Related articles - No means no when life is full
I’m sitting at my desk at home today feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s Wednesday, the day I set aside to work at home. The days that I spend at the church are usually fully booked for several days ahead, and like most people, are interjected by many telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and letters; so I’ve tried to carefully guard this one day to think, pray, write and prepare for upcoming speaking engagements. This week is a particularly busy one for me and is pressing against the boundaries that I have set for my emotional health.
It’s now before ten a.m. and I have answered six phone calls from people asking for my help or counsel. Two of them were desperate and the callers had to see me right away, although I should not have, I said “yes!”
Now I’m feeling the stress of time restraints, energy dissipation and emotional overload. The very thing I’m planning on advising others in my column, I’m failing at. My advice to others is sound: “Mark boundaries for yourself! Don’t let others set your agenda! Keep white spaces in your calendar! And for goodness sake, learn to say NO! “It’s good advice. Listen and learn. As an experiment, take a 12 ounce clear glass and fill it with water. Now add one spoonful of salt to the water and stir. When you do that you’ll notice that the salt is absorbed into the liquid.
The same thing will happen if you add a second or third teaspoon of salt; but when you add the fourth spoonful and stir, you’ll see that the salt is no longer absorbed. Why? Because the solution is full. It has reached saturation point and can absorb no more – thus the added salt will simply sit on the bottom of the glass.
We can easily understand how that principle translates into our financial world. If we have $1,000 income per month and continuously spend $1,200 per month, our budget is going to crash relatively soon. The solution is simply to either earn more money or to spend less. That makes sense. Now apply the lesson to our time. We all have 24 hours a day and seven days a week given to us. First we calculate how many hours we require for restorative rest and sleep; then add in the necessary hours for eating, personal grooming, family relationships, travel, work and play.
As we look at our schedules we can easily calculate the white spaces in which we can handle the serendipitous crises and incidentals of life. But the bottom line is that there is a limit to what we can absorb into our day’s schedules. If we do not learn to say “no”, some important things, like family time, sleep and fun will be pressed out of the picture and our lives will become dry, stress filled, unfulfilling and less productive. Over the next four weeks I’ll write about setting healthy boundaries to protect our emotional and physical energy, time and finances; but right now I have to make a couple of phone calls and apologetically cancel a couple of appointments.
