I still haven't managed to cure myself of my habit of saying 'yes' instead of 'no'. There's lots of advice on how to say no which I seem unable to take, though I did manage it twice last week which felt as if I might be able to learn how.
In an alternative to saying no Adam Grant recently wrote a book called Give and Take which is all about the benefits and value of helping people. There's a compelling NY Times interview with him Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? So maybe I can pat myself on the back for giving stuff rather than feeling overwhelmed by stuff resulting from my incapacity to say no.
Anyway this is what I tried to tell myself as I knuckled down over the weekend to meet the deadline of submitting the material for a one-day workshop I'm running in October. I looked at the now published, introductory paragraph I'd written months ago and was a bit shocked when I discovered I'd opened with the sentence 'Being on the knife edge of organisational change can be challenging'.
I wondered what that meant – my past self didn't seem to have left many clues for my current self to work on in a way that my future self could then deliver on the day. (Watch Dan Gilbert answering the question 'Why do we make decisions which our future selves so often regret?') The thought that I should have said no to the invitation to facilitate momentarily outweighed another thing I tell myself to do which is to give things a go.