Daring to say no

Like many trying-to-be active and ambitious working mums, I often struggle to achieve everything I want to achieve. I want to be a stay at home mum who’s there for her girls (who are part-time in nursery), I want to run my own investor marketing business from home,  I want a house that’s clean and tidy with food in the fridge, with freshly laundered clothes, I want to keep running and cycling regularly (because it keeps me from going loopy)… but sometimes I have to admit defeat. And that’s easier said than done, but when it’s ‘done’, boy does it feel good.

I’ve spent the past two weeks ill with yet another winter bug. I’ve experienced a cocktail of symptoms from feeling like I’ve been run over by a bus, nauseous, sore throat, chesty cough, headache, fever, glands in my neck the size of golf balls, feeling totally wiped out, oh and an eye infection to boot.

Somehow I’ve ploughed on still thinking, until Sunday night, I would get better in time to go on 95km rides in the Kentish hills with cycling club training camp this week and, until yesterday, that I would be better in time to participate in a live video interview with a friend and ex journalist colleague tonight, where I would have been later immortalised on YouTube with my red gunky eyes and hacking cough.

Eventually, of course, when you stop and listen to your body, and decide ‘no, I’m not going to do that’ you feel a flood of relief. Even if it’s something you had really been looking forward to and wanted to do, and involves losing a bit of money (in the case of the training camp) or letting down a friend (in the case of the journalist).

The same applies to mental as well as physical pressures. But I’m on a roll now. At the end of last week, a good friend who works for me (not always wise to mix friends and business…) messed up on a technical issue in a client project. He’s fabulous at the work he normally does, but has an unfortunate habit of saying ‘yes’ to other things because he wants to help out; even if he’s not always very experienced in said area. I should have stood firm and said ‘no’.

I ended up having to simultaneously employ someone else (the person I’d initially had in mind for this part of the project) to step in and help out. This was on Friday, a day I shouldn’t normally be working because I’m meant to be with my girls. My aim had been to solve the issue, and hopefully spare my friend any negative feedback (even if it meant I was slightly out of pocket).

The upshot was an irate call from him on Monday, accusing me of poor project management (because he hadn’t been around on Friday and he’d done unnecessary work because he’d not seen all the emails sent to him, which I apparently should have ‘collated’ for him). He then quit, leaving me reeling, minutes before I was due to leave for nursery pick-up.

4-year-old MiniM#1 perceptively asked me why I looked sad and I gave a dumbed-down summary. “Oh dear that’s not very nice, you should have told him you’re not feeling well and you have a sore throat,” she suggested helpfully. “Maybe you can ask your friend Laura to help out instead?” I didn’t even know who she meant by Laura, but I did know I would be giving my little girl a big hug when I got out the car.

Thankfully, he appears to be ‘un-quitting’ now. Or at least honouring existing projects with legally-binding contracts. And possibly more. And back to his lovely self, even offering to contribute towards the pay of the person I’d brought on board to help out. In the height of the quitting saga I began to question if all the hassle was worth it. Should I maybe strip out his area of activity from the company rather than find a replacement?

Tough times help you to readdress the balance. To dare to say ‘no’ to what doesn’t work. And to either sort it out, or change path. This can only be a good thing, even if at the time it seems horrible.

Still in this frame of mind – ‘enough is enough’ – I threw caution to the wind and wrote an email to my biggest client last night. I spend most of my company time working for them, so I lack the time to look for new business elsewhere, plus they don’t pay me enough for what I do. I politely told them to either pay me more or to reduce my workload because I sadly could not continue the way things were.  It was a big risk. But sometimes you have to bite the bullet or you never get anywhere in life.

To my delight the client agreed to reduce my workload and still pay me the same. I think this is probably the better outcome too, because it gives me the time to look elsewhere for other, hopefully more remunerative clients. Or go for a sneaky bike ride to feel the wind on my face and escape toddler tantrums and tricky clients.

For now though, I just need to concentrate on getting well again. I think I’ll be saying no to the People’s Vote March in London on Saturday too, that I’d been planning to take the girls to. They’ll be learning about it in their history books in school, so it’s a shame for them not to partake, but I’m not well enough and a part of me had been a bit scared of taking them on a march with several million people just in case anything untoward happened.