BE POLITE, BUT HONEST
I get so many requests, you guys. You can’t even imagine the amount of emails asking for mentorship, advice, nonprofit support, and product endorsements flooding my inbox on the regular. For years and years I agreed to every coffee date, every request to “pick my brain,” and every charity opportunity that came my way, and I was drowning in it. I didn’t know how to say no, because I felt a responsibility to give back and show up for others. Then I had an epiphany: every time I gave someone an hour, I was taking an hour away from my kids. Every time I gave someone an hour, that was less energy I had to devote to my marriage. Every yes to someone else was a no to me and my list of priorities. So I started being totally honest, and I did it in the most polite way possible. I told everyone who requested time that I couldn’t commit to anything additionally this season because it would take time away from my family. Seriously, who is going to argue with you or be mad at you for that? Nobody. I’ve never once had someone push back on this, but I have had many women write back and tell me they’d never considered that perspective. A yes to their agenda is a no to yours. Be honest about what you can commit to and do it politely.
BE FIRM
This almost plays into the idea of only touching something once, because if you don’t do this effectively, you’ll have someone reach out again and again, which is a waste of both your time and theirs. Be firm with others in a way that doesn’t leave it open-ended, unless you’d truly like to revisit the opportunity later. Also, be firm with yourself. You’ve made the commitment to you and your goals, and it’s important that you stick to your guns. Learn to say no and to say no effectively.
PART III
SKILLS TO ACQUIRE
skill1
skil
noun
1. the ability to do something well; expertise.
Please note, in this section we’ll be talking about skills and not talents. These are not unique and special abilities you were born with; they are learned abilities. Developing a new skill set or growing in a certain area is something accomplished with focus and time and hard work. So, good news! Even if these aren’t things you currently possess in your arsenal, you’re still entirely capable of making them yours. No excuses, remember? We let go of those in part 1.
SKILL 1:
PLANNING
The first time Dave and I went to Amsterdam, we got lost.
We were a young married couple, and neither of us had ever traveled to Europe before. We made all the classic mistakes: we packed too many countries into too few days, we went to every tourist location the world has ever known, we lived in fear of the “gypsies” who might steal our worldly possessions and so, though it pains me to admit it to you, we wore our passports and money under our clothes in special Velcro pouches created specifically for this purpose. Bless.
On that trip we went to London and later explored Rome and Florence and got trapped in Venice during an Italian transportation strike. But before that happened, there was Amsterdam.
I will be fully transparent. We added Amsterdam to the list because the child-nerds that we were thought it would be cool to go to a country where you could get a cup of coffee and legal marijuana at the same establishment. Did either of us smoke marijuana or even eat it inside brownies? No. Which was why it felt illicit enough to visit an entire country for just this purpose. In our defense, this was circa 2005, so marijuana wasn’t easily available like it is today. Also, we were idiots. But back to Amsterdam.
We flew from London to Amsterdam on Ryanair—basically an aerodynamic cardboard box with all the luxury amenities of a medieval oubliette—but on our way in to land, the plane reared us back up into the sky. The fog was too thick, apparently, and we had to be rerouted. If you’re young, you’ll have to imagine a time before smartphones existed—the rest of us still have nightmares about those days, but we were in the thick of it. We were rerouted to—wait for it—an entirely different country! I honestly don’t know how this is possible, but it’s true. Rather than landing in Amsterdam, we landed in Frankfurt. Germany.
Y’all, I did not have a German translation book. I did not have Lonely Planet’s guide to Germany with all the helpful little English phrases, because I never intended to go there. We were so stinking confused.
Somehow, through many questions and even more pantomiming, we gathered that we’d now be getting on a bus. An honest-to-goodness bus that would then drive us into Amsterdam. The bus was crammed to the gills with Europeans in giant parkas to contend with the winter temps. It smelled like my minivan after a half-full bottle has been allowed to bake inside it undetected in the Texas heat—sour and wrong. We were nauseated and not entirely positive that this was really where we were supposed to be. Next came the train. In retrospect, I’m not even sure how we made it this far. Maybe we just blindly followed the other people on the airplane/bus right onto that train, but one way or another we were finally on our way to Amsterdam. When we arrived in the city, we walked out of the train station with no clue how to get to our hotel. We had a printout of the name and the address, and we just sort of awkwardly asked one person after another.
“Do you know how to get to this hotel?” That person didn’t speak English. We tried another.
“Excuse me, do you know how to get to this hotel?” Another confused person who couldn’t answer us.
Person after person either didn’t understand what we were asking or answered us in a language we couldn’t decipher. We flagged down a taxi and showed him the address.
“Amsterdam,” he told us.
“Yes! Yes, sir. Amsterdam! Can you take us?” We were exhausted and at this point had been asking people (while towing our suitcases behind us) for nearly an hour.
“Amsterdam,” he said again, and when we just looked at him, confused, he drove off.
We started asking every person we passed until finally, blessedly, we found a man who spoke broken English.
“Sir, do you know how to get to this hotel?” I pointed emphatically at the address on my now wrinkled and dirty paper.
He looked at the paper, then back at us, then at the paper again. “Yes. Is Amsterdam.”
“Yes, we know.” I pointed to the streets around me. “Which direction? How do we get there?”
“Is Amsterdam,” he said again.
I wanted to scream or cry, and he must have sensed my growing distress, because he stiltedly fought his way through his response.
“Hotel is Amsterdam,” he told us. “You are here.”
Horror started to dawn on me. “Where is here?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Not Amsterdam.”
You guys, we weren’t even in the right city.
We were still two hours away from it. Likely we were supposed to get on another train to take us there, but we didn’t know. We were sheep; we followed the crowd. What was supposed to be a two-hour flight ended up being an entire day of planes, trains, and automobiles, and we didn’t get to the hotel until it was too late to do anything. I’m sure God was trying to keep me from ingesting illicit baked goods on foreign soil, but the point is still the same.