Why High Achievers Say Yes When They Mean No
- StevenMiyao
- 3 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Most of the senior leaders I work with say yes too often, and they're paying for it in ways that don't show up on any quarterly report. I recently had Erin Holland-Collins on the Midlife Remix podcast, and one of the threads I keep coming back to is what I've started calling the "half-yes": agreeing to something not because you want to do it, but because the no felt harder than the yes.
I do this too. Last year, I said yes to an advisor role for a founder I respected, and I knew within a week that I shouldn't have. I showed up to every meeting, did everything I'd committed to, and the founder got the advisor he'd paid for. The cost wasn't to him or his business; it was to me. For six months, I was carrying a yes, my heart wasn't in, and that took time, attention, and energy I would rather have spent on the work I actually cared about.
Erin has spent the last decade placing senior leaders in asset management at HCA, the firm she founded, and she sees the half-yes constantly in the people she works with. She described it on the podcast as the difference between being all in, with body, mind, and energy aligned, and being half in because you're worried about what the other person will think of the no. The math doesn't work the way you think it does. The cost you're trying to avoid is one uncomfortable conversation. The cost you actually take on is months of carrying something your heart isn't in, energy that wasn't available for the work that mattered to you, and the kind of slow drag that eventually shows up in everything else you're trying to do.
The half-yes was one thread of what we got into. We also talked about:
→ The morning practice Erin uses to start her day on purpose instead of reacting to whatever comes first
→ Why letting go of control became the most useful thing she learned as a founder
→ The story of two senior people at the same firm, where one moved with intention and walked away with more than double the compensation, while the other is still stuck
→ Why she sees more candidates lose roles to their own desperation than to anything they actually said in the interview
→ The difference between an intention and a wish, and why wishing is what most of us are actually doing
If any of this sounds familiar, the full conversation is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and the Coaching Metta Substack.
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