by Wayne Ramsey

Created on: March 23, 2007   Last Updated: April 10, 2007

By nature people avoid confrontation. However, while avoiding confrontation sometimes we get ourselves into situations where confrontation will almost be inevitable in the future. Unfortunately, regardless of our past experiences, we still have a difficult time saying 'no', especially to those that are close to us and we tell them 'yes' no matter how badly we don't really want to do something.

It seems that the closer we are to someone, the more difficult it is to say no to them. This is of course, unless you are a parent to a small child, because no becomes the first word out of your mouth after that. But for most of us, saying no to someone that we care about, especially if they need something important is almost impossible for us to do. A good example would be a friend asking us to watch their children for them while they go out. If you don't have any children, this could be sort of strange, and since that person is your good friend, you are probably going to be doing it for free as well. But you are also sacrificing your time. You may not want to do it, but because they are such a good friend of yours, you feel almost like you are obligated to do it. This is just the reality of human nature, we are naturally programmed to want to help people, to make people happy, and because of that, it's easy for others to take advantage of the natural good nature of people, especially friends.

However, it isn't always a friend that that can become difficult to say no to. Think about the times that you have been approach by a sales person and they were so helpful throughout the process that you felt like you had to purchase what they were trying to sell you. This is true with cars, insurance, those stupid magazine sales people that call on the phone raising money for god knows what made up charity, and even the people that try to get you to switch long distance providers. It's incredible how many times I told a carrier that I would switch to them even though I didn't have a home phone to switch with. The reality is, most of us are afraid to let someone down, especially if they have spent a lot of time with us trying to help us with something, or just by knowing us for a while.

This is why we find ourselves avoiding people during certain times of the day or when we know they are about to ask us for specific favors. If we could just find a way to say no to people then we wouldn't have to resort to hiding out from them all the time and I'm sure our lives would be that much less complex. Plus we wouldn't feel so bad about doing it.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no real way to avoid it, it's just our nature to be nice, and as long as we are, sales people are going to love taking our money.

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