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You were probably taught this as a kid: you start a season, you finish it. No matter what. Kelly grew up with that rule too. Then parenting got messier than the theory, and she started noticing the same pattern in the women she works with. Commitments made when life looked completely different, roles that quietly turned into something three times the original size, activities that bring dread every single week. And none of them would even consider leaving early. “You finish what you start” is still running in the background, years after childhood.
This episode is Kelly questioning that out loud. She looks at where the rule came from, when it serves us, and what it costs when we keep applying it past the point where it makes sense. She also talks through what an honest, clean exit looks like, because leaving early doesn’t mean disappearing and handing someone a mess. If you’ve been white-knuckling through something that stopped working a while ago, this one’s for you.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Back-to-School Guide (free): https://kellynolan.com/school
- Join the waitlist for the 10-week Bright Method program here: https://kellynolan.com/bright-method-waitlist
Links you might enjoy:
- 🌿 Free 3-Day Time Management Program: Get five short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
- 📱Follow me on Instagram: Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women – like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time. •
- ✨ The full Bright Method™️ program: If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time – and their peace of mind.
Full Transcript:
Kelly Nolan: 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. [00:00:00] 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. [00:01:00] All right. Today, we’re gonna talk about something that sounds like it’s for parents, but it’s not just for parents. So if you don’t have kids, stick with me, because I think it has a real bearing more on how we were raised as kids, and therefore, how we act as adults. And so just stick with me.
Okay, what I wanna talk about today is that there is just this saying, this approach, this philosophy that I think a lot of us inhaled as kids, and that we, at least I, like, have continued to think as a parent is the, you know, right way, I guess, like, the way it should be, the principled way to approach things, and that is that you follow through on your commitments.
You start a sports season, you finish that season, even if you hate it. That is how I was raised. I was taught that there was value in that, and I assumed that I would teach that to my kids. You know, before I had kids, I was [00:02:00] like, “Yep, you start a season, finish it, and then we’ll go from there.”
You know, that whole, like, I was the better parent before I had kids, that whole thing. I had this idea that was the right way. I didn’t really question it. But the more I have moved into parenting — and granted, my oldest is eight, that means, you know, I’m only an eight-year-old parent in the sense that I don’t have a ton of experience here.
But the more that I have moved through parenting, as with everything in parenting, the more I see nuance. What if, for example, the season is a whole school year long? Like, some of these things you sign up for now, like gymnastics and some other things, are like whole school year long seasons. What if in a season like that, in your kid’s final month, they say they don’t wanna continue that sport, that activity?
It’s not a team sport in that, like, no one else is relying on them. My daughter wasn’t doing, like, you know, competitive gymnastics. It was just, like, a season of a sport. And they wanna skip that whole last month. They don’t wanna go back. And I will [00:03:00] add for context, they are showing enthusiasm and willingness to do other activities, and have a busy activity stretch coming up in the next season.
Is it okay to bow out? Is it okay to skip that last month? On the flip side of it, what if it’s this really long commitment, you’re only like a month in, maybe a month and a half, and the kid has consistently resisted going the whole time, and the kid wants to bow out? Do you force months of finishing it out, or even like two or three more months of it?
Twice a week, three times a week, once a week even — you’re gonna battle to get the kid to go. They’re not happy. It’s upsetting. Like, they’re just not happy. Are you really gonna force that whole period of time to keep going? I’ll also throw out there, and I know this isn’t every kid — ‘cause I have two very different kids, so I know all of this depends on a lot of nuance.
What if you have a kid who’s still figuring out what they even like, and it’s a kind of high cost to try out every new [00:04:00] activity? Getting to an activity, getting into it, there’s such a high cost. It’s a struggle. And so getting into any practice or activity is a battle. For them, you know, starting an activity with the pressure to finish out a whole season just injects more weight to an already weighty process for both the kid and the parent, into what should be an exploratory process.
I also wanna flag here that I know there’s a financial piece to this. Like, a lot of us invest a lot of money in these practices, and the gear that goes with them, in getting out of work early, all that kind of stuff. But particularly focusing on the financial side of things, you know, it is a lot, but that’s also a product of the adults’ monetization of youth sports problem in this country, in at least the United States.
And to me, that’s an adult-created problem, not a kid one. And so I don’t wanna, like, fault the kid or make them carry the weight of that just because of the [00:05:00] financial monetization of kids’ youth sports. So I’ll just throw that out there — I’m not trying to neglect the financial thing. It’s just more like, do we really, you know, make the kids carry the weight of that when it’s more of an adult thing?
More to the point, with that kid who — you wanna foster a relatively low-pressure exploratory process in the hopes that they find a thing or a few things that they love — you wanna keep that low pressure. And so what if instead the deal was, “We’ll go four times, and then we’ll decide. We’ll go five times.”
That really shifts the whole approach, both for the kid and for you as the adult. And as I said, there’s a lot of nuance here, and, you know, my math changes if there’s, like, a team counting on the kid or things like that, or if I suspect they truly love the activity, there’s just something they’re struggling with right now.
Like, all of that has an impact. And I think that, you know, we all know our kids really well and should listen to that. I’m not trying to create bright-line rules. I’m just trying to kind of chip at [00:06:00] this bright-line rule I thought existed about, like, you finish your commitments. There’s a lot of honor in that.
So I’m more saying not that everybody shouldn’t finish their commitments, but should we introduce some valid nuance in this?
Because here’s why. In addition to the parenting element of, like, you know, thinking through what do I wanna impose on my kids and foster in them from a, you know, work ethic, but also listening to themselves perspective — why I think it really matters is I work with a lot of women who do so much and often won’t even consider — they either have not thought about it or shut me down immediately — when we talk about bowing out of something midway through, like somewhere in the process of being in it. That can happen even if that activity is gonna last another year or longer and they are miserable. And I think it comes at least [00:07:00] in part from this “you finish your commitments” mantra that we all inhaled as kids.
Again, we painted it as noble and the right way to proceed, and I’m just not so sure. You know, often we make commitments when life looks really different, like something then changes, and now that commitment doesn’t work for us, and yet we’re not willing to renegotiate. We don’t think that’s even appropriate to consider renegotiating it.
Or maybe the commitment scope, when it was told to us, was painted to be somewhat smaller, and now it’s morphed into something else. Either it already was or it just morphed that way, and we still aren’t willing to say, “Actually, I don’t have the interest or the time.” You know, and you can soften how you approach it, but being honest with ourselves that I don’t have the interest or the time to take on something that now has this big of a scope.
I didn’t know it was gonna be this big. And candidly, [00:08:00] sometimes I was led to believe it was not gonna be this big and now it is. I think there are a lot of reasons — I don’t even think I’ve come up with them all — there are a lot of reasons that you might be midway through something and it is no longer working for you in your life.
It fills you with dread. It makes the rest of your life feel too frantic. A whole other list of things. And for some reason, we won’t often even consider bowing out.
And I just think in those scenarios, finishing your commitments, especially when they’re years or longer, I just, I’m skeptical of it now. To be really clear here, bowing out does not mean you just jump ship tomorrow and you’re like, leave them in the lurch and peace out and let them clean up the mess.
Exiting earlier than you planned can be offering, you know, a two-month off-ramp.
It can be working with them for a period of time until they can, you know, find a replacement and onboard. I would limit your time to offer that. I would not make that indefinite. But there are ways [00:09:00] to do it with integrity and kindness — you know, professional kindness — but not continue on.
This relates a little bit to the story I’ve told in the past about, you know, I was in law school. For background, I thought I was gonna be a public defender. I worked at a public defender’s office between my 2L and 3L year and realized I actually didn’t want to do that, and I wanted to go into civil practice, and that’s a really late time to realize that for anyone in law.
And because of that, I was taking a full course load and interning with, like, a small civil litigation law firm — a tiny one — just to, like, learn that area of law to make sure I did wanna do it, and then also to get the experience to show that I did wanna do it. I got that job, and I think it was only, like, two or three months later, I found out that for my second semester of my 3L year, I got a judicial clerkship that was part of, like, my law school’s program.
But I could not [00:10:00] clerk for the judge, intern for the judge, while also still working at a civil litigation firm. It’s like a conflict of interest. And I felt like, “Man, this civil litigation firm just hired me. I can’t now leave them.” And I called my dad, who is incredibly principled and very loyal, and just, you know, he’s like a very, just, really principled guy. I won’t even go into all the stories, but just know that. And I called him and just explained the position, like the issue that I was dealing with, and I was like, “But I really wanna do this judicial clerkship.”
And he’s like, “Could they fire you tomorrow? Could the civil litigation firm fire you tomorrow?” And I was like, “Yeah.” He goes, “Then you can leave whenever you want. It’s business.”
And that example is not applicable in every scenario. I know, you know, if you’re maybe volunteering for a board position or a volunteer position at a school or something like that, it feels like, well, it’s not just business, so maybe it’s not applicable to everything. But I do think it’s relevant, at least in [00:11:00] the scenarios where we are over-committed at work and we wanna bow out of some things and we feel like we can’t.
I just think that’s an important reminder as well. I think that we, particularly women, can have some overactive loyalty, and also, candidly, like, an overactive sense of importance in a sense. And I say that not in a mean way. I just, you know, I’m like, “This platform, I must stay. They need me.” And it’s like, I mean, I’d been working there two months and barely knew anything, was probably messing up more than I was helping.
Like, they were fine. They were gonna be fine without me. They were. So I just throw it all out there that sometimes we have to, like, tease this stuff out of what’s actually going on.
And again, that example is not applicable in every scenario, but I think it can be important to hear. At the end of the day, if you can take some of the loyalty and that sense of things out of it, a lot of these arrangements are transactional [00:12:00] in a sense. And you can again get out of the transaction with fairness and with integrity and, you know, with empathy of the situation you’re leaving them in and helping them bridge the gap to the extent that is fair, but you can leave.
And I really believe that learning when it is okay to exit earlier than intended versus staying in things past their useful life — like, on top of it all, where they’re making us miserable — learning when it’s okay to do that, how to do it fairly and with kindness, that’s a skill worth developing in our kids and in ourselves.
And it’s something that I don’t pretend to have all the answers to, but I think it’s worth at least starting the conversation — there’s more nuance here than I think we grew up thinking there was, at least I did. And I would love to hear what you think as well. So definitely, you know, shoot me a DM, shoot me an email, let me know what you think on this front. [00:13:00]
I find it really fascinating, and I would really love to hear what you think.
I’ve had some amazing conversations in my email inbox with women when I emailed out to my email list about this topic, and I just loved it. I had women, you know, sharing about their own kids and how they made the same decision to let a kid quit something. And when they started a new activity, they just saw the difference.
You know, the kid in the first activity had been really dragging, not into it, and then in the next activity, they’re beaming and loving this new activity. And how cool. And if we stay just so stuck in that first route and don’t let ourselves and let our kids explore a different route, we’ll never know.
And a lot of this is exploratory. I mean, obviously for our kids, hopefully, but also for us. And what are we giving up by making ourselves, like, stay — like, white-knuckling through something that isn’t enjoyable for us? And you know, in a sports context, if it’s a sports [00:14:00] team, it frees up a position for somebody else who really might love it.
And same at work, same in your volunteer position, same in all of it. I know that can be a little naive. I know sometimes it can be really hard to fill positions. I’m not trying to, like, totally sugarcoat all of it. But I don’t know. I just think that there’s something really here about freeing ourselves up to keep exploring and find something else that really actually does bring us joy, even if it means we have to bow out of something a little earlier than intended.
So anyway, would love to hear what you think as well. Also, just to let you know, my back to school guide is out now. Um, if you’re new here, the back to school guide is a free guide you can get of all the things you can start calendaring now to help the back to school season — if you have school-aged kids — go smoother, be less scrambly.
Also really important, it helps you lay out your game plan so you can let all those things go and get back to enjoying the rest of your summer, you know, to the extent you have the rest of the summer to enjoy. When you’re [00:15:00] listening to this, it can be just a really nice way to, if you start getting anxious about back to school, really plot things out and then let them go and know that your calendar will remind future you when it’s time to do it.
So you can grab that at the link in the show notes. It’s at kellynolan.com/school. That is a redirect — it’s gonna be a little slower to get you there — but if you go to kellynolan.com/school and give it a couple seconds, it’ll get you there. You can also DM me on Instagram at BTS for back to school. Just DM me the word BTS. Thank you for being here. Thanks for noodling on this with me, and I will catch you in the next one.
Links you might enjoy:
✨ The full Bright Method™️ program If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time—and their peace of mind.
🌿 Free 5-Day Time Management Program Get five short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
📱 Follow me on Instagram Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women—like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.
