Adam Grant

It's about you.

I wasn't going overboard for others because I cared too much about them.

I was doing it because I cared too much about their opinions of me.

I said yes because I wanted them to like me and accept me.

It probably started as a solution to being bullied in elementary school, but it had created a new problem.

I'd come to rely on others for self-esteem.

I craved their validation, so I was putting them above myself.

The evidence is clear.

Not only is that a path to emotional exhaustion, it doesn't actually build strong connections.

It creates one-sided relationships where we feel used instead of supported.

And at work, it can undermine rather than advance our progress.

I needed to learn to say no.

But just saying no is not as easy as it sounds.

Vanessa Bonds is a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell and the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think.

She's an expert on the psychology of saying no.

Vanessa knows this from experience.

She has a long history of people pleasing.

Are you just saying that to please me right now?

In one of her early studies, Vanessa investigated whether people say yes to requests more often than we realized.

She asked people in New York City to guess the odds that strangers would agree to onerous requests, like walking them to a destination they couldn't find or even borrowing their cell phone.