When To Say NO?

Take the Good in Life and Reject the Rest

When was the last time you watched a bee as it busily went from flower to flower collecting the nectar and pollen that would become the life-saving energy source for the larvae back at the hive? While some bees are happy to collect pollen from many different plants and flowers, others specialise in only collecting from individual species. The honey produced in the hives of these specialist bees is highly sought after for its unique qualities and flavours.

In our life choices, we can be like the specialist honeybee, taking the right things offered to us in life, and rejecting the rest that will potentially harm us, or our quality of life. Learning to say no is a powerful tool that many of us rarely if ever use. There is nothing wrong with the pollen and nectar than the specialist bees reject. They have the potential to produce delicious honey, for the honeybees that are searching for a particular type of pollen; they represent imperfections and time-wasting activity.

Learning to reject or say no to what will hurt or harm us in the long term is the key to reducing the amount of stress we carry each day and to feeling better about ourselves, but also the choices we make. As we learn to reject the things that will harm us, we are more inclined to accept the things that will help us. Perhaps more importantly, we can learn to tell the difference between the two.

How can you tell the difference between what to accept and what to reject to help you stay stress-free? Most of us know what is going to cause us distress. These things never are accepted and must be rejected from our life, but what of those things that will cause us stress but not distress? Can we trust our instincts with them?

Growing through stress is not a bad thing, and sometimes we do need to move outside of our comfort zone to achieve progress in our life. The key to knowing what will produce good stress and what will produce harmful stress is to have a life plan and only accepting those things that contribute to our life plan. Saying no to other things helps keep us focused on our goals and thinking positively about our life experiences.