You 2.0: How To Say No

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 1920s, a young Englishman was stationed in Burma, now Myanmar, working as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police Force. Early one morning, he got a phone call. An elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would he please come and do something about it? Arriving at the bazaar, the officer learned that the elephant had killed a man and damaged a bamboo hut. He asked for a rifle, in case he needed to defend himself. Once he began to make his way toward the animal, weapon in hand, a crowd of villagers began gathering around him, shouting excitedly. The officer didn't want to shoot the elephant. He didn't think shooting the elephant was necessary. But standing there, surrounded by some 2000 villagers, he felt that he no longer had a choice. In his words, suddenly, I realized I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it off me, and I had got to do it. I could feel their 2000 wills pressing me forward irresistibly. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with 2000 people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away having done nothing? No, that was impossible. The essay Shooting an Elephant was published in 1936 by the British writer George Orwell. It's a dramatic rendering of a widely shared experience. We often encounter pressure from others to do things. Do we comply, compromise, or resist? This week on Hidden Brain, how to navigate the demands of other people while staying true to ourselves. Living among other people, holding down a job, raising children, cultivating friendships, means that you feel a never-ending stream of requests, invitations, and orders. Your boss wants you to take on an assignment. Your kid's teacher needs volunteers. Your friend asks you for a favor. How do we respond to all these demands on our time and energy? At the University of Houston, Vanessa Patrick studies the psychology of how we respond to these requests, and how we can align what we do with what we really want to do. Vanessa Patrick, welcome to Hidden Brain.



Vanessa Patrick: Thank you, Shankar, for having me.



Shankar Vedantam: Vanessa, I understand that you started out your career working at an advertising agency in India. At the end of one particular workday, you were looking forward to leaving the office and going home to a celebration. What were you celebrating? What had you planned?



Vanessa Patrick: You know, Shankar, for most people, 24th birthdays are somewhat unremarkable. However, for mine, it stands out in time because of this incident that happened at this advertising agency, which was my first job. It was a routine day. We had client meetings, and I was the junior most person at the advertising agency. And so as part of the team, when the team met the client, what we would do is we would have a discussion about what the plans were, what ads we were going to develop, briefs, et cetera. And I was in charge of writing the minutes, which were the notes of the meeting. I had to type those minutes up, fax them to the client, and the client would then respond back saying, the minutes are received and they are okay. And so this was a routine task. I did it every day. Now, on that particular day, I was in a huge rush to finish the minutes and head home because I had a big party planned and people were coming over to celebrate my birthday with me, family and friends. So I got them typed, showed them to my boss, and faxed the minutes over, ready to leave at 5 p.m., ready to beat the rush hour traffic. I was getting ready to walk to the elevator, and my boss comes to my cubicle to inquire whether I had sent the minutes over. And I said yes. And then she turned around and walked to the elevator. And then she turned back, and I thought she was going to say, hey Vanessa, have a great party. Enjoy your evening with the friends. But what she said instead was, have you received the fax from the client saying that they have received the minutes? And that was not what I anticipated that she was going to ask. And so I said no. So she said, well, don't leave till you receive that fax. My plans for the evening were shattered with that instruction. And I was just shell shocked, stunned. She turned around and went home. And I was left with the burden of having to wait for a fax that I had no idea when that was going to come and potentially miss my birthday party. So I consider all sorts of options. Should I leave anyway and then come early and put it on her desk? Or should I ask a friend to handle it? But I was so scared. It was my first job. I was so afraid that if I didn't do this task, I could be fired, that I called home and I said, I'm late. I'm going to be late. And as the evening progressed, everybody from the office started leaving. And I was staring at the fax machine, waiting for the fax to come. I kept calling home, and somebody from my family, either my dad, my mom, or one of my sisters would pick up the phone and say, yeah, this friend has come, and this friend has left. And essentially, it was a Tuesday evening, so it had to be an early night. By about 9 p.m., the fax did arrive. I picked the fax up from the fax machine, and I put it on my boss's desk, and I went home.



Shankar Vedantam: And how many friends were still left when you got home?



Vanessa Patrick: Actually, just my grandmother. My grandmother was the only one who stayed on and waited to wish me. Everyone else had left because it was a Tuesday evening, and they needed to get back home for work or for school.



Shankar Vedantam: So, many years later, Vanessa, you became a professor at the University of Houston. And in that role, you fielded many requests for your time. And one was an invitation to join a committee that would decide on the winner of a prestigious award. What was your first reaction to this invitation?



Vanessa Patrick: I didn't want to do it. Being on these committees is a service engagement which takes a lot of time. And I just did not want to do it. I have my plate full. I have tons of work. I didn't know how to fit it in. And yet, I did feel that there was some value in being on the committee, that I was asked, that I was special in some way perhaps. And I thought, okay, maybe I should just say yes.



Shankar Vedantam: So you joined this committee, and then along the way you discover something unexpected. What was it?



Vanessa Patrick: Through an unfortunate series of events, I discovered a set of emails that was accidentally forwarded to me on all the people who were considered to be on this committee. I also saw a back and forth on debating who was going to be asked. And I was number nine on their choice list. After I found that out, it really diminished my enthusiasm, and I felt very resentful towards the people who had asked me, and really kicked myself for saying yes when I wanted to say no.



Shankar Vedantam: So in other words, not only did you say yes when you wanted to say no, but you realized that you were the backup to the backup to the backup to the backup.



Vanessa Patrick: Nine times over, yes.



Shankar Vedantam: In addition to all the demands from our workplaces, many of us have people in our personal lives who need our time and energy. A friend of yours once reached out with an urgent request for help concerning groceries. Tell me the situation, what happened, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: Yes. So, Shankar, we are all good people, and I think I'm a good person. And so when someone is in need, I feel the need to help them. So in this particular story, I heard that a friend of mine was very close to delivering her baby, heavily pregnant, on bed rest. And I called her up asking how she was feeling, and to cheer her up. And before I ended the call, I politely offered to help if there was anything that she needed. Not a very long time later, she emailed me and said, can you please pick up groceries for me today? And she sent me a long list of groceries and the grocery store to pick it up from, with very specific instructions. And that was not very convenient. She didn't ask me if I had the time, and I had to juggle a fair bit. And I dashed across town to pick up groceries from that particular store. I walk into the house laden with groceries, and I see her husband sitting in the backyard, kicking back with a beer. And there was something about that experience that just made me mad. Like, I am running around getting groceries out of the goodness of my heart for this friend. And she could have easily asked her husband, who was sitting right in the backyard, and the grocery store was so five minutes away from their house. So I think that definitely affected my relationship with my friend.



Shankar Vedantam: Like many of us, Vanessa found herself saying yes, when she really wanted to say no. When we come back, why we find it so hard to turn down requests, and the effect this has on our well-being. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. All of us have been in situations where someone asks us for something. Sometimes, the thing they want is easy for us to provide, and we are happy to give it. Other times, the request is outlandish, but we still find it difficult to say no. At the University of Houston, Vanessa Patrick studies why we say yes when we really want to say no, and the effects these choices have on our psychological health. Vanessa, you say there are important reasons we say yes when it would be better to say no, and the first has to do with our fears about the effect that saying no will have on our relationships. Can you say more about this?



Vanessa Patrick: Absolutely. So, we are social creatures, and we want to have strong connections with other people. And in order to maintain those connections and to maintain good relationships, we believe that we should say yes to the things that are asked of us.



Shankar Vedantam: So you say that when someone makes a request of us, it's almost expected that we will say yes. So saying no is something that you call the socially dispreferred response. So besides our fears about relationships, there are all these social expectations that influence us.



Vanessa Patrick: Absolutely. Saying no is a major harmony buster. People think that if you say no, people are really not going to like you, not going to invite you places, are not going to keep you as part of their social group. And this is something that as social creatures, we definitely try to avoid.



Shankar Vedantam: So a few years ago, Vanessa, we had another researcher named Vanessa on the show. This was psychologist Vanessa Barnes of Cornell University. And her work showed that people say yes, even to requests made by total strangers, and even when the requests were completely out of line. You cited her work in some of your own research. Can you give me some examples of what she found?



Vanessa Patrick: Yes, Vanessa Barnes' work is really fascinating and dovetails really well with my own. So Vanessa finds that people say yes to really the most crazy requests. She's had people do things like defile library books. Can I play a soccer in your backyard? Can I borrow your credit card? And people are just like, sure, sure. And it's crazy to think about. But she finds robust effects that we are willing to go out of our way to say yes, because saying no comes so hard for us.



Shankar Vedantam: So the concern we have for how other people will react shows up most clearly in relationships where we don't know the other person very well. You call this the acquaintance trap. What is the acquaintance trap, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: So the acquaintance trap is essentially the idea that when we have weak social ties with people, we are most concerned about that relationship. So we worry about that relationship being most tenuous and most likely to be destroyed if we say no. So we get trapped into saying yes to all these people who are acquaintances and oddly enough, Shankar, the majority of people in our neighborhoods, in our communities, at our workplaces, could be categorized as acquaintances. And they are the ones with whom we have the most struggle.



Shankar Vedantam: So in other words, if I know someone very well, they ask me for something and I say no to them, I'm reasonably confident that my relationship is secure enough that saying no is not going to damage my relationship. If someone is a total stranger and they ask me for something, I might be comfortable also saying no, because in fact, I don't have a relationship with that person. It's the group of people who are in-between who, as you point out, in fact, are the vast majority of people whom we know, that we have a really hard time saying no to.



Vanessa Patrick: That is exactly right. And I'll tell you a really strange and interesting story about that. So one day, my daughter and I were driving back from a birthday party that she had just attended. Now, these kids birthday parties where you play all morning, and then they give you lunch and then you head home. And so I watched her play and then I saw that she had to order her favorite meal, which was chicken nuggets and fries. And we were heading home, and I thought, okay, done. Now she can just play in the afternoon. I don't have to organize lunch. And she says, Mom, I'm hungry. I said, What? Why are you hungry? You just ate lunch. She said, No, I didn't. The girl next to me asked for my chicken nuggets and fries. And I didn't say no, I just gave them to her. And so I said, Why did you give your chicken and nuggets and fries to somebody else and not eat your own lunch? And she said, It's the acquaintance trap, Mom. And I was just flabbergasted. She's obviously listening to me speak. And this girl was in fact someone she had just met at that party. And, you know, even at about nine years old, she was experiencing and recognized, interestingly, the acquaintance trap occurring in our own life.



Shankar Vedantam: Another reason you say we say yes is that we're worried about the effect that saying no will have on our reputations. And I'm wondering if this might have been one of the reasons you effectively said yes to your boss at that ad agency in India, which is you were worried what the effect of saying no would have on your reputation in your very first job.



Vanessa Patrick: So reputation is a really key aspect of who we are as in organizations especially. So our reputation is what people say about us when we are not in the room. And we want people to say good things about us. We want people to say we are warm. We want people to say we are competent. We want people to say we are capable. And so we strive to create that impression in people's minds. And so saying no might come across as not being warm. Saying no in other situations could be she's not competent, she's not capable, she can't juggle all the balls that everybody else is juggling. And that is definitely something that we are concerned about.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that this concern about our reputation is often distilled into a single moment of being put on the spot. And you compare this to the cultural phenomenon known as the stadium proposal. What is the stadium proposal, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: So, when people ask us something that we want to say no to, it feels as if the spotlight is on us. And that everyone is stopped and waiting for us to say yes. And I liken that to the stadium proposal. And a stadium proposal is one of those cultural phenomena where somebody proposes to the person that they love, and it is broadcast on this big jumbotron screen in front of thousands and thousands of fans, typically at a sports event. And I talk about the fact that being in that stadium proposal moment, it's very hard to say no if you think about it. The girl has very little choice. She can't say, you know, let me think about it. She is on the screen with everyone watching. And what I argue is that we have these mini stadium proposal moments that happen in our life on a daily basis. Someone asks you on an aircraft, you know, can you please give up your aisle seat because I need to sit next to somebody? And your heart sinks because you have planned an aisle seat for months. Someone catches you on the corridor and asks you, you know, can you please take this on? And then you just feel, do I really have a choice, especially if that person is your boss? And so these kind of mini stadium proposals really feel like the spotlight is on you, and you have very little choice except to say yes.



Shankar Vedantam: You're drawing an analogy between what happens in the stadium and what happens to us in everyday life. But of course, in everyday life, we know that there isn't a stadium watching us. We know that thousands of people are not watching us. We know that our faces are not on the jumbotron. Why does it feel that it is? Why does it feel as if the spotlight is on us, even when it's not?



Vanessa Patrick: Absolutely, that's a great question, Shankar. And this stems from who we are as human beings. We have this egocentric bias, and the egocentric bias is that we believe that we are the center of attention. And I actually have a study in which I demonstrate the stadium proposal effect in the lab. This was a study I ran with undergraduates, and I gave them a scenario in which I wanted to make sure that they were going to want to say no to this request that was coming their way. So I described a very busy semester, and I described the fact that they have a ton of things that they have been busy with, and they were really, really looking for a spring break where they could just chill. So it was very clear that they wanted an open spring break. And then the Friday before spring break, they went to a party and met some people at a bar, and there was a person at the bar called Sarah. And Sarah kind of made an ask of the individual that they clearly would like to refuse. And the ask was that she was looking for volunteers to make 25 calls on behalf of a charity over spring break. So this was what everyone read. Then I varied the situation in different conditions. In one condition, which I call the solo ask condition. In the solo ask condition, Sarah asked this person just one on one, nobody watching. In the other condition, which I call the social ask condition, there were a whole bunch of people already at the table who had also agreed to be part of this volunteer team for Sarah. So essentially, in one group, there was this more stadium proposal like experience where there are lots of people watching you and you are being asked to do something that you don't want to do. And then the solo ask where the other people disappear and it's just you. What I find interestingly, as you might imagine, because of the social pressure that is embedded in these situations, when people were asked one on one, they were more likely and more comfortable with saying, no, I have plans for spring break and it does not involve making 25 calls. But when people were in the social ask condition, they were more likely to say yes to helping Sarah out. But what was also really interesting, Shankar, is the difference between men and women. In the social ask condition, both men and women felt equally uncomfortable with saying no. So it's a tough thing for anybody. But in the solo ask condition, where you took out the social pressure, it's much easier to say no to somebody who's asking you. Men felt comfortable with saying no more than women did. There was no difference for women between the solo ask condition and the social ask condition. It's almost like women conjure up an imaginary group who's watching them, and they feel extreme pressure to say yes even when they want to say no.



Shankar Vedantam: So in other words, as for many women, it's almost as if they are on the jumbotron even when they're not.



Vanessa Patrick: Absolutely.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm thinking of this other story, and I don't know if the story is apocryphal, but it goes back to the days of World War II, or the closing days of World War II. You know, Japan was running out of ways to defend off attacks from the Allies, and the Japanese military resorted to a number of kamikaze attacks, where they basically had pilots basically fly their planes into enemy ships and essentially turn their planes into missiles. nd if I remember the story correctly, the way they recruited people is they would line up people, you know, they would line up these pilots, and basically say, does anyone not want to volunteer for these flights? You know, you can step forward and say, I don't want to do it, but you have to step forward in front of everybody else. And the moment you step forward in front of everybody else saying, I don't want to fly one of these suicide missions, everyone else knows that you have declined. And of course, what they found is hardly anyone would step forward to say, they didn't want to do it. And what strikes me about that is that we care about our social reputations so intensely that it might go to a point where we're willing to die in order to protect our social reputations.



Vanessa Patrick: Wow, that's a great story. I've not heard that. And I think it's amplified in a society like Japan where honor and interpersonal kind of connection is so strong. And I think you can see this amplified in collectivist cultures like Japan. I strongly believe that individualistic cultures allow you the permission to say no more than collectivist cultures. In collectivist cultures, the power hierarchy, the social connection, the expectation that you conform to society is so strong that I can totally see that this strategy, the non-volunteer strategy that the army used would work.



Shankar Vedantam: Do you think the same thing might be happening with men and women, which is that if men are more individualistic on average and women tend to be more focused on the community on average, and these are averages, of course, but if that's the case, do you think that might be driving the gender differences that we're seeing?



Vanessa Patrick: That is definitely one of the reasons. In fact, there had been some research about why women are more likely to say yes to tasks, especially at the workplace. And they have found that it boils down to this communality. Women are expected to be more helpful, the nurturers, the givers in most relationships, and that stems from communality compared to men, who is perfectly okay for them to be more agentic and more individualistic.



Shankar Vedantam: So, we often say yes when we want to say no. And you say that doing this often has the opposite effect of what we expect. So, for example, we say yes because we think that saying no will make us feel bad. You've run a study on this. What was your study and what did you find?



Vanessa Patrick: So, I ran a study in which I asked people to give me stories, stories of times where they said yes when they wanted to say no, and other stories about when they said no successfully. So, have two groups of stories, yes stories and no stories. And what I find, counter intuitively, the people who say yes, they very often think that they will feel good about saying yes. And people who say no think that they are going to feel bad and guilty for saying no. What I find in reality is that people who say no feel way better than people who say yes when they wanted to say no. When you say no to things that you don't want to do, you feel empowered, confident, in control. Whereas if you say yes when you want to say no, very often you feel really resentful towards the other person. You feel angry and frustrated. And that is something that is worth thinking about, that when we say yes to the things that we don't want to do, it often leaves us very grumpy, very unhappy, and resentful to the other person.



Shankar Vedantam: I mean, and this is along the lines of what happened with you and your friend. When your friend asked you to pick up groceries, and I think you wanted to say no, but you said yes. You know, and then you showed up and found your friend's husband was in the garden drinking beer. You didn't just feel like I shouldn't have spent the last two hours doing something I didn't want to do. You said that it actually damaged your relationship with your friend. So, in other words, saying yes when we want to say no is not just bad for us personally, it's actually bad for our relationships.



Vanessa Patrick: 100%. I actually do this exercise in my class, which I call the stinking pile of garbage exercise. And saying yes to something that you don't want to do is like taking on a stinking pile of garbage. As soon as you say yes, now it is your stinking pile of garbage that you have to deal with. And that is something that can make us very grumpy and resentful and unhappy in general.



Shankar Vedantam: You point out that one reason some of us might say yes to a request is that we say, okay, it's just this one time. This friend wants me to pick up groceries just this one time. You know, I'm just going to do this one thing, and then we'll just get this unpleasant task over with. It's going to be three hours out of my day, but it's not going to happen again. And so we tell ourselves a little story that we can essentially placate the person who is making this unreasonable request, and the request won't be repeated. Can you talk about why that idea might be a misguided idea, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: Yes, absolutely. I talk about this notion of the psychological immune system, which is the coping, the set of coping responses that come into play whenever we have to deal with something unpleasant. And so there are these unpleasant things, like, say, picking up groceries and spending three hours doing it. And we come up with these reasons why it's OK. And unfortunately for us, when we come up with excuses and when we invoke this psychological immune system and our coping mechanisms kick in, we are less likely to learn from our mistakes. So if you see someone who keeps making the same mistakes again and again and again, it's because the coping mechanism has kicked in and they have failed to learn from the experience.



Shankar Vedantam: I mean, it's an interesting thing because you're pointing out here that our ability to forecast how we will feel. You know, we forecast that I will feel happy if I say yes, and I will feel bad if I say no. You've shown that that forecast is inaccurate. So in other words, we are bad at forecasting. But once we have done something, you're also pointing out that we're bad at learning. So in other words, there's sort of this pincer movement where on both sides of the experience, we're either inaccurate in our forecast or inaccurate in learning from what just happened.



Vanessa Patrick: So we are definitely inaccurate in our forecast. And there's quite a lot of research by Tim Wilson and Dan Gilbert on affective forecasting. But the learning is something that we can actually put things in place to prevent. We can definitely invest more in self-reflection, invest more in learning from those experiences. So I very often advise, when you make a mistake, dwell on it. Feel bad. Recognize that this was not something that you want to do. Make a personal policy or some sort of decision around it, so that you are able to not repeat that mistake again.



Shankar Vedantam: Besides looking at the fact that we often say yes when we want to say no, you also examine how we say no when we turn down requests. And you find that even when we turn down requests, we often do so poorly and in fact, we often sabotage ourselves. For example, we offer what you call a compromise no. What is a compromise no, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: If you say something like no, but if you really want me to, I'll do it. That's not a no. That's a yes. People are trying to be nice. I get it. It's this way of saying no, that's very nice. You know, I really can't do it. But if you really, really wanted me to, I would. That's kind of a compromise, right? I don't want to help, but I want to help. So you're kind of in that really weird place. What I also find is that people very often say no in a way that signals that I'm open to be persuaded otherwise. So there's a lot about the body language, it's the way the no is said, that says, hey, you know, I could be convinced.



Shankar Vedantam: You said that another unproductive way of saying no was dramatized in the 1999 movie The Runaway Bride featuring Julia Roberts. I haven't seen this movie, Vanessa. What is it about? What happens?



Vanessa Patrick: Yeah, I'm a huge fan of these kind of movies. So what happens with Julia Roberts as a character is that she is someone who's the classic people pleaser. She doesn't really have a mind of her own. She doesn't have any preferences of her own. She just does whatever the person she's with wants to do. So the story, without giving away too much, is essentially she's the runaway bride. She's lovely, people want to marry her, and she keeps meeting these different guys and going up until the altar but then can't commit. And with each of these relationships, she has essentially agreed to do whatever they wanted. And so it's just at the moment where she was going to say, yes, to this marriage, that she runs away because she just doesn't feel that this is something that works for her. And so it's a really interesting thing that there are, that we can get ourselves into situations where we say yes and yes and yes and yes, and then, you know, something disastrous happens, and then we just make some big move and say no, like quit our job or leave the person at the altar.



Shankar Vedantam: So in other words, because we are not able to say no in lower stakes settings, what you're saying is that the pressure eventually builds up, and then the pressure cooker basically blows, and then we're exploding at this other person and saying, you know, you take me for granted, or you never understand me, or you're an unkind person, and the other person looks at us bewildered, saying, why didn't you just say no? You could have said no like two years ago. And I think that's what you're getting at, that in some ways our inability to say no in small circumstances prompts us then to explode into a gigantic no in a way that's also inappropriate.



Vanessa Patrick: I think that happens mostly with me as a parent. You know, you want to be a good mom, so you say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then becomes so much and you're so tired, and then sometimes you just explode.



Shankar Vedantam: How do we say no in a way that preserves relationships and protects our reputation? When we come back, the art and signs of empowered refusals. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. At the University of Houston, Vanessa Patrick studies why we say yes when we want to say no, and how to align what we do with what we want to do. She's the author of the book, The Power of Saying No, the new science of how to say no that puts you in charge of your life. Vanessa, I understand that you have a book on your shelf in your office, the title of which you try to keep in your line of sight when you're on the phone or looking up from your computer. What is this book?



Vanessa Patrick: So it is a book called Hell Yes, Two Little Words for a Simpler Happier Life. The important takeaway from the book is that if it is not a hell yes, it is a hell no. And it's a very simple idea that you have to know what's a hell yes for you and say yes to those things and hell no to everything else.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that the first step in saying no well is deciding when to say it. And you say whenever we receive a request for our time and energy, we should engage in something that you call strategic postponement. What is strategic postponement, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: Strategic postponement is essentially this idea that we shouldn't make a decision in the heat of the moment. We are more likely when we are one on one with someone and they ask us in the moment to say yes. We are much more likely to say yes in those situations. And that is because we are in a hot state. So essentially strategic postponement would be postponing to the future when we are in a colder state to be able to make a decision with more information, having thought through it.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that a helpful tool here may be to develop personal policies. What are personal policies? I've heard of organizational policies and company policies. What are personal policies?



Vanessa Patrick: Personal policies are simple rules that we set up for ourselves that guide our actions and decisions. And these rules are based on who we are. They stem from our identity. They give voice to our values and priorities and preferences and beliefs. They essentially shape how we choose to live our lives. And if we come up with policies and rules that help us make these decisions, we have an infrastructure, we have a framework that gives us the ability to say no more effectively.



Shankar Vedantam: You said that the novelist Isabel Allende has a set of personal policies that help her focus on her writing. What are these policies, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: So if you think about Isabel Allende, she has spent a lot of time thinking about what value she brings to the world. And she has identified that the central contribution that she makes, despite the many, many things that she does, from making films to philanthropic engagements, etc. At the end of the day, everything stems from her writing, and she needs to make time for writing in order for her to do the other things. So she ruthlessly prioritizes her writing. And the way she does it is by having a start date every year to start a new writing project. So in 1981, she started writing a letter which converted into a book called House of Spirits. And that book started on the 8th of January. And so since then, every year on the 8th of January, she starts a new book. And she's got that discipline to say, 8th of January, all the other engagements have to go away. I'm just going to sit down and do my writing. And she has a very rigorous writing schedule. She writes every day for many hours. And that is kind of how she contributes to the world. More importantly, is that everyone knows that she is unavailable after the 8th of January. And so they don't ask her to do stuff either. And that is how you invoke a personal policy and put it into action. You have a policy which is your rule. I start on the 8th of January. You share that policy with people so that they know that that is your policy. And they don't ask you stuff that violates that policy.



Shankar Vedantam: Vanessa says that when people make requests of her, she divides them into two buckets. Things that are easy or things that are difficult for her. But then she also asks, does this request offer marginal benefit or substantial benefit to the other person? Things that are easy to do and very helpful to someone else, those should be automatic yeses. Things that are of trivial importance to the requester, those should be automatic no's, regardless of how much effort they involve. The trickiest requests have to do with things that are difficult for us to do, but are immensely meaningful to us and to the recipient. Many books and movies are about characters fulfilling such requests. Vanessa calls these the hero's journey asks.



Vanessa Patrick: These are asks that make life worthwhile and meaningful because we are able to bring our best selves to these tasks. They showcase our unique talent. They create value. These are things that we should be spending our time on. This is what builds reputation and grows relationships. So we should say yes and we should have space in our days to say yes to the hero's journey asks.



Shankar Vedantam: So in other words, someone says, do you want to come and volunteer in another country for two years working in difficult circumstances? And you say that would be an enormous ask on my time, but in fact, it would be very meaningful to do. That could be an example of something that gives your life meaning or let's say you're thinking about having a child and raising a child involves significant time and effort and sacrifice, but it's also profoundly meaningful. And what you're saying is, we need to decide on the things that are meaningful to us. And those are the domains where in fact, we should be willing to say yes to things that are in fact extraordinarily difficult and costly.



Vanessa Patrick: Yes, absolutely. It's so funny Shankar because people think because I wrote this book, I'm the queen of no and that I just go around saying no willy-nilly. And that is not at all the reality. It's much more that I'm extremely strategic and thoughtful about what I say yes to, what I commit to, and what I say no to. There are things I will not touch and then things I fully immerse myself in.



Shankar Vedantam: So we've been talking, Vanessa, about making the decision about when to say no. Once we've decided that no in fact is the correct answer, there is still the matter of how we can say no well. And you say that we should put our no in the form of something you call an empowered refusal. What is an empowered refusal?



Vanessa Patrick: An empowered refusal is a way of saying no that stems from your identity. So what I found in my research is that when you look inwards and ground your no based on who you are and the extent to which the no reflects your values, your authentic self, when you communicate a no from that place, you come across as much more determined and with greater conviction and are less likely to get pushback from other people.



Shankar Vedantam: So one way in which this empowered refusal can manifest itself is in the language we use to communicate our refusals. You recommend that we use the phrase, I don't, rather than the phrase, I can't. Why is this, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: When you say, I don't, you are signaling that this is who you are, that it stems from your identity, and hence gives your refusal much more power. It puts you in the driver's seat of your own life. It essentially says, I know that this is a no for me, and it's an unwavering stance. In contrast, and very commonly used, is to look for an excuse and say, I'm sorry, I can't. I can't very often begs the question, why not? And then you get into all the external reasons as to why you are unable to take this on. And it opens a discussion, and it invites negotiation. What I've shown in my research is that when you say, I don't, you shut that down. You essentially say, this is my way. This is what I believe. And people don't argue with who you are.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that it's also best to avoid giving excuses when we say no. What do you mean by this, and how do you operationalize this, Vanessa?



Vanessa Patrick: So we have learned that when we want to say no, we often lean on an excuse. I ran an experiment where people read a scenario that they were looking to borrow $1,500 from a friend, and their friend in different situations told them different things. In one situation where the friend invoked a personal policy, the friend essentially said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to loan you the money, which essentially said this is my policy about loaning money to friends. Compared to the excuse where the friend essentially said, I'm really sorry, I can't give you the money because I need to use that money that I'm saving up for graduate school. What I asked people was whether the refusal was effective. In both cases, the refusal was effective. In the sense people went away and said, okay, fine, I'm not getting the money. The critical thing I was looking at was whether 10 years from now, you need money again, would you go back and ask that friend for money? And as you might imagine, when somebody used the excuse, something that was temporary, something that was external to them, people said, yeah, I'll ask that friend, because presumably, they've paid for graduate school. When the person invoked a personal policy, people were less likely, significantly less likely to go back and ask them for money. So a personal policy essentially just conveys your stance on a matter and shuts the door, not only in the moment, but for the long run.



Shankar Vedantam: So beyond simply getting out of tasks that we'd rather not spend our time on, what I think I'm really hearing from you, Vanessa, is that the power to say no is central to carving out our own destiny, learning to say no is part of defining who we are and what we want out of life.



Vanessa Patrick: I absolutely agree. Absolutely. I think that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And so the things that we spend our time on, on a daily basis, adds up to how we've spent our lives. So I agree with you that saying no is very much about creating the destiny that we want for ourselves.



Shankar Vedantam: Vanessa Patrick is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Houston. She's the author of the book, The Power of Saying No, The New Science of How to Say No, that puts you in charge of your life. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



Vanessa Patrick: Thank you, Shankar. This was so much fun.



Shankar Vedantam: If you have follow-up questions for Vanessa Patrick that you'd be willing to share with members of the Hidden Brain audience, please find a quiet space, record a voice memo on your phone, and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty, and please use the subject line saying no. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media, our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For more Hidden Brain, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. It's where you'll find interviews and ideas that you won't find anywhere else, plus your membership is a great way to support our work. You can try Hidden Brain Plus with a free 7-day trial by going to support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.