Folks, I found the book that I have been looking for my whole adult life—"The Book of NO: 250 Ways to Say It—and Mean It—and Stop People Pleasing Forever" by Susan Newman, Ph. D. Don’t come to the library looking for it however. It is on permanent check out to me alone---no one else! After all, I wouldn’t want everyone else to learn the secrets in this book, would I? If I let all the rest of the world in on this book, then everyone else would know how to say NO and I would have to say YES again. Honest to gosh, can you believe it, we actually have a book, which will teach suckers like me how to say NO. I have died and gone to heaven.

To begin, the YES person must learn the basics of NO. There are five basic steps.

1. Make a list of your yeses over the period of a week.
2. Pay attention to how you parcel out your time.
3. Get your priorities straight.
4. Know your limits—start to define them if you don’t know what they are.
5. Give control to others to ease your responsibilities.

NO is a learned skill. I am already a pro at YES, but I am trainable.

Chapters include saying NO with friends, with family, at work, and with really difficult people. Chapters are set up with a Scenario, for example at work:

The Scenario: "The printer’s out of ink!"

What’s going on here: "You’ve been pegged as the office techie, and the staff, from the president on down, seeks you out. But where is the polite, "I’m in a bind. Can you please help me?"

Response: "I can’t do it this minute, but as soon as I’m free I’ll show you how so you can do it yourself in the future"

Alert: "Don’t assume that what a colleague is doing is more urgent than your work."

That’s the general idea. Seriously, this is a wonderful book for those of us (and there are many of us) that have trouble with the word NO. Now that I have let the cat out of the bag, I will probably need to buy many more copies of this book for the library.

Oh, by the way, here’s an example from real life.

Let’s say that you are being interviewed for a job—maybe say as a Library Director. Just suppose one of the questions is, "How would you feel about leading a Library Building Project?"

The incorrect answer is, "I would love to. I think it sounds like fun."

The correct answer is NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Have a good week!

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