Stop negotiating with yourself
[~4-5 min read]
You say yes to the school committee. Or the extra project at work. Or drinks with someone who leaves you feeling drained before you’ve even sat down.
Not because you genuinely wanted to. But because by the time you’ve argued with yourself for ten minutes in the kitchen, you’ve talked yourself past your own clear hesitation and straight into agreeing.
“It’s fine.”
“I don’t want to seem unsupportive.”
“It’s only two hours a month.”
“If I don’t do it, nobody else will.”
And you know exactly how this ends. You’ll show up. You’ll be perfectly pleasant. You’ll deliver. And somewhere around the third week, you sit in your car, stare at the steering wheel, and wonder how you ended up here again – spending your finite energy on something you talked yourself into for reasons that don’t hold up in daylight.
That’s not open-mindedness. That’s negotiation. And you’re negotiating against yourself.
The Illusion of the Tight Grip
We tend to think of control as if it’s something you achieve by gripping harder. More colour-coded planning. More double-checking. More anticipating everyone else’s needs before they even speak.
We convince ourselves that if we just manage the details tightly enough, we can prevent things from going sideways. But real control was never about managing outcomes. It’s about being ruthless about where your attention, energy, and boundaries actually go.
There are two completely different kinds of control, and most high-performing women spend their lives pouring 90% of their energy into the wrong one.
The first kind is the Control that isn’t yours
- Other people’s opinions of your choices.
- Whether someone approves of your boundaries.
- How fast an outcome unfolds.
- How other people behave, perform, or react.
The second kind belongs entirely to you
- What you say yes to.
- What you say no to.
- Where your attention goes.
- What you tolerate.
- What you prioritise.
- What you do next.
Letting go of what you can’t control isn’t giving up control. It’s reclaiming it.
When you stop trying to manage the first list, a massive amount of energy suddenly frees up. The distinction in practice looks like this:
- You can’t control whether someone misunderstand you. You can control whether you explain yourself for the seventeenth time.
- You can’t control whether someone likes your decision. You can control whether you make it based on their approval.
- You can’t control whether an opportunity works out perfectly.
You can control whether it’s worth your energy pursuing in the first place. - You can’t control what happened five years ago.
You can control what you do with the life you’ve got right now. - You can’t control how other people behave.
You can control what behaviour you’re willing to keep accommodating.
The 90% rule that reclaims your bandwidth
Which brings us back to that ten-minute negotiation.
If something isn’t at least 90% right for you, you don’t need to talk yourself into it.
That’s a version of Greg McKeown’s 90% rule from Essentialism. But here’s the part he doesn’t spend much time on: not ‘is this a good idea’ not ‘does this deserve my time’, but the harder question, ‘Why am I trying to make myself want something I don’t actually want?”
You can be 90% sure and still say “yes”. You can be 70% sure and say, “interesting, let me look into it”. You can be 40% sure and say “sorry, no”, easily.
But if something doesn’t hit the mark and you’re already hunting for reasons to talk yourself over the line, that’s usually your actual answer. You just don’t like it yet.
There’s a real difference between “I’m not sure” and “I know, but I just don’t like the answer”. The first requires more information. The second just needs you to stop negotiating.
Not everything needs to score 90%. Obviously. You don’t ghost your family because they occasionally annoy you.
But you could start noticing the things that consistently fall well below it and ask yourself: Why am I accepting this as the default?
Designing around energy, not obligation
In Episode 012 of the Hello Prime Life podcast, we explore what happens when you stop building your weekly calendar from an imaginary, fantasy version of yourself who never gets tired. The woman who handles 50 tasks, cooks perfectly, smashes her goals, and apparently operates on zero margin.
When you stop giving away that 10% of energy to things you talk yourself into, you stop designing your week for exhaustion and start designing it for actual capacity.
The 90% rule isn’t really about deciding what to say yes to. It’s about recognising when you’re spending far too much energy trying to make the wrong things fit.
It’s the 90% you actually have influence over, while the other 10% represents the stuff that belongs to circumstances, other people, randomness and life being life.
Then the 100% is simpler than it sounds: deciding, on purpose, what gets your time, energy and attention instead of drifting into it by default.
Next time you catch yourself building a case for why you ‘should do’ something, take notice. That’s the tell. You don’t negotiate for things you actually want, you just want them.
So this week, when you feel yourself listing reasons why instead of feeling an immediate, grounded yes, stop and ask the real question: Is this genuinely a 90%? Or am I just working hard to make 70% feel like enough?
None of this means you get to control everything that happens to you. You won’t. But you don’t need to control 100% of what happens to you to take 100% responsibility for what you do with it.
If you want more real strategies for protecting your energy in midlife, not more things to add to your list, my Hot Flashes newsletter is where I go deeper on this every week.
