Deep Dive Series: The Power of Discerning When No Is Kindness
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
Jay Shetty’s September 5, 2025, podcast detailed 10 lessons he’s learned in the last year. The first lesson he shared was “Helping Less Can Actually Help More.” Jay loves to serve people, but in the last year he learned that sometimes saying yes to every request and wanting to fix things for others actually hurts people. Your help can make some people dependent on you and enable them to not learn how to help themselves. This dependence creates learned helplessness and makes people feel like they can’t do for themselves or depend on themselves. Powerful leaders make people believe in themselves and teach them to connect with their own gut instinct. So they’ll say no to a request and remind the requester of how capable they are of completing the task on their own.
Discerning when no is kindness is definitely a theme in my own life currently. I have a child, and I’m used to doing things for him. But he’s growing up, and I’m having to force myself to remember that he needs to learn to do things on his own. Which sometimes means he needs to screw up and learn his own lessons from his mistakes. I’m not the best at this. I worked as a support staff professional for 16 years, and a large part of my job was anticipating people’s needs and fulfilling those needs before they were even noticed. It's hard to shut that part of my thinking off in order to let my child’s independence flourish. But no is kindness when helping him grow.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team