As promised, here is the blog post that I alluded to in last month's post. This month I am talking about "It's Okay to Say No Way and/or Not Stay and Walk Away!" If you are like me and many other individuals who went into the teaching profession, you gravitated toward such a career because you enjoyed school and excelled at it as a student. In many cases our desire to please and our perseverance is what drove us to succeed in our studies. We wanted to please our teachers and our families by achieving academic success so we worked hard and stuck with it until we mastered the content presented to us. The desire to please and our ability to persevere, although helpful to us when we were students, can at times backfire on us when we become educators because it can lead us to say "YES" to too much and/or stay in unhealthy professional environments out of guilt and/or a fear of failure.

We have worked with countless clients who seek our services after they have become overwhelmed and burnt out in their current positions. As we progress through the career coaching process, we often find that our clients are struggling with establishing boundaries and saying "No" to unreasonable demands and unrealistic expectations. When we discover this, we give our clients the tools to:

1) Reflect on their past behavior (i.e. Identify "Yes Person" behavior)
2) Empower them to make changes to their behavior (i.e. Just Say No!)
3) Monitor their behavior on a consistent basis to ensure they do not fall back into past behavior patterns. (i.e. Avoid the"Yes Person" Slide....it's electric boogie woogie woogie)

Most importantly, we help them break free from the notions that they must please everyone and/or stay in a position that are no longer a good fit for them. We also encourage them to give themselves permission to Say No Way and/or Not Stay and Walk Away

Not to sound cliche but essentially we give our clients the tools, as Kenny Rogers most famously sang, to know: