I got nervous when she started to talk about health and her weight – but I needn’t have worried. The more she says yes, and follows through, the easier (and better) it gets. Year Of Yes turns out to be Rhimes’ own self-guided form of exposure therapy. She does interviews, speeches, cameo appearances, all kinds of awesome stuff that brings her a lot of joy – all of which she would have said “no” to, had her sister not made a crack at her at a family get-together. Most of the time, facing the fear she feels really pays off. When Rhimes starts saying yes, she finds that her fear won’t actually kill her.

There are some things (and some people, ahem!) that it is absolutely right to say-yes-to-saying-no-to. This is not the year of indiscriminate yes it’s the year of yes to things that make us feel alive. She addresses the over-commitment question directly in chapter seven (“Yes to All Play and No Work”), when she realises that saying “yes” also means saying yes to silly things, fun things, and sometimes saying yes to those things means saying a grateful “no” to others. I’d say Year Of Yes is a non-fiction book about the transformative power of being open to new things and overcoming ingrained anxiety, as exemplified by one extraordinary woman. It’s not self-help, either – even though Rhimes offers a lot of advice and wisdom gleaned from what she’s done. It’s not a memoir, exactly – even though it’s told through the frame of Rhimes’ experiment.

She’s now written this book, Year Of Yes, about her experience. She embraced the challenge and decided to go against all her better instincts, to spend the year saying YES.

Well, you can’t lay down a gauntlet like that in front of a powerhouse like Rhimes. Then, while cooking Thanksgiving dinner in 2013, her sister said something to her, something Rhimes calls the “six startling words”: you never say yes to anything. But the truth was, actually, she was too afraid. As a show-runner for multiple Big Time Mega Hit Must-Watch shows, and a single mother to three kids, no one ever doubted her when she said she was “too busy”. Really, Rhimes said “no” to everything as a way of hiding from things that terrified her (can’t we all relate, just a little bit?). (And yes, I am an affiliate, which means I’ll earn a small commission from any sales made through links on this page.)

The power of yes shonda rhimes