I recently completed a 24 hour challenge of walking around the Panorama in Tallai, Gold Coast. The walk gets to a height of about 400 metres at its peak (1200 feet) and we do that in an 8.8 kilometre lap, which might not sound hard, but we did that for 24 hours straight in order to raise money for PTSD resurrected, a local Gold Coast charity that helps return servicemen and first responders who struggle with PTSD.
So there were about 20 to 30 of us out there all doing different numbers of laps, but the idea was to just keep going all day for 24 hours. It was hectic, but we did it.
So what lead me to here?
Stop saying no
There’s so much out there saying we’ve got to learn to say no. And whilst I understand the people who are saying that they’re coming from a good place. I think what we’ve got to do is learn to say yes more often. I think there’s very few people who deserve the right to say no more often.
For the rest of us we’ve got to say yes! We’ve got to say yes to life! That’s what we’ve got to do. Forget about this no business, you know, life begins after saying yes, that’s what I believe.
The problem with saying no
The Problem with saying no all the time is you don’t take chances. You miss out on meeting great people. You don’t see the kindness of some people sometimes. You put yourself out there to help, and even if sometimes you get taken advantage of don’t care about that, have the spirit of, I just want to serve, and you have that spirit of serving. If someone does take a little bit of advantage of you, who cares?
You went in with a great heart to help somebody else, and you’ll be surprised when you go out and you say, I’m going to volunteer over there or I’m going to do this. The people that you meet, the communities that you get involved with. There’s just so many wonderful things that come from saying yes and putting yourself out there. Failure, all of a sudden is okay, because you continue trying to do stuff.
You continue trying to better yourself and only good comes from that. In my experience there’s only good that can come from saying yes. So my encouragement to you is say, yes! That’s my motto. That’s my catch cry is just say yes, say yes more often. Forget this learn to say no business. That’s with respect, that’s rubbish.
Saying yes is as easy as just saying yes.
It’s just an attitude shift to say “I’m going to experience more life. I’m going to get out there, I’m going to help more people, but I’m also going to make myself more productive.”
The interesting thing that’ll happen is the more you say yes, the more you get out there, you’ll all of a sudden become a more interesting person. You’ll start talking about the things you did on the weekend to your friends and all of a sudden you will become more interesting to people and your social group will grow.
And I say from my experience, you’ll just have a much better experience of life.
Life begins after yes.
Saying yes is the door to opportunity
As an employee, if you go that extra mile, that’ll be noticed. If you want to get that raise, if you want to get that promotion, you’re not going to get it by going “that’s not my job. I’m not going to do that. I don’t get paid to do that”. You’ve got to put yourself out there, go that extra mile and you’ll reap the rewards, you’ll reap the benefits of doing that.
How I help people to say yes more often
If you’re someone who struggles with saying yes, there are tools that I can help you with to overcome some of those fears that you might have.
What I’ve done with some of the people I’ve worked with is I’ll just go “hey, just come hang with me for a little bit. Let’s go and do some stuff. Let’s have some adventures.”
So, if you’re up for it, I encourage you to reach out and let’s do some adventures together.
Just say YES!
