ‘no’, and my fear system may bring to the fore failed social interactions or previous occasions when I said ‘no’, which might not support me to say ‘no’ this time. I know this because I’ve spent years researching this and yet, I continued to struggle to say ‘no’ as the demands on me stacked up. 

It’s back to attachment 

As therapists, we might ask our clients how their early attachment experiences may affect the way they seek care or give care to others. We may explore whether, as children, they responded to ambivalent, frightened or absent parents. Were there family rules around compliance, for example, always saying ‘yes’, or avoiding conflict by not saying ‘no’? Other clients may come from a culture of ‘put up’ and ‘shut up’. We might ask if the client experienced overburdened parents, and if so, it might be hard for the client to say ‘no’ because there hasn’t been any modelling of how to say ‘no’ – or knowing what it feels like to be overburdened. Neurodivergence may also be a factor to be aware of, and therapists may need to consider whether the client has neurological, cognitive, or biological states that affect how rules or behaviour are learnt and enacted. 

Saying ‘no’ in a culture of ‘yes’ 

Beyond the culture of our workplaces, we live in a world of instant responses and this could play a part in why we are so predisposed to say ‘yes’. Social media, WhatsApp, Facetime and Instant Messenger lure us with instant gratification, and our patience to wait for anything seems to have been eroded with the ability to access so much ‘on demand’. 

The rise of zero-hours contracts can create pressure on workers to be present and visible to those who are offering the work, whether they want it or not. Is this just another form of people pleasing in order to keep the working coming in? And there are gender implications too, as social narratives refer to women as being ‘multitaskers’ and men as ‘problem-solvers’. To what extent does being a professional caregiver play out in our workload as we feel the burden of wanting to help others? 

51bn According to a recent study by Deloitte, poor mental health is costing UK employers £51 billion a year¹

Arguably, the weight of expectation facing us at work is a new kind of epidemic. Adaptation: enough already is a new play written by the playwright, Samantha Graham of Vegas Nerve Productions, which explores exactly this. According to Graham, women account for around 80% of autoimmune disease sufferers, and her play shines a spotlight on how the business world’s excessive expectations of women are causing disproportionate, epidemic levels of ill health.³ 

63% of respondents are experiencing at least one characteristic of burnout¹ 

So, I’m aware that whenever I speak on the topic of saying ‘no’, it’s as relevant to me as it is to the people I’m speaking to. However much I might wish that knowing the theory means that I’ve become an expert on living a boundaried, uncomplicated life, that’s simply not the case. I can still recall how my supervisor sagely invited me to look at my own predicament and ask myself the question, ‘When you are overwhelmed, what can you do less of?’ I found this simply insightful. Therefore, I suggest that we need to reframe saying ‘no’, not as a failure, a lack of strength or as a passive act, and instead reframe it as a choice where we are actively saying ‘yes’ to something else. 

Asking different questions 

In my research, I started to ask myself, ‘What do I/we get from not saying 'no'?’ We know that just taking a moment to consider whether we want to say ‘no’ gives us agency, and checking in with our health, our values and our priorities, we might be able to really see what exactly is being asked of us and ask ourselves, ‘Is it my role?’, ‘Do I have capacity to say “yes”?’ or, ‘Could this be a learning opportunity for someone else?’ 

Learning to say ‘no’ to something and ‘yes’ to something else, presents opportunities, such as doing something restorative in the time it would have taken. I needed to unhook my neurological tick and the fear I have of letting others down but I’m not the only one. I’ve wondered how our society has managed to sleepwalk into a way of working and living which is so unsustainable.

By this, I mean the slow displacement of corporate or service administration which goes on in our lives – just think about how much work you have to do to get insurance, open a bank account or purchase your goods from a supermarket. We do the research, add in all the numbers, the statistics and we even scan our own goods. Somehow, we have been saying ‘yes’ to extra admin for years! 

Helping clients to say ‘no’ 

To be able to say ‘no’ with competence, we need a good understanding of our psychological development and our ability to self-regulate. With clients, I explore how social conditioning is at play and I encourage them to notice what saying ‘no’ arouses for them. Our role as counsellors and psychotherapists is to provide a safe enough space where our clients can practise saying ‘no’, feeling the words in their bodies and developing some new muscle memory. 

Working with clients, I frequently use the Workable Ranges Model (WRM),⁴ devised by Dr Sally Rose, to draw out embodied knowing, and help map the client’s experience and conditions of being regulated or unregulated. The green zone is when we are regulated – where we feel competent, resourced and sufficiently energised. It is where we are most likely to make an informed ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In the green zone, our social attachment systems are supporting our wellbeing and our sense of satisfaction in the tasks. 

Outside of this regulated state, we can experience dysregulation up to a hyper-aroused state in the red zone – where we can feel strained, agitated, frantic and frightened, where our self-defence is unsupportive and inner talk is critical. This is a place where a ‘yes’ is likely to be rushed or a ‘no’ can be compromised. 

The hypo-aroused state is the blue zone, where it is more likely to be typified by retreat or exhaustion, freeze and low mood, and this is also a place where an exhausted ‘yes’ or a compromised ‘no’ can exist. 

I use this model to encourage clients to consider the best state they might need to be in to say ‘no’. It gives them a framework to assess their state and preparedness for saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This model also helps explore what conditions we might need to address in order to move from a dysregulated to a regulated state. 

This is not unusual work with our clients, is it? We know it can be normal to struggle with self-confidence, boundaries and seeking good care or support. And we know it can be dangerous when we overcommit, leading to burnout, if we are relying on external validating affirmation from others which might not ever come our way. This is so often at the core of what we do as workplace therapists with our organisational clients.

Questions for reflection 

A safe environment can help us to be curious and experimental, and provide the best conditions for learning how to say a healthy ‘no’ or an appropriate ‘yes’. You may find these questions helpful to explore with clients or for your own personal development: 

• Did you have caregivers, mentors or influencers who were good at saying ‘no’ or setting limits?
• What were your early experiences of your caregivers setting boundaries or saying ‘no’?
• Do you find yourself saying ‘yes’ because you just don’t have the energy to say ‘no’?
• Could not saying ‘no’ be a sign of danger, ill health, despair or care-seeking?
• Could the client use the Workable Ranges Model⁴ to map the times they say ‘yes’ hastily when they might otherwise say ‘no’? Can they analyse the conditions they are under at these times? And use that knowledge as insight to try it differently another time?
• How can the client tune into these signs and signals, and learn to do something different?
• Can you, as the therapist, provide a place for the client to practise the competence of saying ‘no’ to you?
• How might you explore this work in supervision? Might you be aware of any parallel experience or barriers to saying ‘no’ in your clinical work? 

If you are looking for further reading, Psychology Today has an excellent blog on the power of saying ‘no’ and the key message is that, ‘Saying “no” can create more mental health stability by helping with self-care, and build your self-esteem and confidence by setting boundaries.’⁵ Saying ‘no’ means you are actively saying ‘yes’ to something else, and this is a handy mantra to call on when you need it.

Doing things differently 

Of course, as practitioners, we know that change and competence come through practice, research, experimentation, exploration and discovery. Putting in the time to rehearse saying ‘no’, testing it out and getting support, are all incredibly helpful. It’s a learnt skill, and we need to build up muscle memory and new neurological pathways to develop our competence. 

In our work at the University of Leeds to support staff with their boundaries, we compiled some of our favourite ways of saying ‘no’ below. The Go Natural English website is an excellent source.

Ways to say ‘no’ 

• ‘Thank you for asking me to X, Y or Z. Under different circumstances, I would like to be able to help you, however…’
• ‘I’m sorry, I know this will be disappointing…’
• ‘On this occasion, the answer is “no”’
• ‘No, I can’t do that’
• ‘No, that’s not possible because…’
• ‘I think this is too important to say “yes” to without thinking this through…’
• ‘I can see you really want to me to say “yes” and I hate disappointing you, it doesn’t mean I don’t care about you or this project…’
• ‘My bandwidth is low, so I won’t be able to make it work this time’. 

Closing thoughts 

Saying ‘no’ is not a negative act. Saying ‘no’ changes our world and can, in fact, change the world. If you think about it, all great acts of compassion start with an individual act. In order to take action, we need to get to know what might be stopping us, immobilising us, or even frightening us. 

When we say ‘no’, society changes. We’ve said ‘no’ to slavery, to putting children up chimneys, driving without a seat belt, smoking in certain places, and started to say ‘no’ to things that cause environmental damage. You will be able to think of many more, but saying ‘no’ begins with compassion. 

When I learnt to say ‘no’, it led me to taking a wonderful pottery course. It took me away from the tyranny of tasks and instead to experience being me, feeling free and creative. When you say ‘no’, where might it lead you? When your clients say ‘no’, where might it lead them? Good luck.