'What Zoë Foster Blake taught me about how to say no, and why it matters.'

In the past nine months, in my own life, two things have happened.

The first is that I've had a baby. A daughter whose gummy smile and fine, unruly hair elicits something in me that I didn't know was there.

The second, which sounds a little silly, and is something I'm sure a lot of people are able to discover without experiencing parenthood, is that I've realised time is finite. 

It's not like I didn't logically know this. Of course, I did. Every now and then, in the early hours of the morning, I'd get a pang of anxiety about my own mortality and the time I had wasted, was wasting, that I'd never get back.

Watch: The things you should say 'no' to. Post continues after video.

But there's something about watching a human who didn't exist before, who didn't smile and then one day did, who needed only milk and then discovered the sweetness of yoghurt, and now hungrily face-plants into bowls of oats and pasta and meatballs, that makes you notice that time is passing. That your newborn and your five-month-old aren't here anymore, that your baby won't always be a baby, that you can't do everything you've ever wished to do. That you have to choose. 

In some very immature, probably pathological, magical-thinking part of my brain, I genuinely thought I could live every version of my life. That I'd be a millionaire, that I'd exist off-grid, that I'd be a writer and a teacher and a doctor and a researcher and a psychologist, that I'd live in Paris and New York and Bangkok and Alice Springs. Nevermind how. It didn't matter because there was no time limit, there were infinite parallel universes - realities I had access to, whenever I wanted.

Except there aren't. There's one. And, as much as you're able to - if you believe in free will and not determinism - you have to choose it. 

Choosing what that life looks like, much to my horror, involves saying no. 

This is where author and entrepreneur, Zoë Foster Blake, comes in. Strangely, she was the first person I thought of when I had this revelation. I remembered reading (here, if you're curious) that in order to decide whether to do something, she rates it from one to 10, in terms of how much she wants to do it. But, the exercise comes with a footnote: you can't give anything a seven. Without the neutrality of a seven, you're forced to give a six (a likely no) or an eight (a likely yes). 

The advice, as is the case with most tips for living a more satisfying, effective life, carries particular weight because of the person giving it. Foster Blake is the founder and owner of Go-To Skincare - a company valued last year at $177 million. She's also the author of five novels (including Things Will Calm Down Soon, released next week), three non-fiction books, and eight children's books. She has, I would assume, made several years worth of invisible, quiet decisions - ones that built an internationally beloved business, ones that put evocative words on thousands of pages, and ones that were uncomfortable and hard and sometimes, probably often, involved saying no.

I recently sat down with Zoë Foster Blake to interview her for my podcast, But Are You Happy? I'll leave the answer to that particular question in the necessary context of the full conversation, but within the framework of talking about joy and creativity and meaning and purpose, I asked about saying no.

Listen to the full episode of But Are You Happy? with Zoë Foster Blake below. Post continues after podcast.

Early on in her career, Foster Blake was a beauty editor at Cosmopolitan. She was, unsurprisingly, impressive - driven, clever, innovative. So she was offered a promotion. A pathway that would lead to people management and working on the business side of the publication, to climbing a ladder where each rung came with an increasing salary, but also increasing levels of responsibility, and an increasing distance from writing - the part of her work she adored. In her mid-20s, and without the knowledge of the stellar career ahead of her, Foster Blake said no. I asked her why. How she had the confidence, the clarity, the self-awareness - if that's what it was - to turn it down.

At first, she laughs and says it was "hubris". But then she clarifies, "I just knew… I'm a writer, and writing informs everything I do, if you really drill down on it. So I saw that pretty clearly."

I, on the other hand, have lived my entire adult life unable to say no - swaying like a weed in the tide, towards whatever direction I think will keep other people happy. Worse, I say yes when I mean no. So I resent people and their demands, furious that they have the audacity to not hear the words I never said out loud.

She admits, "It took me a while to learn it, [and] it is a real skill." She cites thinkers like Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin, "who are firm believers in that old adage of: when you say no to them, you're saying yes to you. It's really about the more busy you get, having children, having a business… you have to be a lot more careful about what you say yes to.

"Saying yes to a gig or a job or something… it's never just those two hours on stage. As you know, there's a lot of admin and emailing and sorting out and contracts and travel and all of those things. And it's a real privilege to be able to say no to a lot of stuff now, but I have reached that point because I've done the 20 years of building up that confidence, but [I'm also in] the comfortable position to be able to have my own business and I write books, and that's all I do."

There is financial privilege in being able to say no to work, to particular jobs, but we're all mortal beings with a finite number of years and days and hours, and some degree of choice about how we spend that time. Because of my aforementioned lack of awareness about the fundamental truth of how life works, I've spent inordinate amounts of time committed to things I had no interest in. There's selflessness, which is lovely and necessary, but then there's becoming bitter as a result of your self-imposed martyrdom. There's saying yes to something and hating it. There's having no boundaries, so that your integrity is compromised, so that you - and probably the people around you - know you're not being forthright about your needs and your desires. I, shamefully, fall into this category.

Using the only example I can think of that won't directly offend someone reading this, I've paid for unused gym memberships for years, afraid of the challenges the sales people will present me with. I know they'll require me to say no, over and over again, in different ways, to different last-ditch offers, and I simply don't know how. I have the same problem when I'm asked to attend an event, when I'm offered an unappealing job, when a person reaches out with a request I just don't have time for. So I ask Foster Blake how, exactly, to say no. For a script, if you will. 

"You just say, 'thank you so much. Sounds great. I can't be there, but I hope it goes really well.'

"Because if you say, 'Oh, I can't do it that week,' [it becomes] 'Oh, what dates are you free?'

"Never explain. Just say, 'It's a no', and with kindness… 'Thank you so much for thinking of me. This is going to be a great event, but it's not for me,' and that's a really firm boundary. It's not rude, it's just, it's a no."

That, we discuss, is the only way to focus on what matters most to you. To build the extraordinary business. To be a prolific writer. To pursue your purpose, and to give back in a way that's on your own terms.

Women in particular are tied to the expectation that the needs of others will come before our own, that our boundaries are porous and open and to close them is callous and cold. Perhaps because historically we've been valued exclusively as caregivers, and that role demands sacrifice. But caring for someone - in my case a tiny person, who is growing before my eyes in a way that is at once miraculous and terrifying  - is an ever-present reminder that life slips through our fingers, that time is all we have. 

I recently stumbled across a quote by gender equity expert Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play. "In a patriarchal society," she says, "women's time is viewed as infinite, like sand, and men's time is viewed as finite, like diamonds."

As Zoë Foster Blake told me, "when you say no to them, you're saying yes to you." And your time is finite - a rare, precious resource, like diamonds, that no one will protect for you. You have to guard it for yourself.

You can pre-order Zoë Foster Blake's latest novel, Things Will Calm Down Soon, here. Out October 1.

For more from Clare Stephens, you can follow her on Instagram here, and listen to But Are You Happy? on Apple or Spotify.

Feature image: Instagram @zotheysay.