In my family we have a saying to explain people’s work attitudes. We call them “Can-Do” or “Can’t-Do” people. As a result, my parents have always taught me to be a can do person. The main way to do that is to always say yes to any task given to you. For me this has turned me in to a people-pleaser. I will often go out of my way to make others happy, even when it obviously doesn’t make me happy. It’s taken me until about a year ago to realize that there’s a balance and I don’t always have to say yes every time.

Saying yes and being a can-do person doesn’t require you to go completely out of your way to do something, it just means when someone asks you a question, you answer it in a way that provides all the information they’ll need as opposed to just the information they asked for.

I bring this up because when I asked one woman last week what she wished she had known when she graduated from college that she knows now, she said, “always say yes.” Always. She told this story about when she was working at a company for a few years and was really ready to leave. Two days before her last day, her boss asked her to do something, and she said, “ugh.” She forgot her professionalism because she was so ready to leave and fed up with her current job. She never thought it would come back to her later. But it did. A few years ago, when she was looking for another job again, she interviewed at a company to which her previous boss now worked. Needless to say, she did not get that job because her boss remembered her response and attitude that one say and called it unprofessional. She told me this story to explain that no matter what, you need to remain professional. I took her lesson a step farther to connect it with what I learned from home: always say yes.

The conclusion: to be professional is to be a can-do person.