I have a strong memory of when I would shove boiled Brussels sprouts into my mouth at the dinner table when I was young. I would politely excuse myself with the Brussels sprouts stored in my cheeks like a chipmunk, and go to the bathroom to spit out the entire mouthful down the toilet. In my house, you had to be a part of the clean plate club. No waste, eat what is on your plate. I was so afraid of my parents’ disapproval that I developed an entire operation around a small boiled vegetable rather than simply saying: I don’t want this.
Most of us learned that fear early. The fear that expressing a need, a preference, a limit, would cost us something. And so we swallowed what we didn’t want. It is one thing to be a child and do this for survival, but it is another to continue to do this as an adult. We have shifted this doing what we don’t want into something that looks a lot like politeness and generosity. We have learned that keeping the peace is easier than keeping our word to ourselves. We have learned to disappear inside of obligations we never fully chose for ourselves in order to accommodate others. And then one day we wake up tired, resentful, and wondering how we got here.
The answer, almost always, is the same. We didn’t put up a healthy boundary and say it out loud to ourselves or to others.
About a decade ago, another mother pulled me aside and told me, with unmistakable criticism in her voice, “Lisa, you truly are the Queen of No.” I took it as a compliment. And I still do.
Saying no is one of the most loving things a person can do, both for themselves and for the people around them. The no that says: I know what I have to give or not give, and I am going to protect it. The no that arrives not from fear but from faith in oneself to know with clarity and confidence what you need. And then, when we say yes because we mean it, the yes carries weight.
The word I find myself saying most often these days is simply: boundaries. I say it as a reminder to my husband, my children, my friends, and even acquaintances I barely know. Sometimes I say it in committee meetings when someone is quietly drowning in a job that was never theirs to begin with. I make a small square with my fingers. One word. Boundaries. Sometimes I even get phone calls out of the blue from friends asking for advice on a boundary they know they need. Because sometimes it helps if someone else gives us permission we know we already had.
There is a second phrase I come back to constantly: not yours.
Not yours to carry. Not yours to manage. Not yours to fix. You are responsible for your own feelings, your own choices, your own behavior. You are not responsible for managing other people’s emotions, solving problems that belong to someone else, or absorbing consequences you did not create. When we rush to rescue people from the results of their own choices, we do not help them, we rob them of the chance to grow. And we quietly increase our own burden while reinforcing the very dynamic we are trying to escape. Deep down, most people already know they are carrying too much. They know that the reason they are exhausted is not the volume of their life but the weight of what does not belong to them. The key in these moments of recognizing what is not yours is simply to listen.
There is a short video that has quietly made its way around the internet called “It’s Not About the Nail.” In it, a woman is expressing pain and frustration to her partner, who can clearly see a nail lodged in her forehead. He keeps trying to point it out, to fix it, to solve it. She keeps saying: I just need you to listen. It is less than two minutes long and it is one of the most accurate depictions of human connection. Because so often, the people in our lives do not need us to remove the nail. They need us to sit beside them and witness the discomfort without rushing to make it disappear. This is hard!
But why is it so hard to simply listen without fixing? Nedra Tawwab writes in Set Boundaries, Find Peace that many people confuse care with control, and we often say yes not because we want to, but because we are afraid of what no will mean. We say yes to avoid disappointing someone. We say yes to manage an outcome. We say yes because we were taught, early and thoroughly, that our value lived inside our usefulness, inside swallowing our Brussels sprouts.
So, how do you begin to change it?
I subscribe to what I call the Full Body Yes model. If something is a full body yes, there is no deliberation needed. You feel it, you say it. But when the full body yes does not arrive, I ask my gut a series of questions: Is this good for my higher self? Can I grow from it? Does it have a predictable beginning and end? Will it light something up in me? Will it bring me joy? If the answer is yes to even two or three of those questions, I will likely say yes. And even then, I give myself permission to change my mind, because sometimes a pause reveals what the initial moment obscured.
What I have also learned is this: I should is almost always the wrong reason. “I should go because they expect me to.” “I should help because that is what a good person does.” “I should say yes because I said no last time.” The word should is a red flag. It signals that the decision is being made from someone else’s framework, not your own.
You do not need to justify your no. You do not need to construct an elaborate excuse or spend three days composing a careful explanation. “I’m not available” is a complete sentence.
Balance matters enormously here.
Boundaries that are too porous lead to overfunctioning: you give your time, your money, your energy, your attention, until there is nothing left and resentment quietly takes its place. You lose yourself inside your relationships. You become the person everyone counts on and no one truly sees.
But boundaries that are too rigid carry their own cost. Rigidity is often fear disguised as self-protection. Fear of intimacy. Fear of losing control. An inability to flex when flexibility is needed. Boundaries should function less like walls and more like the flexible fence around a well-tended garden: clear about what belongs inside and what belongs outside, but not so high that no light gets through.
For those of us raising children, this balance is particularly difficult. My boys are teenagers now, and I have been learning, slowly and imperfectly, to loosen my grip. To let their father become a more central figure in their lives. To trust that the village around them has things to offer that I simply cannot provide, no matter how much I love them. This is a rite of passage: the quiet work of loving from a slightly greater distance.
A dear friend of mine, the numerologist Marisa Grim, recently told me that I am in a year path 2, a period centered on relationships, friendships, and family dynamics. It is a year of heightened intuition and emotional sensitivity, and her counsel was simple: listen to your inner voice. Neglecting your own needs in favor of everyone else's will only lead to frustration.
The image she left me with was this: It is like being underground in a root system, quietly expanding before breaking the surface. The work is invisible for a long time. But it is happening. Boundaries are just as important as devotion, and the inner work is always rewarded. When something falls away, it is making room for something more authentically aligned. Slowing down does not mean falling behind. It means laying the foundation to move more freely when the moment comes.
That inner foundation is what makes the outer work possible. And the outer work, it turns out, is simpler than we think.
Think of your life as a property, with a fence around it. That fence defines what belongs inside your space and what belongs outside of it. Not only your physical space, but your energy, your time, your attention, your emotional bandwidth. Where do you begin and where do you end? What is genuinely yours to carry?
If guilt comes when you start drawing those lines, and it will, let it. Guilt is often just the response to an old pattern breaking. It does not mean you are doing something wrong. It means you are doing something new. Sit with the discomfort. It will pass. And on the other side of it is something worth having: a life that actually belongs to you.
Say no when you mean no. Say yes when every part of you feels it. Let what falls away fall. Trust that what is meant for you will not require you to betray yourself to receive it. This is what it means to live an authentic life.
And if anyone calls you the Queen of No, stand a little taller. It means you have learned something most people spend a lifetime avoiding. And if you need someone to give you permission, I am here. Drop me a line, but please know… You already have it, so don’t wait.
Service through suffering is not virtue. It is a habit. The goal is service through joy, which begins with knowing, and honoring, where your joy lives and how to protect it.