Goal setting: How to say 'no' to others to say 'yes' to your goals.

Image: ABC. By Claudine Ryan for ABC. 

Most of us don’t have oodles of spare time idly waiting to be put to good use. So finding time to focus on your goals will likely involve some hard choices about what to prioritise.

Of all the things you need to do today, “you should be asking yourself which ones are going to make a real difference and which can go on the backburner,” says clinical and health psychologist Dr Bob Montgomery.

“A really important part of sticking to your goals is sticking to the ones that are really going to make a difference and not giving into the ones that might be easy or appealing or entertaining, but aren’t going to do as much good.”

That often means turning down tasks, activities and demands from others – a challenge many of us find difficult.

It’s a skill Kirra Rankin had to learn when she decided to re-evaluate her life and start prioritising the things that were important after a bout of illness several years ago.

The exercise physiologist, who has several businesses and a child under one, said she is now very comfortable saying “no”.

“It’s easy for you to say ‘no’ if you have a structure and you know where you are headed,” she said.

“You need to step back… so you have a bit of clarity and some time and space and so you can see ‘is this the right path I am taking?’,” she said.

Not only has Ms Rankin found she is now able to give her work, health and family the attention they need, it also means she can be more generous with her time.

“I have so much more time in my life now… Those kinds of things that are helping someone or friends who need a hand… I [now] like to say ‘yes’ to those kinds of things.”

But for Ms Rankin, getting to this point meant breaking the habit of being a people pleaser and initially feeling some guilt when she put things that mattered first.

“The more you say ‘no’ and the more you set yourself up for success, the easier it is to say ‘no’. It’s just so easy now, and you don’t have any guilt at all because it’s the best thing for your family and yourself.”

At the top of the list of things Ms Rankin says ‘no’ to are:

• pointless meetings (meetings about a meeting);
• negative people who do not enhance your life at all;
• obligations you only commit to because you have been committed to them for a long time;
• big social events that don’t really allow you to catch-up with anyone.

Obviously we’ll all have a different ‘no’ list (although who would say ‘yes’ to a meeting about a meeting?).

But most of us would welcome the extra time we gain by not doing things that don’t support our values or take us closer to meeting our goals.

“That’s another two hours of your day that you could be spending on something that’s actually useful or just on yourself,” Ms Rankin said.

‘It’s not selfish’

Self care is not selfish. It’s how you meet your obligations to all the people who might count on you.

One myth Dr Montgomery would like to dispel is that saying ‘no’ to others means you are selfish.

“Self care is not selfish. It’s how you meet your obligations to all the people who might count on you,” he said. “It’s not only not selfish; it’s doing the right thing by all the other people in your life.

“Every now and then you have to say ‘no’ to someone – ‘I can’t do that this week’ or ‘I can’t do that this year, I’m already booked out’. You owe it to yourself to say no to impossible or unreasonable requests.”

However, many of us struggle in large part because we’ve trained ourselves to be submissive, Dr Montgomery said.

“We confuse [saying ‘yes’] with being polite. We are often frightened by how other people will react if we don’t meet their requests.”

Ms Rankin agreed you could say ‘no’ and still be polite.

Her tip was to make sure your response avoided ambiguity.

“You just have to straight up say ‘no, I can’t’, ‘sorry I can’t’ and that’s it. That way there is no confusing the situation, ‘no’ is ‘no’.”

This post originally appeared on ABC News.