Lena Dunham: The one word that helped the Girls creator become successful

Dunham says she used to feel pressure to always say 'yes' (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Lena Dunham has explained why she is no longer a people-pleaser and instead now firmly believes in saying 'no'.

Writing an article for Linkedin, Dunham says: "A well-timed yes can expand our world in beautiful and unexpected ways. But I am writing now to espouse the power of another simple word: no."

Dunham considers herself to be like most women, “a people pleaser” and wrote that previously saying yes affirmed her belief it was the “key to my likeability”.

She is not the first woman in the pubic eye to say such a statement. In 2000, the veteran talk show host Oprah Winfrey said she only learned to say no in her 40s as she was previously "consumed by the disease to please".

“We can only pull off a high wire act for so long before gravity does its job,” Dunham writes. “The more my personal relationships suffered, the more I wanted to work. The more I worked, the more work I had to do.”

With the encouragement of her business partner Jenni Konner, Dunham learned to use “a polite no” to bat off unrealistic deadlines.

“[Konner] reminded me meeting a deadline wasn’t the reason I was loved or not loved, respected or not respected, and that life didn’t have to be an endless jog to accommodate all the ‘Yes’s’”.

In her year of saying no, Dunham and Konner launched the Lenny letter in July, a twice-weekly digital newsletter which featured Jennifer Lawrence's first and much-debated essay on gender wage inequality in Hollywood.

In the essay, Lawrence describes how she also aimed to please and would "close a deal without a real fight" so not too seem "difficult" or "spoiled".

Dunham's success doesn't stop at Lenny. She hasn’t yet reached 30 but has directed and produced multiple films, written, produced and starred in six seasons of the Emmy-nominated TV series Girls, and written an autobiographical book which reached number 2 on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Dunham writes that her new experience of saying ‘no’ has resulted in success as “people respond well to honesty, to reality. They understand.”

“And so with those 'no’s', ‘yes’ sprung back up everywhere. Funny how that works."