Welcome to Taking Care of Yourself Tuesdays! Today we are discussing learning to say no to people and having priorities:

Sometimes you just need to say NO. But saying no can be hard when you are a mom and worse if you are a people pleaser.  The reality is, though, that you can only do a few things well in this life and the rest you will have to give whatever you have left over, which might not be much. There are good things in life and then there are great things.  If we really want to live meaningful lives we should focus on doing the great things.

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Now, don’t get me wrong, doing laundry and cleaning toilets can be a part of a the great things. I am not saying that the mundane things in life aren’t worth the effort. I am really hoping to encourage you to examine your life, what you spend your time on, and eliminate those things that are stealing your time from the truly worth while things. If you are a mom, then the mundane things are part of your great things!

Think about it. Your children are watching you.  They see your no’s and your yes’s. They are learning from you what is important and what time should be spent on.

So how do you manage your yeses and noes? We’ll let me give you an example:

My kids like to ask for things on the spur of the moment (heading to a movie with a friend, a new pair of shoes, a toy they can’t resist) but there’s something we have in our family called a budget (perhaps you have one too?).  I learned a neat little trick once from an older, wiser woman and that is to say something like “I’d love to honey but let’s see what Mr. budget says.”  This way “Mr. budget” can say yes or no according to what is true about what is in our budget. Mr. budget gets to be the bad guy sometimes.

The same thing can be applied to your time.  You can budget your time with your priorities.  Make a list of your top priorities in life.  Mine is something like this:

• God
• Marriage
• Kids
• A Healthy Lifestyle for Myself & My Family
• Taking Care of Our Home {Making it a place of beauty and peace}
• My Calling
• Friends/Family

I can then insert into each category the ways I will spend my time to keep these things priorities. Anything else can only be added and done if these things have been done.  This helps you to focus on the great things and when someone asks you to do something you can assess whether or not it fits into your priorities and if it is going to hinder you from getting the things higher up on your list done.  You can say “My priority list doesn’t have room for that right now.”

Sometimes you have to say no to yourself and not just to others.

Don’t let spur of the moment ideas take you off on tangents unless they are part of your priorities. If you make an effort to do this then you will find yourself doing the really great things in life and it will get easier and easier to say no to things, even the seemingly good things.

Do you ever struggle with saying no?  How do you manage your yeses and noes?