Book
Set Boundaries, Find Peace
Nedra Glover Tawwab
Practical thinking for relationships that need clearer limits rather than simply more effort.
Tool 30 · Develop yourself
Where am I saying yes and meaning no?
This exercise avoids the language of self-care, never recommends cutting anybody off, and treats a yes you chose as a yes worth keeping.
A guided 15 to 20 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
What does the yes buy?
Nobody agrees to things for no reason. Remove the payment without naming it and the limit lasts a fortnight.
A yes you chose is not a boundary problem. Some of it is worth the cost.
What you'll explore
- 01A recent occasion
- 02Who it tends to be with
- 03What happens in the moment
- 04What you have already tried
A note from Mark
Most advice about boundaries is written as though the difficulty is knowing what you want. It rarely is. The difficulty is that saying yes is buying something, and nobody tells you what you are giving up when you stop.
So I would start there. Peace, approval, being the one who can be relied on, an income, not having a conversation you do not want to have. Once you can name it, the limit gets much easier to design, because you know what you are trading.
Then I would get specific about who. People arrive saying they cannot say no and it turns out they say it perfectly well at work and never once to a brother. That is not a personality trait. It is a relationship with a history.
Read my full view ↓
And I would only ever set one. A list of boundaries is a way of having none, and the one you can hold on a bad Tuesday is worth five that read well.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
Where it happens
02
What the yes buys
03
What it costs
04
One limit, as conduct
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02Where you say yes and mean no
- 03What the yes buys
- 04What it costs
- 05Where the pattern came from
- 06Who this is actually with
- 07Is a limit the answer
- 08The rival reading
- 09What deserves protecting
- 10The credible alternative
- 11What, if anything, should change
- 12The one limit
- 13What remains unresolved
- 14Where this goes next
What now?
01 · Save it
Where the yes is being given, specifically.
02 · Test it
Change what you do at the point of the ask, not what you explain afterwards.
Explore this further ↓
What I would do
- 01
Find out what the yes buys before removing it. Nobody agrees to things for no reason.
- 02
Get specific about who. Most people who describe a general problem have a particular person.
- 03
Describe the limit as your own conduct. Anything that needs the other person to agree is a request.
- 04
One limit. Lists of boundaries are a way of having none.
- 05
Leave a chosen yes alone. Plenty of the work you resent is worth doing anyway.
Test it
- 01
Ask whether the yes is chosen. If it is, protect it and stop.
- 02
Ask what you get from agreeing. If you cannot answer, you have not found it yet.
- 03
Check whether the limit needs anybody's permission. If it does, it is a request.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you need better boundaries. Often the evidence says something narrower. Sometimes this is not a general difficulty at all, it happens with one person and started when you became the reliable one. Sometimes the yes is buying something you would not want to give up, and the honest answer is to keep paying knowingly. Sometimes the problem is the volume of work rather than the absence of a limit, and no amount of saying no fixes an impossible load. And sometimes the limit you need is not with another person but with yourself.
Think about this
- A recent time you said yes and meant no.
- Who it tends to be with, and where.
- What agreeing gets you.
- What it costs, and who else pays it.
- Whether you have tried a limit before, and what happened to it.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
The conversation I keep not having
If the limit needs saying out loud
Further thinking
Set Boundaries, Find Peace
Nedra Glover Tawwab
Essentialism
Greg McKeown
Boundaries
Henry Cloud and John Townsend
Explore the thinking ↓
Book
Essentialism
Greg McKeown
Useful when too many commitments are competing for limited attention.
Book
Boundaries
Henry Cloud and John Townsend
The book that put the word into general use, and it carries a strong prescriptive tone that will not suit everybody. Take the part that lasts: the distinction between what is genuinely yours to carry and what you have taken on because nobody else would. That question does more work than any amount of language about limits.