It doesn't have to be you

If you have triplets, by all means, be choosy about what else you take on. You’ve got your hands full, and there’s no getting out of it. (Galt Museum and Archives)

In the olden days when I used to develop programming for Eclectic Music, I asked one of my best summer camp teachers to help me design the following year’s summer camp offerings.

As good as he was at leading summer camp, he didn’t really like doing it. He was ready to move on, but hadn’t really made the identity shift yet. So when we would come up with an idea, I would sense reluctance from him. I’d say, “It doesn’t have to be you who does it! You don’t actually have to lead the camp.”

“Oh yeah,” he’d say, and brighten up. He was ready to be enthusiastic about our ideas and think of more of them as long as he didn’t have to be the one to manage their development or deliver the service. Exploring possibilities was no fun if he believed he was committing his own time and energy.

When people struggle to delegate—and so, so many of us struggle to delegate—they often work around this weakness by doing everything themselves. At a certain point, they get fed up and overloaded. They still don’t delegate, though—they just start saying no. Instead of taking advantage of a new opportunity, they shut it down. Their growing business gets pruned back like one of those crape myrtles that ends up looking like a fork.

It’s always okay to say no. It’s good to be more selective over time about the projects we take on. However, ideally, we are turning down work and opportunities out of a sense of abundance, not scarcity. When we’re afraid that we’re going to be trapped or overloaded by projects we don’t want, we don’t make good choices. We react out of panic instead of responding thoughtfully.

Often, this happens when we are short on time or energy. Ironically, we might also be short on money if we’re not charging enough for our expertise. In such a situation, a potentially great lead seems like just another exhausting request for our limited resources. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything in it for us.

When you think about it, though, it’s really an amazing thing when we get a call from someone who says, “My friend told me that you would be the perfect person to help me.” It’s not an obligation, it’s an invitation. It could be a win-win if you had the capacity for it. And if you had someone to help you—someone to help expand your capacity to give this person what they’re looking for—it could be a win-win-win.

I did hit a point, in my music teaching career, when I felt a pang of unease when I’d receive a new inquiry. I already had too many students, but I didn’t want to say no to paying work. That pang went away when I brought new music teachers into my neighborhood. Instead of saying yes and burning out, or saying, “Nope, I can’t take you on right now” and giving up, I could say, “Yes! I have a great teacher for you.”

I’m not going to pretend that was simple—it was actually a huge hassle and I could have gone about it in a much better way—but over a decade later, I am grateful that I moved toward growth instead of running away from it. In the long run, it was good for me, for the students and their families, and for the teachers, too.

When someone offers us something of value to do something we used to enjoy doing, and instead of being pleased, we inwardly groan, there’s a lot of information in that “ugh.” We’ve discovered that we’ve grown.

We don’t have to shrink to pretend to be who we were and say yes out of duty. We can say no, but we don’t have to do that, either. We can find someone else to do the thing we don’t want to do, learn the new skills of making a referral or delegating, and maybe create that triple win.

When you say yes, you still don’t have to be the one to do the thing. There are all kinds of other creative solutions available that allow you to live life and do your work the way you want. It’s sometimes fun to move into “How?” instead of just “No.” No matter what, you get to choose—and sometimes, knowing that we can refuse gives us just enough freedom to be open to something new.