Hi Reader,
For much of my life, I was the yes person.
I was the busy, competent one who somehow always managed to get it all done. If someone needed help with something, I said yes. If there was a committee that needed another person, I said yes. If someone asked me to take on one more thing at work, help with something at school, or squeeze something into an already full week, chances were pretty good that "Sure" would come out of my mouth before I'd given it much thought.
The interesting thing is that most of the time, I could get it all done.
I would rearrange things, move something to another day, stay up a little later, or find some other way to make it work. Inevitably, the things that got moved were the things that belonged to me. Sleep was negotiable. My treasured weekly yoga class could be skipped. Quiet time, reading, exercise, or an afternoon with nothing planned could easily be sacrificed because someone else needed something.
Then, once the day settled and I had a chance to think, I'd find myself wondering: what was I thinking when I said yes to this?
The answer, of course, was that I hadn't really been thinking at all. Saying yes had become automatic.
Over time, something else began creeping in alongside all that competence: resentment. I was still doing everything I'd agreed to do, but I wasn't always feeling particularly generous about it.
I’ve come to think of resentment as one of the clearest signals that my energy has been flowing outward without enough replenishment. It's the system telling you the exchange is no longer sustainable. For years I had been reading that signal as a character flaw, something to push through and manage better, rather than as information worth listening to.
Then came the school bazaar.
One weekend I was scheduled to volunteer at my kids' school bazaar. One of my kids got sick, so I backed out at the last minute to stay home and take care of them. It wasn't ideal, but sick kids have a way of rearranging even the best-laid plans.
The following week I received an email from the school requesting a mandatory $150 donation because I had failed to fulfill my obligation to the school community.
My jaw dropped.
I had volunteered multiple times that semester, as I had many times before, and yet somehow none of that seemed to matter.
I was angry. I was hurt. And somewhere underneath both of those feelings was a realization that stopped me in my tracks.
There would never be enough.
I could keep saying yes, keep rearranging my life, keep giving more time and doing one more thing, and there would always be another request waiting.
That email became a line in the sand for me.
Eventually I realized the school wasn't responsible for all the times I had said yes. I was. No one had forced me to automatically put my own time at the bottom of the list. I had developed that pattern over years of being helpful, capable, responsible, and very good at figuring things out.
Changing that pattern was slow work. It didn't shift all at once, and there were plenty of moments when the old response surfaced before I'd had a chance to notice it. One of the first things I did was give myself a 24-hour cooling-off period before agreeing to almost any request. Instead of automatically saying yes, I started saying: let me check and get back to you.
It sounds ridiculously simple, but those 24 hours changed something important. They gave me space to choose.
How Much of Our Day Is Automatic?
We tend to think we're consciously deciding our way through the day, but much of what we do is shaped by habits and responses we've repeated so often that they require very little conscious thought. That's useful when you're brushing your teeth or driving a familiar route. It becomes more complicated when the automatic response is agreeing to something you don't actually want to do.
For me, the request had become the cue and yes had become the well-practiced response.
There were plenty of reasons behind it. I wanted to be helpful. I didn't want to disappoint anyone. Being the person who could handle things had become part of my identity. There were expectations and old roles mixed in there too, along with the simple fact that I'd been responding this way for so long that it felt normal.
The 24-hour rule interrupted that sequence.
It created a small space between someone asking and me answering, and that space gave me an opportunity to notice what was actually happening.
I began paying attention to something else too. My body often knew my answer before my mind admitted it.
There might be a tiny hesitation, a tightening in my stomach, a held breath, or that subtle feeling of heaviness that arrived the moment someone made a request. Sometimes my mind would immediately begin rearranging my schedule, figuring out how to make something work before I'd even stopped to ask myself whether I wanted to do it.
I've come to recognize these sensations as one of the ways the energy body communicates: through sensation, weight, constriction, or a held breath. My system had been sending these signals all along. I just hadn't been listening early enough, or taking them seriously when I did hear them.
This Is What Conscious Living Looks Like
This is one of the simplest ways I think about conscious living.
We begin to notice the space between what happens and how we automatically respond to it. Inside that space, we have a little more choice.
Our minds, bodies, and energy fields are communicating with us all day long. The challenge is that we've become so accustomed to moving quickly from one thing to the next that we often don't hear the message until much later, when we're exhausted, irritated, resentful, or wondering why on earth we agreed to something in the first place.
Awareness allows us to hear the message sooner.
And awareness doesn't mean the answer always becomes no.
I still say yes to plenty of things. Sometimes I say yes when it would be much easier or more convenient to say no because the person, experience, or commitment matters to me. Sometimes I willingly rearrange my schedule or give up some of my time because I've decided that is exactly where I want to put my energy.
The difference is that these days I'm much more likely to know why I'm saying yes.
That, to me, is the important part.
Conscious living isn't about constructing a perfect life in which we always make the right decision. It's learning to notice when habit, expectation, an old role, or someone else's needs have made the decision for us before we've had an opportunity to make it ourselves.
Try This for One Day
For one day, experiment with simply noticing your automatic yeses.
You don't have to change them. You don't need to suddenly become better at setting boundaries or turn down every request that comes your way. This isn't about judging whether your yes was right or wrong.
Just notice what happens in the few seconds before you respond.
Does your body tighten somewhere? Do you hold your breath? Is there a tiny hesitation that you quickly override? Does your mind immediately start rearranging your schedule before you've even decided whether you want to do it?
And perhaps most importantly, notice whether you actually make a choice.
At the end of the day, sit with this question: where in my life am I responding automatically rather than choosing?
That $150 email from the school bazaar irritated the heck out of me at the time. In retrospect it gave me something valuable. It made a pattern I'd been living for years visible to me.
And once we can see a pattern, we have a choice about whether we want to keep living it.
That's conscious living.
What have you caught yourself automatically saying yes to lately? Hit reply and tell me. I have a feeling I'm not the only recovering automatic yes-person around here.