Hey You’ll, yup I know it’s been a minute! No lives, no blog posts, and maybe this post will clarify that.
A few weeks ago, I do what I do every quarter, got my favorite bottle of wine, prepared a charcuterie board, and arranged for everyone to be out of the house for the next three hours. It was recalibration and reassessment time. I put my phone on D-N-D, shut down my laptops, lit some candles, and began to think. How did this year go Iyandra?
What were the highs? What were the lows? How did you accomplish such highs? And what circumstances precipitated such lows? What lessons did I learn? Where did I repeat mistakes I should not have? How should I characterize this year? 2021?
And the theme was loud and clear: 2021 was a NO year! And man was it gratifying! Okay I know you’re looking at the screen with that smirk, thinking “like WHAT Iyandra?”, how could being a NO year be gratifying? Take the blank stares off your face girl! Don’t laugh at me, too quickly! Don’t close the laptop, hear me out chica.
You remember when Shonda told all of us to get our acts together and say YES. I read the book, and I am sure you read it too – you know the book I am talking about, the book that was on everyone’s 2016 reading list: Shonda Rimes “The Year of Yes: the book that taught us all to move the needle forward by just saying Yes, even when we don’t feel like it, or when we don’t want to do it. Shonda wrote about how she forced herself out of the house and onto the stage; when she learned to explore, empower, applaud, and love her truest self: Yes.
Now I love me some Shonda Rimes, I remember after reading that book in 2016, I said Yes to EVERYTHING! You want me to work this upcoming Saturday on a project: YES! You want me to speak at this seminar about international regulatory developments: YES! You want me to contribute a chapter to a book on global money laundering: YES! You want me to come over to your house and help you decorate: YES! You want me to be on the PTA fundraising committee: YES! You want introverted me to come to a cocktail reception/network mixer and have superficial/fake talk with people and pretend that these people actually give a damn about me, YES! And man was that YES hard!
But let’s be real, Shonda was a great boost, but I feel like my entire life I had been saying YES to everyone, everything; after all I don’t want to miss out right. I was doing anything and everything, climbing up the ladder steadily and aggressively, building relationships, writing chapters, and speaking all over the world. And I thought I was doing it all right, doing the things that made me happy, and doing the things that did not make me happy. After all, it comes with the territory right?
I’ve always felt like I was moving through life like a hurricane, a whirlwind, never taking the time to reflect, assess, recalibrate, to prioritize on the things and people that were essential; just wanting and craving more, more, more. As soon as I accomplished a goal, I never took the time to celebrate or even consider if this was a goal that was aligned with the vision I had for my life. It was just about doing as much as possible and always moving, moving, moving. Is your head swinging yet?
Don’t get me wrong, I discovered peace, meditation, and essentialism years ago but I often found that despite improving my practices and my focus on presence, I was always insisting that I partake in everything and that I wanted to be everything to everyone, do everything for everyone, and more.
And then January 2021 happened. I found myself debilitated by illness and bedridden for 3 weeks, and the first month of the year had not even passed yet, just do it 2021, start with a bang! Everything changed for me. I was forced to rest. I found myself unable to move any part of my body and in some of those moments when I was in excruciating pain, I thought about how I wanted the pain so badly to go away, I would be okay if God saw fit for me to leave in that moment. In fact, there were times when I felt I was in such a transient state, it (that it, being death) was imminent. If anything can make you reflect about life, it’s seeing your life pass you by. It often takes such a transformational moment in one’s life to realize and truly appreciate just how short life is: I started reflecting on whether my short time on this earth was enough, whether I had lived my true purpose, whether I had focused on the big things that matter: people, family, community, society, charity.
Coming out of such a tough experience had me thinking. I realized I was saying YES to so many things, that the opportunity cost of those YESes were NOs to things, hobbies, activities, and the people that I valued so much. Having clarity of thought, when my life came to standstill, also made me assess my ambition, my drive, my motivation. I now understood that this drive, this rush may not have been truly fulfilling but may have been actually pushing away the very things I wanted: to be and to feel unconditionally loved, to be and to feel at peace, to be and to feel total bliss without condition. I started to understand that the desire/urge I had to do, to become, to achieve was so strong that often it was as if I was communicating subconsciously to the Universe, “I want this, I want this, I want this” that I was sabotaging my own damn self because the Universe in feeling those vibrations, was hearing from me “I don’t have it, I don’t have it, I don’t have it.” Oh shit. The Universe was hearing from me “I don’t have it, I don’t have it, I don’t have it.”
I started thinking if all the things I did mattered, did they matter to me? Were my YESes seen through the impact I wanted to live in the world? Did I tell Zahra everything I wanted to tell her? What had all the YESes done for me? In this moment? As I prepare to leave this Earth, have my YESes been enough? Have my YESes prepared me to leave it all on this earth, and leave my last ounce of energy in this bed?
It was in these moments of agony and reflection, I realized there was never and could never be POWER in a YES, but the real POWER could only be in the NO:
Am I prepared to forego “X, Y ,and Z” to focus on something that is more meaningful or someone that is more important to me in this moment? If not, NO.
Is the time and energy commitment inherent in accepting this task equivalent to the joy and passion I will receive? If not, No apologies, NO.
Will this thing excite me? If not, NOPE!
Will this help nourish me? I didn’t think so, PUT MY X ON THE NO!
Is this the priority in this season? Well then, hell to the NO! See you next season!
Is there a task that I can do that would be more purposeful than this task? I had to go through this process of inquiry, every single request, every single time.
And if I couldn’t satisfy myself that the opportunity cost was outweighed by the benefits from a task, then the answer had to be NO.
And girl, NO is a complete sentence. It shouldn’t be accompanied with an apology. NO is NO.
Here I was, 36 years old ready leave this earth, and my YESes hadnt given me the answers; my NOs were the answer.
I started saying NO to things I would have previously said yes to, and those NOs re-directed me to a path of profound fulfillment.
I started feeling better. And if you have seen me in the past several months, you know homegirl got her energy back. Calls started happening again, emails started flooding in, life went back to normal. And I made the conscious decision to say every step of the way when it warranted: NO.
I leaned out (and yep, I love you Sheryl Sandberg, and I loved Lean In, but that aint what we doing over here no mo! Well not really, let me explain 🙂 With a pause, with leaning out, my entire life started shifting. In leaning out, I leaned into introspection and self-analysis (not comparison), I leaned out of money-driven work and leaned into values-based and purpose-filled work (not check the box work). I leaned out of superficial and surface level relationships, and in doing so, I leaned into-deep and meaningful connections and relationships. I leaned out of wanting to be seen, to be loved, to be heard; and in doing so, I leaned into knowing that I am worthy of being seen, loved, and heard. I made some incredibly tough decisions, moving away from things that I thought I had wanted before, and trusted God with the path that I saw myself on, and surrendering to His will every step of the way, even when I didn’t fully understand or appreciate how I would get from one step to another. This summer, a few months after I made a conscious decision to lean out, I started getting the opportunities I truly wanted yet having the time in my schedule to fulfill other passions as well. I increased my income this summer while at the same time reducing my workload, work responsibilities, and work hours. I started working on projects I loved, and those I liked, I opted to put them in the “Future pile” reckoning I didn’t “love” them but could “love” them in the future: code for they weren’t priority in this season.
The minute I stopped chasing, everything I was always seeking started flowing into my life. It was as if the Universe adjusted to my vibrations. Every single NO led me closer to a YES. The things that weren’t meant for me missed me, and those things that missed me, I am so confident that they were not meant for me. I said NO to an amazing opportunity to speak globally because the timing was not right in this season. I said NO to a request from my boss to travel to one of my favorite cities on his private jet (imagine how hard this was! I am always down for travel and especially private). I said NO to countless events, and in return sat down in my closet and meditated and journaled. I said NO very recently to a launch of a project we had planned for this past Thanksgiving: the project is completed, and we’re all ready to go, but I told my marketing team: I want to use this next several weeks to spend time with my daughter and I don’t want her schedule inundated with interviews every day as it was last year. So taking a huge risk, we’ve decided to push this project off to 2022 because right now, we need each other, we love spending time together, and she is growing quickly every single day, and for me time is more valuable than money.
2021 taught me the power of NO. In saying NO, I have made the conscious decision to say YES to happiness, to purpose, to absolute surrender. In saying NO, I have said YES to life. What are you saying No to?
