Most people treat every proposition as a binary choice. The gap between the choice you’re offered and the choices actually available has a name: agency. Not the “organization providing a service” kind of agency, but “the capacity to act independently” kind of agency. I want to explore that concept because it seems poorly understood and underutilized. It also produces better refusals. The best kind is what I call a thorough no.
Tracee Ellis Ross
On a recent podcast with Trevor Noah, Tracee Ellis Ross used a turn of phrase I hadn’t thought about before. She said she had an epiphany that led her to realize that “I am the chooser”. That was in the context of dating, and Tracee realizing she didn’t have to wait to be selected, looking and acting a specific way in the hope that a potential partner would choose her. This insight is powerful on its own, but I think it applies even more broadly to our general capacity to move forward and proactively toward the things and experiences we seek, rather than act passively waiting for those things or experiences to “happen to us”.
Never say no first
Tracee’s insight was about initiating rather than waiting to be chosen. But the capacity to choose is bigger than the capacity to initiate. We can still choose when someone else has made the opening move.
If we look at the things we would like to say no to, we can benefit from forcing ourselves to not immediately say no. Instead, I find it a lot more valuable to ask myself the question: “what would it take for me to say yes to this proposition?”
It’s a simple question, but a very powerful reframing of the situation.
Let’s say someone is asking you to be part of a project. For a variety of reasons, your immediate reaction is that you don’t really want to participate in that project. It could be the wrong time, the wrong scope, the wrong collaborator. By asking the question of what it would take to say yes, instead of immediately saying no, you’re giving yourself an opportunity to think through those reasons. Which in turn gives you an opportunity to potentially negotiate specific aspects of the project. If it’s the wrong time, maybe it can be pushed out a few weeks. If it’s the wrong scope, maybe the scope can be negotiated. If it’s the wrong collaborator, maybe you ask for a different one.
That question presumes you can ask it. Not everyone can, and not on every proposition. A directive from your manager is not an offer. A client who is your only client is not a counterparty you negotiate with as an equal. Standing is not evenly distributed, and pretending otherwise would make this an essay about people who already have leverage. But the question is smaller than it looks. It doesn’t ask whether you can rewrite the terms. It asks whether the terms in front of you are the only ones on the table. That question is almost always worth asking, even when the answer turns out to be yes.
Note that none of this is meant to talk yourself into things. The point of asking the questions is not to arrive at a yes. It is to arrive at an answer you can defend, whether that answer is yes or no.
You might run through all the questions and find that no version works. A thorough no is one you arrived at by exhausting the alternatives, not by declining to consider them. It stands up to counter-offers, because the counter-offers explore ground you have already covered. You considered the later start, the reduced scope, the different collaborator. There is nothing left to propose, because you proposed it all to yourself first.
That saves them time as much as it saves you. A vague no sends someone off to build an offer that was never going to land. A thorough no tells them where the wall is.
The questions you never asked
One way to think about agency is as the ability to ask questions. And when I think about questions, I always go back to the idea that people cannot answer questions you don’t ask. That is a truism, but it is worth saying out loud, because it means an immediate no is not really an answer. It is a decision to stop asking questions.
Think about our previous project example. If you just said no instead of asking for the things that could lead you to say yes, then you probably have unanswered questions yourself. Would they have done the project later? With a lesser scope? Under different conditions? What if any of those things had been true?
“What if such and such had been true” sounds like “I wish such and such could have been true”. But in reality, you don’t know if such and such could have been true, because you never asked. That sounds like regret, but it’s really missing information.
That’s the part that stays with you. A no you can defend closes the question. A no you never examined leaves it open indefinitely, and you carry it around as a counterfactual you have no way to resolve.
The antidote to powerlessness
We are often victims of our circumstances. Health, wealth, relationships. A lot of things can happen to us in ways that can make us feel powerless.
The project example had someone on the other side of it. A current state has nobody to negotiate with. But the move is the same move. You are refusing to treat the options in front of you as the complete set.
There are serious exceptions to that, obviously, especially on the health front. But even in health, we often have more agency than we realize. You might be overweight, tired or out of shape. That’s a current state, and one that you may not have caused. The pertinent question is less how you got there, and more where do you go from here? Do you just accept all those things and live with them? Do you try to reject all those things and give up the moment it’s not “easy”?
Or do you look at your sleep patterns and look for the things that need to change in order for you to be able to go to bed at a better time, or sleep better through the night? Do you look at your fitness level and look for the things that need to change in order for you to start walking 30 minutes a day?
The proposition you can’t renegotiate and the state you didn’t choose look like different problems. They are the same problem. Both arrive presented as a fixed set of options. Both are usually wrong about that.
Believing in your own agency is believing that the first answer isn’t the last answer. It’s believing that failure isn’t the end of trying. It’s believing that whatever has brought you to this moment isn’t all set in stone, it isn’t all immutable, and that you in fact can control enough of it to turn this moment into a different moment. And that if this moment can turn into the next moment, then that next moment can turn into another next moment, and then eventually you can turn any moment into the moment you actually want to say yes to wholeheartedly.