What I Learnt in Business Last Week - 24th May - Learning to say yes but...

Jasmine here. 

Now, quick update for those playing at home. There is just six weeks until my little project is due pending they don't come early (fingers crossed!). But yes it's been quite mind blowing just to see how much you are aware of and how much you do learn in business when you know that you have an impending end date.

With that in mind, I've got one key learning that I had last week, and this actually came from a team coaching session that the LVL Up team had last week. So we learnt about sacrifices and not just making sacrifices in business, but also communicating those to others, particularly clients.

A lot of us, and I'm definitely guilty of this, we say yes to everything. We try to please the client, we try and give the client exactly what they need - on time, in full, to budget -, maybe we even undercut ourselves. But if we keep saying yes, then we condition those expectations on others as well. It may not be clients. It could be in your personal life. It could be your team. So if you're constantly making compromise that you're aware of, if you're squeezing things in, if you're doing things out of scope, you're setting that expectation with others, that that's how you roll.

So what I learnt is not to say no, of course, if you want to deliver a good service and you want to do the right thing, then of course do those things, but just make it known that this is out of the ordinary.

This is extra work. This will take me three days instead of two hours, cause I've got other stuff on.
That way you're being really upfront, really transparent and you're not setting yourself or that other person up for failure. So when you're compromising, when you're making sacrifices, set really clear expectations. And then the outcome of that is that you're actually valued a little bit more than you are today.
That's my hot tip for this week. I will see you next week with more what I learnt in business last week.