Year Of Yes

Year of Yes details famous TV-show creator Shonda Rhimes’s change from introversion to socialite by saying “Yes” to anything for a full year and how she was finally able to face her fears and start loving herself.

Her sister’s comment at Thanksgiving stung Shonda, but the one who finally pushed her over the edge was her publicist. When getting an invitation for a fancy dinner party, to which even the president and his wife would show up, she simply accepted for Shonda.

She made the painful realization afterwards, that, without her publicist, she’d never have had an amazing night, because she herself surely would’ve declined the invitation.

This is what ultimately stopped her from letting life pass her by and the plan to say yes to anything that scared her for a full year, in order to learn what else she’d been missing out on.

What’s the lesson? Sometimes, you simply can’t cross a certain line. And that’s okay, because if you’ve got a few true friends, they’ll push you over the edge – even if it means upsetting you. The best thing you can do is hope for this to happen and don’t get mad at your friends when it does. Wait and see what happens, and then thank your friends for pushing you beyond what you thought you were capable of doing.

The biggest lesson is of course to say yes to things. I’m a huge fan of focused efforts and quitting lots of things, but in order to know what to focus on and what to quit, you first need to do a bunch of things.

If you’re in that initial, figuring-out-what-to-do-phase, set a period of time in which you’ll say yes to anything that comes your way. Don’t ask questions, don’t complain, don’t deliberate. Just say yes and see what happens.

Once that time is up, take a look back. What new passions have emerged? Which things really were as bad as you’d imagined them? And what will you keep on doing?

This is especially true for introverts. We’re social people too – we just have a hard time admitting it. By running a year-of-yes experiment, you’ll learn a lot more about how social you really are. It’s probably more than you think.

One valuable lesson Shonda learned about loving herself is to just accept compliments. Before she would react with modesty and play it down every time someone complimented her. Now she realized that it’s okay to take a bath in the sun sometimes. When Bill Clinton praised Shonda on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, her assistant made a t-shirt for her saying “Bill Clinton loves ANYTHING I do.” She’s usually really shy, but decided to…