Someone being upset that you said no doesn’t mean you were wrong to say it.

Discomfort in someone else is not a verdict on your decision. The two get welded together early, because as a kid the fastest signal that you had done something wrong was an unhappy adult. That shortcut stops working once you are making decisions that affect people. Somebody can be genuinely disappointed and you can still have answered correctly, and both of those are true at once.

Separate them on purpose this week. When a no lands badly, ask whether you would make the same call again on the facts rather than on the face. If so, let them have their feelings without rewriting your answer.