Stop Bargaining with Reality (And What to Do Instead)

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Bargaining with reality just leads to frustration, wasted energy, and missed opportunities to do something about it. Let’s dig into what it can actually look like to stop fighting the things you can’t change (your memory, your energy at night, your partner’s limitations) and start getting creative to work with the reality you have. The goal was never to be a different person – it’s to build a life that works with who you already are.

Full transcript:

Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bright Method Podcast, where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up the bright method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep, proud of what you got done today, and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in.

Hey, hey, and welcome back. All right, if you have been here long, you have heard me say some version of Embrace Reality and figure out how you still wanna get where you wanna go, thousands of times at this point, probably. So it is no surprise that I loved this quote from Farnham Street when I stumbled upon it, and it is frustration is bargaining with reality, hoping it will change.

Yelling at traffic doesn’t make it go faster. Rehearsing the same complaints about your spouse doesn’t change their [00:01:00] behavior. Getting angry at the delayed flight does not make it take off sooner. While you’re busy fighting, what is you are blind to? What could be. All the energy you put into arguing with reality comes at the expense of improving your situation.

The mountain doesn’t care how much you yell at it, but you’ll find a path around it if you stop and look and I love it. It just is a different way of framing What I really believe, that if we stop demanding, we change things that likely are not changeable. Then we can get creative and look for solutions instead.

So I wanna tease this out a bit in some ways that we talk about here, because I think it’s really, really powerful and it goes beyond this too. But obviously I think about it in this context. Reality number one, as an example, your brain cannot remember all the things. Now, this is one that I used to beat [00:02:00] myself up for a lot.

Anytime I forgot a little detail, forgot to respond to a client, forgot to email that partner back, forgot all these things. This was pre bright method back in the day, and even sometimes still if I’m like, yeah, I’ll remember that. You can, if you want, demand that of yourself and maybe you’re listening and you’re like, I can remember things.

This is great. My reality is not the same reality for other people, but it’s just an example is that for me, one of the things that I used to constantly beat myself up for and judge myself for and shame myself for was an inability to remember things. Now, did I give myself credit for all the things I was thinking about, remembering about strategizing, about being present with instead of remembering?

No, I just focused on the things that I did not remember, but still I was not remembering. And so I used to beat myself up and that’s one option. And you can do that. Call yourself forgetful a mess, not having it together, that kind of [00:03:00] stuff. You can like stick with that narrative or. You can just accept as fact that your brain has more important things to do than remember the 9,284 things that you have as logistical things that we have to manage in our life and get creative about how we’re going to manage those 900, whatever set.

I said, thousand things that matter over time in a system outside of your brain in a way that will work for you. For me, obviously that’s the bright method, but the bigger point today is accept certain things about your brain and instead of wishing they were different, expecting they were different, shaming yourself that they’re not different.

Accept it as true, like as a neutral fact. You don’t have to love it. You just have to say, okay, fact, neutral fact, this is what it is. If I want to do the things, the goal is not I need to remember to do [00:04:00] things. The goal is I need to do the things. I need to have something in place that reminds me to do the things when it’s time to do the things.

The goal is not my brain being that thing. That’s the means. The end is I want to actually do certain things at time for any of my roles, and once I’m clear that that’s the goal, and I accept that my brain is not gonna get me there. Then I can start looking for solutions outside. And that’s powerful, and that’s what led to the Bright Method.

It could lead somewhere else to you, but the bigger point is accept it as fact and then work with it, work around it. Get creative, spend your energy solving versus wishing away. Okay. Another example. This one will probably not apply to many. Please know the next ones I think will apply to more people, but it’s just another example of this that I’ve experienced in my own life.

For some of us, our partners cannot share the home load as much as we want. I talked about this a lot in [00:05:00] episode 76. I won’t go into it all today, but just in summary, those with partners who are physicians who are in the military. Who travel a lot for work. Maybe they have their own executive functioning challenges.

There can be a lot of reasons that your partner is not showing up as the partner. You hope in terms of a sharing the load perspective for a lot of different reasons, and you can either fight that reality. Dream up an even distribution of labor, and then be constantly disappointed and resentful of your partner for not being able to do it or end up doing it all yourself.

Or you can accept that at least part of the support you are craving and need cannot come from your partner, and then get creative to get that support from others and or scale down what you do to fit within your own capacity. I dig into that a lot [00:06:00] more in episode 76, as I discussed, but that was a hugely freeing moment for me in that first year of having a kid with a partner who was gone a lot instead of just kinda wishing our situation was different.

Judging myself and my partner for allowing a distribution of home stuff that wasn’t. Because he wasn’t there and able to do it, instead of like arguing with the reality of that, it was very freeing to say, okay, this is just a neutral fact. I still don’t want to do it all on my own. I need breaks. I need support.

If my partner at this phase of our life while he’s in residency and all this kind of stuff, can’t provide that, how am I gonna get it? And instead of just ruminating about a bad, not a bad situation, but the situation and focusing all my energy at being angry at that. Just broadening the aperture and like looking for solutions [00:07:00] outside of it was so freeing and effective in a way that being stuck in that resentful place just was not serving anyone any favors.

And that’s what I love. About the Farnam Street quote and about just in general, the approach of embrace reality and then get creative of how you’re gonna get there. It’s just such a great example of how that has served me really well in my life, and I hope it does in yours too. Okay, let’s turn to some other quicker examples.

Your brain is not an alarm clock and it won’t alert you right when it’s time to leave the house to drive to that thing. Now, this is kind of like remembering the things, but it’s a little different. Is that time sensitive? Like, we need to do something right now. Embrace that your brain, again has a thousand other things to do that are more important.

Use tech to help you know when it’s time to do something. Like leaving the house. It’s really time sensitive. You have these tools at your disposal, just take advantage of them so that you can lose track of time, like [00:08:00] allow your brain to lose track of time and then also still know that you’ll be able to leave the house when you need to leave the house.

Another example is we are all terrible at estimating how long things take. Across the board. I think all humans are really bad at underestimating how long things take from the repetitive things we do every day. We, I mean, we don’t even put ’em on the calendar typically. We completely dismiss them. We think it’ll take us zero minutes to get out of the house, all that kind of stuff.

Two, the one-off things too, like the work projects we’re like, yeah, we can do that in 10 hours when it takes us more likely, like 40 to 50 hours to do that big project. That is very normal. And yet a lot of us are just kind of beat ourselves up, like I underestimate, but we don’t make any changes to help us figure that out.

So just know, build strategies into whatever time management system you use. In the Bright Method. We do this all the time, but use strategies to help account for the fact that, hey, I’m [00:09:00] probably not gonna know how long this is gonna take. I’m probably gonna underestimate, so have strategies in place to help with that.

I believe I have an episode about that. I wanna say it’s episode two or three, something like that, way back at the beginning, all about that. So check that out as well. Another quick example. You don’t have energy to do the personal quote unquote productive things at night. I know this isn’t everybody.

Some people love doing it at night so they can free up their weekends. A lot of other people are like, I try to do productive things and 85% of the time I can’t do it. And so then I’m just trying to do productive things and it just feels like I’m running into a brick wall ’cause my brain’s not working or I don’t do ’em.

But then I feel guilt when I’m not doing them. Again, you can fight against the reality of whether you have energy or not at night, or you can accept it. You can say, once I get home, I sit down. It’s after all the like life, logistics, meals, all that kind of [00:10:00] stuff have been done. Maybe you have kids and they’re in bed.

At that point, I just can’t do anything, quote unquote productive. The most productive thing I actually could do is relax. Enjoy it. Also go to bed like at a reasonable time. And what that means is we accept that and then we figure out, okay, what are the productive things you do have to do? And when do we do them?

And I guarantee across the board everything will be more enjoyable because you’ll get to enjoy and soak in evenings. You’ll get more sleep because you’re prioritizing sleep. And you then do productive things when your brain is actually ready and able to do ’em. So they go by faster. Again, accepting the reality is just another example of accepting the reality of you and your energy and the, the fact that we’re not robots and we might be really tired at the end of the day and accepting that and then looking for solutions outside of it.

Hey, another one that is kind of random, but was definitely [00:11:00] the case for me is it’s hard for you to say no when someone asks you to do something face to face, and whether that’s in person or on Zoom. If you have to look at someone in their eyeballs, it is very hard for you to say, no, that is me for sure, and you can try and change that or beat yourself up for that or whatever it is.

The reality is for me. I would say that it’s good to try and change it. What I mean is it was very, I kind of kept expecting myself to just say no. Like instead of saying yes, I could say no while I stared at someone, and that’s most often too hard for me. I will say it’s gotten a lot easier, but especially in the beginning it was very difficult and I wasn’t doing it, so I would cave.

The reality I guess, was not accepting. I’d say yes. When I look at someone in the eyes, it’s more that I can’t say no when I’m looking at someone in that, or like, you know, that deer in headlights feeling and you’re just like, okay, yes. What was preen instead was to realize. Well, I can’t say no, [00:12:00] but I could say something else.

Is there a middle ground? And that’s where building in that pause that we’ve talked about in a lot of episodes comes from. So having a phrase like at your fingertips that you can pull out and you’ve practiced and you feel weird, but it’s at your fingertips and you can say it in the moment. Something like this sounds really interesting.

I have to check my calendar before I commit. But really cool opportunity or something like that, that buys you space and then you can go. Say your no by email. You can feel, you can categorize that as a cowardly move if you want, but to me it’s effective, it’s fine. I can finesse my, no, it gets me where I wanna go and it’s a no big deal.

And I’m actually then doing like tailoring my life in the way that I want by saying yes and no to opportunities that make sense to me. The final reality that I think is, I mean, again, this can go so far beyond like time management. I’m sure there are many more in the time management space, but the biggest one I see is the fact that your [00:13:00] time is limited, and a lot of people want to live in denial of that reality, or they spend time railing against it.

If I only had more time. If I only had one more hour, if I only had five more hours. All of those types of sayings are just arguing with reality, and if that’s where your brain is focused on, then you are going to spend your energy fighting with reality and losing. If instead you accept time is limited.

As we’ve talked about, it doesn’t mean my capability is limited, but my time, my capacity, it is limited. That is a neutral fact. If you wanna argue against it, I mean go for it, but that’s not gonna get you anywhere. But our time is limited, and the reality is we are trying to do a lot with it, and many of us wanna do a lot of awesome things between caring for the people we love, [00:14:00] rocking careers that we enjoy.

Exploring interests that we have sleeping, which we enjoy. There’s just a lot we wanna squeeze into that limited time, and I think over time we can do so much of it and lead very like, varied multi chaptered lives, but we can’t do it all at the same time or even on the same day, or even in the same month, or even in the same year.

At least not in a way that feels good. I think that’s a tricky part too, is we talked about capability and capacity, and I think that that itself is a real unlock for a lot of people. I also wanna say that some of the clients I work with have been doing a ton with their limited time, and so there is an intellectual feeling of, well, I can do it, I’ve done it, I can do it.

But the tricky part is, do you like how life feels? That’s where I think the real clincher is. Are you enjoying, like there’s so many things that we want to do and that [00:15:00] even if we got to do like we just, were trying to cram in all the things we truly want to do. At a certain point, if you cram in too much, you don’t enjoy those things that you wanted to enjoy at all because you’re stretched too thin, you’re scrambling, you’re dropping balls, you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re not getting enough breathing space, you’re not getting enough time with loved ones.

Even too much of a good thing can be a lot good. Things can stress us out too. And while we know this intellectually to some degree, I don’t think a lot of us know where those lines are. How limited is my time? What am I trying to squeeze into it? Does it fit? Will I have enough breathing room if I try and take on this other thing?

Those things, at least for me, before the Bright Method, were very conceptual and theoretical. Easily malleable in my head. I could trick myself into saying, into thinking that I [00:16:00] could take it on if I only, you know, puzzle piece all these things into like basically ignoring my sleeping windows. And so I encourage you to use a system that makes that more concrete, makes you not be able to out negotiate yourself.

I’ll say that was part of lawyering I was pretty good at. I was negotiating and I could do it to myself. And it’s good to have a system to keep you honest on that front. And if you don’t know where to start, I do think that making everything visual in a digital calendar, you know, you can start playing with that.

It’s so effective because once you block time for all the things you have to do, including things that feel silly to calendar, like showering and getting dressed in the morning, walking dogs and all that kind of stuff, and then add in all the things you want to do, like taking on that presentation, going to that art class, going to a soccer game, including all the driving time, all that kind of stuff, you are forced to confront that time is limited and choices [00:17:00] must be made.

About you, what you want to do without limited time. There is such a simple elegance of a digital calendar in that if the time blocks of the things you’re trying to do do not fit within the day, you are objectively trying to do an impossible amount of things, and it keeps you honest and trying to fight that reality.

You know what fits in the calendar and the broader thing of time is limited. Trying to fight that reality will not result in any different reality. It just results in an exhausted and defeated you. So make sure you accept the reality, even when it pushes you to make choices about how you’re gonna spend that time, because otherwise you won’t be the one making the choices somebody else will.

Or just happenstance. Whatever gets done, gets done. That’s what’s making those choices for you. ’cause the choices do. They have to be made, they will happen. And you can decide whether you wanna make them or leave them to chance or someone else. [00:18:00] And I just wanna really be clear here, ’cause this can sound very doom and gloom.

I think it’s very empowering and freeing to realize this stuff. And as I said, empowering to be like, okay, if I can’t do it all, I’m gonna decide to the extent I can what I’m gonna do. I just wanna also clarify that you can still do a lot of the things that you can’t do right now. You can find homes for those things in your calendar into the future, three weeks from now, six months from now, two years from now.

To me, that’s another beautiful part of a digital calendar, is that you can put things out that far into the future and future you will see them. I really believe that life has chapters, and just because we can’t do something right now doesn’t mean we can’t get excited about a chapter down the road when we can.

Embrace reality in all the ways we’ve talked about today, including the fact that time is limited and you must make decisions. And while a lot of these realities that we embrace can be frustrating in the short term, like when you have to accept them, [00:19:00] it’s all really freeing and makes life far more enjoyable day to day when you’re working with and around who you are and your natural tendencies instead of demanding that you fundamentally change.

I truly think all of it will help you feel more accomplished each night. Calm about tomorrow and excited about what’s ahead. And if you want my help with any of this. You know me. I love the Bright Method. I think it is an incredible vehicle to do all of this. We’ll be reopening for enrollment for my 10 week program in mid-September, and until then, you can enjoy the library of episodes here.

There will be one more next week before we wrap up Season one for a period of time yet to be determined. You can also hang out with me on Instagram or in your email inbox if you prefer that. And again, I’ll see you next week with one more episode. If you’d like to leave a review, I would so appreciate it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Really, really appreciate it. Thank you for being here, [00:20:00] and I’ll catch you in the next one.

Links you might enjoy:

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Stop Bargaining with Reality (And What to Do Instead)

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