When these issues are raised, the advice tends to be pretty simple: just say ‘no’. But that can feel more than a little tricky, especially as you first dip your toe into the ‘setting boundaries’ pool.

Perhaps a better way to ease yourself in? Slowing down your yes.

In a post to LinkedIn, keynote speaker and coach Ronan Harrington offered some words of wisdom: “Boundary setting isn’t about saying no, it’s about slowing down your yes.

“It means resisting your instinct to immediately say yes as a default to requests of your time,” Harrington tells Stylist. “To slow down your yes is to take the time you need to check in with your capacity [to determine] whether this latest task is something you can or even want to do – if you have that option.

“In practice, it can be as simple as taking a breath and checking in with yourself, and then saying yes. If you need more time or a false sense of urgency is pressuring you to say yes, use deferring statements to move the decision until a later time. You can say: ‘Let me check my schedule and come back to you,’ or ‘I’d like to sleep on it and give you an answer in the morning.’ Then when you’ve eventually come to a decision, you can be confident this is a task you can commit to – or not.”

Why ‘slowing down your yes’ could be the key to better boundaries at work