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A client said it like it was just a fact: if she pushed back on new work, those clients would take their business elsewhere and never come back. Kelly heard it, recognized the fear behind it, and also recognized she’d spent years operating from that exact same assumption.
This episode is about what actually happens when you push back. Kelly makes the case that it’s one of the best ways to find out who you’re working with, whether they’re a fit for the life you’re building, and whether it’s worth staying. She shares her own story from her attorney days, a client who stepped off a board after one pushback conversation, and another who got promoted five months after finally having the capacity conversation her boss didn’t know was needed. If your plate is overflowing and you keep absorbing anyway, this one’s worth a listen.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- 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: [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. All right. Today I wanna talk about the kind of fear around pushing back, but the incredible data that pushing back on workload, on projects, on all this kind of stuff can give us.
Recently, a client brought up on a call during the 10-week Bright Method program that she said she couldn’t decline new work because those people would take their business elsewhere and never come back. She worked in a very, you know, not saturated, but busy, full, you know, lay of the land of competitors, and if the client wasn’t happy, they would just go to someone else. [00:01:00]
That’s what she just stated as a fact. And I get why. You know? There’s enough truth to it that we treat it as fact. Plus, at least for me, like, anything fear-based feels more, like, big and real than maybe it should, like, be warranted to feel, but it does, and I get that. And so I just wanna be clear that I have zero judgment here.
Like, I spent a long time in my legal career and in my business career operating from that assumption, that if I pushed back, I would lose work, lose the relationship, I would lose the opportunity, and so I just kept absorbing. But we really need to dig into that because when our plates are already overflowing — and I know hers was and I suspect yours is as well — regardless of the reason, taking on more is just living in denial of your real capacity constraints. [00:02:00]
Like, we do have limited capacity, and it’s important to really acknowledge that and realize that if we just keep taking whatever comes at us, we are going to overflow our capacity. We are going to not be able to complete the work, at least not be able to complete the work well, and very much not enjoy the way it all feels indefinitely because of this approach.
We have to push back, and that can look different. You know, that can be saying an outright no to a new project. It could also be pushing back on the given deadline. It could be some other middle ground option. But it’s just not, like, blessing whatever’s asked of you and absorbing it and figuring out how you’re gonna do it later.
That pushback factually just has to happen. You know, if you take the emotion out of it, you have limited capacity. You have more work than you can handle coming at you. You have to manage what work gets done, or just happenstance will decide what gets done. Like, you can work really hard, but if you have an unrealistic amount of workload, some things are not going to get done. [00:03:00]
And if you haven’t decided what to take on and not take on, then it’s just whatever happens to not get done doesn’t get done, and it could be something that actually is a high priority or very important to you in your life. So there’s that. But in addition to pushback being aimed at getting you an actually realistic workload that matches your capacity and all of the incredible ripple effects that come with that, there’s another benefit in that: what if pushing back makes the wrong people leave and the right people stay?
And I’m using right and wrong here — kind of, I don’t mean it so black and white, I’d put quotation marks around it. But what if pushback, in addition to getting you a reasonable workload, makes those wrong people leave and the right people stay, making your overall workload reasonable, as we talked about, but also more enjoyable? [00:04:00]
And my little hypothesis is that it does. I suspect that it does. There are two reasons. First, like, if you’re the one making these decisions, you get to choose who and what you push back on. You do not have to have the same rules necessarily for everyone. You can say no to the client who’s way more demanding than your other ones, but not to the ones you love working with.
Or you can say no to the patients with medical conditions that another specialist or department is better equipped to handle anyway, and yes to the conditions that are right in your wheelhouse. This doesn’t have to be — obviously, when I’m talking about patients, what I’m hoping is you’re seeing it’s not just about, like, good and bad people.
It’s also, like, what substantive work do you enjoy doing versus others? I just wanna clarify that — it’s not, obviously, like, necessarily just who’s kind and who’s not. It’s right or wrong in terms of the type of work you enjoy as well. [00:05:00] Like, in my attorney days, I figured out, like, I really loved working for two partners that did patent litigation, and so I filled my plate with work from that team.
I liked those people, and then I also liked their work style and the impact on my life. They had both had young kids. They wanted to get out of there, too. They weren’t interested in staying super late for unnecessary reasons. They didn’t want me — you know, they wanted me to get the work done, and they were not gonna, like, micromanage me or keep me in the office when it wasn’t needed at all hours of the day.
So I liked them. I liked the work itself. I liked their work style and the impact on my life. And so when I realized that, I took on — I never said no to them. I took on everything they would give me, and in fact, I would go ask them for more work even when my plate was full.
But I would decline work from partners I didn’t wanna work with. Nice people — like, just to be clear, none of the partners I declined I didn’t like as people, but they ran constant fire drills, debatably unnecessary ones. [00:06:00] They would wanna have unannounced team meetings at, like, 5:00 or 5:30 at night. Like, there just were things that I was like, “This is not really the, like, style that I wanna be working in.”
And so because of that, I’m going to fill my plate up with the group that I want to work with and decline work with the people I don’t wanna work with because my plate is objectively full. And I can defend that. And I’m just sharing this as an example that, again, you don’t have to have one bright-line rule you apply to everybody.
You can, you know, play with this and decide when to engage it and when not to. The result for me when I did that was a more reasonable workload over time, ‘cause then over time I could work with them to manage the workload within our, you know, cases. It was also work I enjoyed a whole lot more. I had better specialization, so I was more efficient ‘cause I wasn’t outside my wheelhouse all the time.
I could come up with workflows with those partners. There was a lot of efficiency in that. It was a work lifestyle that suited my preferences, as I shared, and it streamlined those workflows in that area of the law, which made my practice, sure, more efficient, but, like, ease-filled. [00:07:00] Ease was, like, really what was appealing to me.
And so that’s just more my point on this first point — you know, my question is, what if pushing back makes the wrong people leave and the right people stay, making your overall workload more enjoyable? You know, pushback doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all approach. You can employ it strategically and in a targeted way.
The second point, though, is a little different, but I think also really important, is that I suspect that pushback filters out the people you don’t wanna work with anyway. For example, a woman that I worked with was on a board of an organization, in addition to her professional and personal commitments.
And as she worked through the Bright Method program, she gained a whole new level of clarity around her workload and what she could agree to and on what timeline and all of that, given her capacity constraints that we all have. We all have our own capacity constraints. [00:08:00] And the board chair didn’t like it.
You know, he reached out with a new request. She pushed back on just the timeline, and he really laid into her, telling her that, you know, people in this role needed to be more committed, that if she couldn’t do this, she couldn’t be on the board, blah, blah, blah. And her response, essentially — I don’t remember the exact words — was, “Okay. I don’t think this board is the right fit for me. You can take me off the board.” Pushback makes people show you their true colors, and the earlier you can figure that out, the better, in my opinion. Now, I just wanna say that I totally get that these conversations don’t usually feel good in the moment, like in the relative short-term moment, which is why some of us avoid them, which I get.
I don’t love confrontation. But the end result, which is far longer lasting, is incredibly freeing. And I want you to know that often it really does go well. [00:09:00] You know, juxtapose the chair’s reaction I just talked about and the experience of that woman — although again, short-term experience, long-term experience is good.
She gets off that board. But juxtapose that conversation with ones that I often hear about from clients who are dealing with great people. You know, this is an example of a woman who was in a finance department in a large corporation. She said that learning the Bright Method helped her have confidence pushing a prioritization conversation at work with her boss and business partners.
She was able to get alignment to work on three big priorities for the quarter, only three, and with two weeks left in the quarter, they were on track to deliver all three, something her boss didn’t expect would be possible. Another woman shared that she realized through the program — and this, I’m not trying to share these for testimonials of the program, I just think it’s important to see that drawing boundaries and having pushback can lead to great results, and helps you know when you’re working with people you want to be working with because those great results happen. [00:10:00]
This woman shared, “The Bright Method allowed me to get clear on what my capacity was and see that I was totally overworked. Due to finally being clear about my workload and what it meant for my organization, and having conversations with my boss, I got promoted at work five months after the program ended.
I got a large pay raise and title, and less but deeper responsibilities. All the work that kept me from doing the important work got taken off my plate. I can now focus on the things that will help make a huge impact on my organization, and it’s the stuff I like to do. I enjoy going to work again, and am feeling like I’m making a difference instead of putting out urgent but not important fires every day and never getting to the things that matter.”
Now, a lot of this comes down, obviously, like, to her work and all the implementation she did and the clarity she got, so huge props to her. And it comes down to she’s working for someone awesome, who probably wasn’t aware of what was going on, and then she could push back on some things by having these conversations. [00:11:00]
And because she’s a great leader and works at a great organization, they were able to implement some amazing changes here. And now the woman I worked with gets to enjoy her job and knows that she’s working with great people who get her great results. Pushback helps us understand the people and the work culture we’re interacting with, and whether they’re good fits for us and the life we’re trying to build.
I know it’s worked for me that way. You know, my first firm, I pushed back, great results. Really, I could’ve kept slogging on and being miserable, but because I pushed back and worked with great people, I really built a life I loved living there. My second firm, I did the same thing, and it did not go well.
And that was really good data to know because I realized and had the clarity of: I am asking you reasonable things to help protect my workload. You are not delivering. [00:12:00] Whatever reason, doesn’t mean they’re bad people, they’re not delivering the life I wanna live. That is excellent data for me to know that it’s time to go.
In a weird way — I don’t know if this actually makes sense, but in a weird way — it really reminds me of when I was a public defender for one summer. So just, like, a public defender intern for one summer, very minimal experience. I was learning about jury selection, and during the voir dire process, one of the things the public defender that was kind of mentoring us about jury selection was saying is he’s like, “Love the hate.
You wanna love the hate in your jury pool and ask questions that make people feel comfortable sharing their biases, sharing their hatred” is what we were calling it. But when you are a lawyer — and particularly, I mean, any lawyer, but a public defender dealing with crime — you wanna find out if the people on your jury pool are biased against your client, for whatever reason, even the hate reasons. [00:13:00]
And so often in our culture, we almost don’t wanna find that out about people. It’s, like, so uncomfortable to find that out. But your job as a public defender in that scenario is to love the hate, because then you can eliminate those people. It’s boring, but you get a certain amount of, like, counts of people you can kick out of the jury for no reason.
But if there’s a real shared, like, they’ve spoken bias that’s, like, hate-filled, then you can get them out without using one of your limited strikes. This is a really random story, sorry. But hopefully it makes sense to you to some degree. But essentially, you want to kind of foster an environment and ask questions and dig out the responses — like, you wanna know if there’s gonna be hate, and you want them to say it, and you wanna love the hate so that you can get them to say it and get them out of there and structure your jury so that they’re not coming in, like, without hearing anything about the case, already biased against your client. [00:14:00]
And I kind of think about it the same way here — these conversations are hard to have. And, you know, pushing back is hard to do, and it’s easier to look away. It’s easier in the short term to not ask those questions, to not chase down those answers. But you’re gonna end up with a situation that’s not good for you when you do that.
And in some ways, having these conversations helps people show their true colors, and you wanna know the true colors of who you’re working with. You don’t wanna be, you know, killing yourself for someone who’s not gonna look out for you, who has unrealistic expectations that are never gonna get better.
It’s never going to get better there. You might as well find out if you can make it work for you, and I think that’s my convoluted point. You know? I’ll probably leave that in just because maybe someone out there can articulate it better than me and just understand what I’m putting down on the, you know, love the hate front. [00:15:00]
But going back to the conversations around pushback — pushback can be pretty great because it tells you earlier on than you otherwise might find out who are the people you’re working with, are they good fits for you, and do you wanna keep working there? And if the pushback works in the way that we want, wonderful.
And if it doesn’t, that is great, too, because it gives you great data that can help you eventually remove the things in your life that aren’t great fits for you and the lives that you want for yourselves. So just a nudge — push back. You know, I know that it’s easier said than done, and if you need help, obviously knowing when and how to do it and have the specifics at your fingertips to back you up, all of that, I love the Bright Method for that.
I’d love to work with you. But for purposes of today, if you know how to push back and when to do it, don’t let the uglier confrontation parts of it deter you from doing it, because it is the one way to really bring your workload into alignment with your capacity. And you might have to deal with some people handling it in not great ways, but isn’t that a great thing to figure out now? [00:16:00]
And then you can make decisions in light of it. I would love to hear what you think. Let me know. Also, as I said, if you want help understanding when and how to push back and feel more confident doing it because you have all the data — like the objective data — at your fingertips, I would love to work with you.
Enrollment for the 10-week Bright Method program opens up on August 6th at 11:00 AM Central Time for the September and October start dates. You can learn all about it and join the waitlist and get the add-to-calendar feature and all of that at kellynolan.com/bright. As always, you can let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next one. [00:17:00]
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.
