Opt Into Doing Your Best
Black Girl Burnout
Kelley Bonner
4.7 • 762 Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this reflective solo episode, host Kelley explores what it means to “do your best” when your best no longer looks the same. Drawing from her experience with grief, aging, and shifting capacity, Kelley redefines productivity and success through softness and self-compassion. She invites listeners to release perfectionism, honor their limits, and embrace a gentler approach to achievement.
This episode is a tender reminder that your best self is not about doing more—it’s about doing what’s sustainable and aligned with who you are today.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Doing your best changes with your season of life—honor your current capacity.
- Softness and rest are not weakness; they are essential to long-term fulfillment.
- Cultural and familial conditioning can disguise perfectionism as ambition.
- Redefining excellence can help you reclaim balance, visibility, and joy.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
00:00 – Redefining “Your Best”
Kelley opens up about end-of-year pressures and how “soft lock-in” challenges the old habit of grinding.
04:00 – Listening to the Body’s Signals
She reflects on grief, aging, and the body’s cues for rest and slowing down.
07:00 – Unlearning the Need to Overperform
Kelley unpacks how cultural narratives about excellence and representation shaped her identity.
18:00 – Choosing Ease and Visibility
She closes by discussing how striving for perfection leads to burnout and invisibility—and how choosing ease brings peace.
SUPPORT THE SHOW
Are you experimenting with new ways to rest? Whether it’s saying no to one more obligation, shutting your laptop at 5 p.m., or taking a slow walk with no agenda, capture that moment of ease. Share it with us:
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Drop a review—help us spread the word that rest is not weakness.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast, Kelly here. |
| 0:06.5 | And today's episode is a personal one. |
| 0:09.5 | I am going to be talking about what it's like when doing your best doesn't look the way it used to. |
| 0:19.0 | This end of the year, I've been talking a lot about the soft to lock-in, |
| 0:24.6 | that there's a lot of goals and things that I want to get accomplished before the end of the |
| 0:28.6 | year hits. And I'm excited. There's some energy around some possibilities. I'm feeling good, |
| 0:35.3 | but I'm also feeling tired. I've had a lot going on in my life |
| 0:41.4 | for so long. It just feels like a lot going on is the baseline. And I know most of you who are |
| 0:48.3 | listening to this podcast can probably identify with that. I have been trying to practice what I preach, particularly when it comes |
| 0:58.1 | to the soft lock-in concept, this idea that grinding and pushing and forcing yourself |
| 1:05.5 | into success doesn't work. And if it does, it doesn't leave you feeling fulfilled. And so instead, |
| 1:12.9 | I am choosing to be soft about the way I go about getting goals accomplished. But what I've |
| 1:21.1 | realized is, as I always say, this idea of the soft lock-in at the end of the year, it's an ongoing practice. It's |
| 1:30.9 | something that I'm choosing every single day because though I declared it once, doesn't make |
| 1:37.4 | it true. It doesn't mean that I'm going to do it perfectly every time. And the truth is, I have |
| 1:44.0 | been tempted to grind. But for better or for worse, |
| 1:49.5 | grief, age, my body, they're saying something totally different. They're signaling the need for me |
| 1:59.2 | to pause. |
| 2:04.3 | And I'm choosing to honor that. |
| 2:08.4 | And it's from that space that I wanted to create this episode. |
| 2:19.8 | I wanted to talk about what does it look like when you have that moment of tension between wanting to do the soft lock-in, believing in that messaging, |
| 2:27.5 | and fighting the programming of wanting to push and grind and go harder and further. |
... |
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