I Said Yes Again When I Should Have Said… No

Being a Jill of all trades continues to bite me in the you know what.

And what’s wild is I have spent years trying to unlearn people-pleasing behavior. YEARS. But the fear of Ron not finding a job made me forget everything I learned, and I fell for the shiny object. Money.

Because when you’re a service provider and you can do a lot of things, you start saying yes to a lot of things. You get on a sales call and you’re like, yeah, I can do that. Yeah, I’ve done that before. Yeah, no problem. And in the moment it feels fine. It feels responsible. It feels like the smart thing to do. Extra income feels safe when life feels uncertain.

But then you get into the work and you’re like… okay, I can do this, but how much of me is it costing me to do this? How much of my time is it taking? How much of my energy? How much of my time with my family? Am I actually doing the thing I’m best at, or am I just doing the thing that makes sense on paper?

I’ve done this multiple times in my business. When I first started as a virtual assistant, I took on project management because I had done light project management at my job before. So when a client would Voxer me like, “Hey, we need X, Y, and Z done,” I was like, cool, I can handle that. I can decipher the chaos, I can figure out what needs to happen, I can make sure the graphics are done, the copy is written, the podcast episodes are scheduled, all of it.

That part I’m good at. But what I’m not great at is holding all of that forever without it bleeding into my real life. The people-pleaser in me wants to get everything done right now. The ADHD in me also wants to get everything done right now. And then my nervous system is like, “Girl, what are we doing?” and I end up stuck in these weird loops of stress and pause and overwhelm.

So recently, I took on another client who needed that same level of support. And honestly, the timing made it make sense in my head. Ron had just lost his job, and I was like, we could really use this money. And it was helpful financially. But it came at a cost I didn’t fully realize until later.

I stopped going on as many discovery calls.
I wasn’t marketing like I had been.
I wasn’t building my agency the way I said I wanted to.

And then I had to ask myself, what changed? And the answer was simple: I went past my actual capacity to hold this kind of work.

So I finally had to tell the client the truth. I was like, listen… I’m not that girl. I am not Santhio Arrivo. Some people are built for that executive assistant, project manager, integrator role where they can hold everything, move from vision to plan to execution super fast, and still protect their personal life. I respect them deeply. I am not them.

I can get there, but it takes me longer. And when I try to live in that space full-time, I start losing myself in the process.

The crazy part is, I knew this about two and a half months in. But instead of listening to myself, I tried to push through. And pushing through is just a fancy way of saying ignoring your intuition and hoping it works itself out.

It didn’t.

So this time, I handled it differently. I didn’t burn a bridge. I didn’t let resentment build. I didn’t wait until things got messy. I reached out to people in my network, found premium OBMs who were actually built for the role, and helped my client transition. I stayed involved in a supportive way without staying stuck in something that wasn’t aligned for me.

And honestly? It felt peaceful.

Because the whole point of starting a business is so you don’t have to stay in situations that drain you just because you technically can handle them.

Yes, there are always going to be things you don’t love, like taxes and bookkeeping and random backend stuff. But your actual service offerings? Those shouldn’t be the thing that breaks you. They should feel fun. They should feel aligned. They should feel like something you don’t dread waking up to.

Even the people on my team get to choose their lanes. If something stops fitting, we adjust. We shift. We make it work in a way that feels better.

Because just pushing through isn’t a business strategy. It’s a burnout strategy.

So if you’re reading this and thinking, yeah… I said yes when I should’ve said no, just know you’re not alone. You’re not behind. You’re just human.

And next time, maybe the question isn’t “Can I?”
Maybe it’s “Should I?”

That’s it. That’s the lesson.