Opt Into A Soft Pivot
Black Girl Burnout
Kelley Bonner
4.7 • 762 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this reflective solo episode, Kelley invites you into the quiet, powerful moment when change begins—not with a bang, but with a whisper. Whether you’re shifting careers, reevaluating relationships, or letting go of an identity you’ve outgrown, this conversation holds space for the soft, honest pivot. The one you make not out of burnout or collapse, but from clarity, self-trust, and care.
This is an episode about tuning in, not performing. About choosing yourself before things fall apart. And about the courage it takes to release something—even when it once brought you joy.
Key Takeaways
- The soft pivot honors the quiet nudge before the crash. You don’t have to break to begin again. Listening early can save you pain later.
- Outgrowing a role, job, or identity doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you're evolving—and evolution comes with grief, grace, and growth.
- Stillness is strategic. Get still before you get busy. Let your body weigh in on your next move. Expansiveness is a signal.
- You can take a small step without having the whole plan. A pivot can begin with a journal entry, a whispered truth, or a shift in energy.
Episode Highlights & Timestamps
- [00:05:23] Choose to bend before you break
- Kelley introduces the concept of the soft pivot—a gentle, intentional shift before burnout forces your hand. She explores what it means to move from alignment instead of collapse.
- [00:09:22] You can love something and still need to leave it
- A tender reflection on grief, identity, and how hard it can be to walk away from something you’re good at—even when it’s no longer right for you.
- [00:16:08] Get still before you get strategic
- Kelley offers practical insight on the difference between reacting and recalibrating. Stillness isn’t inactivity—it’s preparation.
- [00:20:11] CTA: What are you outgrowing right now?
- The episode ends with a powerful question: "What are you holding onto that no longer feels true about yourself?"
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast. Kelly here, and I am back with a question for you. |
| 0:07.7 | How do you know when it's time to let go of the path you're on? |
| 0:13.6 | This is a question I think I've wrestled with personally, and I think a lot of people wrestle with. |
| 0:20.1 | When they feel this need to change or they're feeling like something is amiss, they're just not really clear about what to do. They know something isn't working, and they're pretty sure that the direction they're going in in their lives is requiring some kind of change. |
| 0:40.9 | It's also a question I've been thinking about a lot more to talk about because I look at the |
| 0:46.5 | world around me and I see people who feel this, this energy, this need to change. And it's a direct reaction to the world around them. |
| 0:57.8 | Things have gotten a lot harder. This year has been difficult for many people. And whether it's |
| 1:07.7 | economically or socially or spiritually or familial things going on in your family and relatives, there's just been a lot of pressure on people and a lot of need to kind of scramble to make quick changes to try to keep up. |
| 1:24.6 | I see this a lot with social media. A lot of the content creators that I've followed or just |
| 1:31.5 | watching them on my feed as they appear, they're all in the midst of changing content, |
| 1:36.5 | trying different things. And while some of that feels organic and natural, everybody has to |
| 1:42.4 | change. I know for myself, I've changed. A lot of it feels anxious. |
| 1:47.2 | Like the feeling I get from it all is anxiety. This need to pivot to stay relevant. This need to |
| 1:53.1 | pivot for numbers. This need to try to make quarterly goals financially if you're an entrepreneur. |
| 2:01.2 | I see it across all the platforms, whether it's LinkedIn to TikTok and Instagram. |
| 2:08.1 | And I know for myself, I've said that before in previous episodes, I've just kind of opted out of that. |
| 2:13.7 | Not in a delusional kind of, oh, everything's fine, I'll just keep what I'm doing, |
| 2:19.0 | and hope everything becomes magically perfect. |
| 2:22.7 | It's not so much that. |
| 2:24.3 | It's more so that I've chosen to opt out of chasing trends and looking at data numbers overly so |
| 2:30.4 | and hyper fixating on, for example, the success of Black Girl burnout because I just don't |
| 2:36.7 | ultimately have a bunch of control over how successful this podcast is or isn't, how much |
... |
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