It Took Me Until My Late 40s To Learn How To Say No!

Stop trying to please everyone, says author India Knight – there’s nothing wrong with simply pleasing yourself

I recently sent a truly liberating e-mail. Someone was asking me, again, to come and give a talk on a topic I know nothing about, at the other end of the country, at an inconvenient time of year, for free. Instead of doing what I normally do – saying yes out of politeness, resenting having said yes for weeks, feeling crosser and crosser as the moment approached, wondering desperately whether I could cancel at the last minute – I said... no.

I wrote wishing the person all the best with their project. But, I said, “This isn’t going to work out for us.” There was no point in pursuing me any longer: I couldn’t do it. I was too busy. I would always be too busy. I did wonder if I’d been rude as I pressed ‘Send’, but the reply to my e-mail thanked me for my candour and for not keeping her dangling with a “maybe”, which freed her up to approach someone else.

Saying no is incredibly freeing. I only really started doing it in my late forties: prior to that, for some reason, I felt I had to try to please everybody so that they would like me. In middle age, however, it suddenly occurred to me that there wasn’t actually anything wrong with pleasing myself, that I had enough friends and had stopped caring whether people liked me or not (I have menopause to thank for that one), and that nobody would mind that much – or indeed at all – if I turned things down every now and then.