The Courage to Say Yes

In a culture full of reasons to say ``no,'' it takes a lot of courage to find ways to say ``yes.''

We're taught to say ``no'' from a very young age, after all. For most of us, our first word was ``no'', and it quickly became our favorite word. As toddlers and teenagers, we used ``no'' to differentiate ourselves from our parents, peers, and surroundings. It's how we began to control what was happening around us, or at least, how we tried to control that. It helped us over those early developmental hurdles, and gave us our earliest sense of our personal boundaries -- and that's a lot of significance bound up in such a tiny word!

The problem isn't that ``no'' in and of itself is somehow bad; indeed, giving yourself permission to say " View the rest of this article