Eva Bradley: You can't always get what you want

How many of us have stared wistfully over fences, real and imagined, and longed desperately for the greener grass on the other side?

Wanting what we can't have and feeling hard done by when we can't get it comes as naturally as breathing.

This week, warmer weather has been on the bucket list for just about everyone I encounter. But when the stinking hot days of mid-summer arrive, you can bet your bottom dollar we will be wishing for the opposite.

We all want what we can't have and getting what we want is often simply a case of supply and demand.

All my life I have been a "yes" person, and I have run my personal and professional life with a cap-in-hand mentality that made me popular and busy but always at my own cost.

If I could accommodate, be flexible, change my plans to suit others or stand on my head and do cartwheels to please someone else, that's what I did.

You know what I've discovered? It impresses no one.

As a small business owner and freelance photographer, I have always had the attitude that if a client says jump, I don't just ask how high, but also if they want fries with that. The customer is always right and I am always at their beck and call.

Recently, however, the business has grown to the point that despite my best efforts, I am too busy to fit people in when it most suits them and, sometimes, I just can't fit them in at all.

Saying no to requests for meetings and assignments was like finding myself speaking in tongues and I was sure it would see me in a position where the work dried up and went elsewhere.

What happened was the opposite.

The less available I was, the more I was wanted. The more firmly I said no, the more accommodating the requests.

I began to wonder if this methodology could work as well in my private life.

The theory that if you treat'em mean, you keep'em keen has always been just that for me ... a theory. Being a little difficult and a bit hard-to-get has simply never occurred to me.

Hot on the heels of my professional unavailability, I experimented by walking away from a personal situation that meant a lot but was failing to produce a return on my considerable investment.

Within days, my stocks had risen and the outcome worked in my favour.

Paradoxically, the number of nos I issued were in direct proportion to the yes I got in return.

Wanting what we can't have makes a certain amount of sense. Getting anything too easily is boring at best and breeds contempt at worst. We are all guilty of being seduced by the unattainable.

Accidentally, I have learned this to my benefit at work and play, but the knowledge comes with a caveat: the definition of suffering has been cleverly described as wanting what you can't have, getting what you don't want, and not knowing which. How's that for your thought for the day?