Learning To Say “No”

All of you probably know someone, or multiple people, who you would consider to be an over achiever. These are the people who do pretty much everything. There’s a club on campus and they’re a part of it. They’re in the band/choir, on student government, in an honors society, on a sports team…the list goes on. You know that if you asked them to be a member of your quiz bowl team, improve group, or whatever it is, that they would say yes. Well, they would say yes after pulling out their planner to make sure that your meetings are at a time that they can make work with their schedule.

These people are always on their way to one thing or another. But, no matter how busy their lives get, they’re always the first person to volunteer to help you out if you’re in a bind. Your ride to the airport cancelled on you last minute? They’re on it. Need help with your crazy hard statistics homework? They took it last year and will totally sit with you and explain parameters and critical values for hours until you understand it.

Let’s face it, half of the time you wish you were as involved in everything as these people. They’ve got their lives figured out and you know they’ll succeed at whatever they do. The other half of the time, you get exhausted just looking at them, and are pretty sure that if you were even half as involved as they are, that you’d die.

Well you can trust me when I tell you, we really don’t have our lives together any more than you do. I’m that over-involved crazy person, or I used to be. As early-onset senioritis takes hold of me in my junior year of college, I have come to realize that this “never say no” mentality might have been killing me. In my two and a half years at college I have been involved in more than I ever thought possible. I was on a division one sports team, in a high level choir, the  sga rep/business manager/president of an a cappella group, a statistics tutor for over twenty students, in a sorority, been a founding member of an event management club, and been in the honors program.

What I have come to learn from all of this, is that I needed to find a way to narrow down the things I am involved in, to the things that really matter to me, the things that I am really truly passionate about. While I only managed to cut two of my activities, that alone helped my mental health immensely. I get fewer stress-related migraines, and I no longer feel like I have run a marathon at the end of every day.

For those of you who are like me, I encourage you to look at all the things you do, and determine what it is that you really WANT to be doing, and go from there. It will really help you out in the long run.

In my next post I think I will be looking at what it is that makes the overachievers/over-involved people of the world think that this is how they should be using their lives.