Keeping Boundaries by Saying Yes Slowly
Last week, I co-facilitated a workshop on managing energy at work, and the participants’ most cited strategy for improving how they manage energy was to set boundaries. That’s a reasonable strategy, but the hard part of setting boundaries is keeping them.
For many, it is difficult to hold fast to boundaries because, in the moment, that requires saying No to others, which feels like a relationship-diminishing move. Ironically, avoiding the upfront No can lead to making commitments beyond your capacity to deliver, which increases the odds that you will violate the agreement—a far more harmful moment for any relationship.
One of my favorite frameworks for reversing this dynamic is “saying yes slowly” to others’ requests, which comes from Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit. He describes the approach this way:
“What gets us in trouble is how quickly we commit, without fully understanding what we’re getting ourselves into or even why we’re being asked. Saying Yes more slowly means being willing to stay curious before committing. Which means asking more questions:
Why are you asking me?
Whom else have you asked?
When you say this is urgent, what do you mean?
According to what standard does this need to be completed? By when?
If I couldn’t do all of this, but could do just a part, what part would you have me do?
What do you want me to take off my plate so I can do this?”
Those questions can turn the boundary-keeping moment from negative to positive and from questioning to jointly designing success. Making that turn, however, is easier when you start with a trust-building statement of aligned intent. Essentially, I am on your side, and what’s important to you is important to me. Now, let’s discuss what it will take to deliver an outcome that meets your needs.
That discussion may yield a version of No or Not right now—e.g., Now that we’ve talked about it, I agree this new request is not as valuable as the other things you’re working on.—but the relationship context of that solution is different. It’s like when you ask for a substitution at a finicky restaurant. The server could immediately say no, or they could say, “Let me talk to the chef and see what’s possible.” The final answer may be the same—no substitutions—but you’d be left feeling like the server is on your side.