The Hell Yes Standard
Anything short of a hell yes is a no. Don't settle for it — negotiate toward it.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 94%
Berger uses a deliberately expansive definition of no: it isn't a yes unless it's a hell yes. A lukewarm 'maybe, I'll try, we'll see' is a no wearing a yes costume, and accepting it is what produces missed milestones and half-hearted commitments months later. The move is not to force the yes but to surface the no honestly and then ask what it would take to reach a hell yes.
Origin
Berger's own framing, drawing on the language of enthusiastic consent and the 'whole body yes' (a term from the somatic/conscious-leadership world — he cites the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership as a favorite book).
Core principles
- 01You want enthusiastic consent, not compliance. Anything less is a no.
- 02A hell yes is felt in the body — head, heart and gut all in. A head-yes with a gut-no is a no.
- 03Everybody gets to say no whenever they want. Surfacing a no is not making them wrong.
- 04Settling for a soft yes doesn't avoid the conflict — it defers it to the deadline.
How to run it
- 1
Make the ask specific enough to be answerable
Name the concrete thing — the date, the decision, the commitment — so the response can be evaluated against the hell-yes bar. Vague asks produce vague yeses by construction.
- 2
Grade the response against the bar
Listen for full-body agreement: 'yeah, absolutely, let's do this.' Anything in the 'maybe, kind of, I'll try, we'll see' family is a no. Read the face and body too — if someone makes the face, that's a no regardless of what comes out of their mouth.
Watch out You are strongly biased to hear a yes because you want a yes. Assume that bias is operating.
- 3
Name the lukewarm response without making them wrong
Say it plainly and non-punitively: 'I'm hearing maybe you're lukewarm on May 1st as a date.' Explicitly preserve their right to say no.
Pro tip Leading with their right to refuse is what makes the next question land as collaboration rather than pressure.
- 4
Ask what it would take to get to a hell yes
Convert the soft no into a design question: 'What would be a hell yes date for you, where you could say absolutely, we can deliver on that?' You're not coercing a yes, you're finding the conditions under which a real one exists.
Pro tip Note the bar in the question itself — 'hell yes date', not 'a date you're comfortable with'. Lowering the bar in the phrasing gets you another soft yes.
In the wild
A CTO says 'yeah, maybe I think maybe we can deliver by May 1st.' The founder, wanting the yes, accepts it and books the milestone against that date.
→ May 1st arrives and, surprise, the milestone isn't done. The commitment was never real — it was a soft yes accepted because pushing for a hell yes felt uncomfortable in the moment.
Berger's general pattern: someone says 'oh, well, okay, we'll give that a try', and everyone treats the matter as settled.
→ It bites later — they weren't really in, they didn't show up to the party, and the work doesn't land. The gap was visible at the moment of the ask if anyone had graded the response honestly.
Common mistakes
Hearing what you want to hear
Because you badly want a yes, you round 'we'll see' up to agreement. That single act of rounding is what manufactures most missed deadlines and phantom commitments.
Treating a no as a bad outcome
Mostly the world tells us no, and it's great data — it tells you what to try next. Framing no as failure is precisely what makes you settle for a fake yes instead.
Pressuring instead of negotiating conditions
'Can you just commit to May 1st?' makes them wrong for saying no and produces compliance, not consent. Asking what a hell yes would require keeps their agency intact and surfaces the real constraint.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders, managers, and PMs negotiating deadlines, alignment, or commitments where soft agreement has previously turned into silent non-delivery
Not ideal for
Low-stakes or fully-delegated decisions where a merely-adequate yes is genuinely sufficient and the negotiation cost isn't worth it
From the transcript
“it's it's not a yes unless it's a hell yes. Right? Because you really want enthusiastic consent”
“And so I think part of what I encourage people to do is one to really hear anything short of a hell yes as a…”
“I'm hearing maybe you're lukewarm on May 1st as a day. Like, what would what would be a hell yes day for you where you…”
From the episode
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back
Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM at Slack)