One Thing You'll Say Yes To This Week

Somewhere in the next seven days, somebody is going to suggest something.

You already know roughly what it'll be, because it's always roughly the same. A coffee. A morning thing with a start time and no clear finish. A friend who says come with me, it'll be fine. And you know exactly what happens next, because you've watched it happen for years from about six inches behind your own eyes.

This week, say yes to it.

Not the big thing. I want to be clear about that, because the moment I said it your mind went straight to the hardest thing on the list, the thing you've been avoiding for two years, and that's not what this is. That's not for this week and possibly not for this year.

We've spent three weeks looking. You counted how often you say "I'd better not", and the number was bigger than you told anybody. You noticed that a maybe wears you down more than anything hard ever did. And you tried saying the accurate word out loud in an empty kitchen and found it was lighter to carry than the respectable one. All of that was looking, and looking was the right thing to do first.

This week is one small piece of doing, and it comes with rules, because a vague instruction is one you can talk yourself out of by Wednesday.

Pick something from the middle of your list. Not the top. The middle, where the things live that you'd quite like to do and have a reasonable excuse not to. Then check it against three things.

It should be short. Two hours at the outside, and preferably less. It should be near, or at least somewhere you can get to and away from under your own steam, without depending on anybody else's timing. And it should have a clear exit, one you could use at any point without a scene and without an explanation.

Now, the exit is the part people push back on, so let me say what it's for.

The exit isn't cheating and it isn't a lowered bar. It's what makes the yes possible in the first place. What's been stopping you was never the two hours. It was the open end of them, the not knowing whether you'd be able to leave, and how it would look, and what you'd say. Put a door in the room and you can walk into the room. That's the plan.

So name it when you accept, lightly, in the same breath. "I'd love to, I might have to shoot off by three." That's all it takes, and it's one ordinary sentence rather than a confession. You've now pre-approved your own departure, in public, with no drama available later. Most women never use the exit. Having it is what got them through the door.

Whichever way yours comes at you, the shape is the same. If it's your body, take the lunch that's twenty minutes from home rather than the day out that isn't. If it's the room, take the networking morning and go early, when there are six people there instead of sixty, and leave at eleven as planned. If it's being seen, stay in the photograph. Just one. Don't offer to take it.

And here's what you're doing, because it isn't what it looks like.

You're not proving you're fine. Nobody is asking you to prove that, least of all me, and if that's the job you've given yourself then no single afternoon could ever be enough to finish it.

You're collecting one piece of evidence that wasn't gathered by avoidance.

Think about what's in your file at the moment. Every scrap of it was collected in the same way, by not going, and the file has been saying the same thing back to you for years because it's the only thing it's ever been given. Your forecast about how these things go has never once been tested against a real afternoon. That's the gap this closes, and it only takes one.

Which is why what counts here is going, and nothing else.

Not enjoying it. Not being warm and easy and glad you came. If you go and it's perfectly ordinary and slightly dull, that counts in full. If you go and leave after forty minutes because you used the exit exactly as designed, that counts in full as well, and it's a far better result than not going. You're not being marked. There's no version of this that you fail apart from the version where you stay in.

Then, when you're home, write one line down. Two, if you want. What you thought would happen, and what did. Nothing more than that, and nobody else ever reads it.

Because the thing about the no you say in advance, the reason it's held for so long, is that it leaves no record anywhere. Nothing ever comes back to argue with it. One line in a notebook on a Sunday night is the beginning of the only file that's ever had anything else in it.

One thing. Short, near, and with a door in it. Say yes on the spot, before the sum has time to run.

When your body and your nerve have been making your decisions for you, that's the work I do. Book a Reset Session at HypnoGirl.

Next Sunday we turn to the room, and to the twenty minutes before anybody talks about work.

Subscribe for one essay a week.