Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout Podcast. Kelly here. And today I want to talk about how to opt into surrender. Earlier in the week on Monday, I talked about opting out of fighting. And I went through a list of

why there are times where fighting just isn't helpful, particularly when we get locked into

patterns where our default response is to fight. I gave my own experience about how I

literally tried to live up to my name, Kelly, which is Gaelic and does mean warrior fighter.

And what it cost me when that was the only way I knew how to resolve conflicts or deal with stressors in my

life. I talked about how sometimes fighting is pointless. And I gave two conditions. When you're

fighting against something you truly can't control and when you're fighting against something

that's not worth your time. And then I even told you about what my last two, now three weeks have been,

how chaotic and how stressful and how upsetting and saddening parts of it has been.

And why having a fighter spirit and a warrior spirit, if I had held on to that during

these last few weeks, honestly, these last few months, I would not be able to show up for the people

I love, to show up for myself, to be able to do the things that I do, to even show up to do

this podcast.

And so while I made the case or why it's important to opt out of fighting, I said, we have to

opt into something else then. And today we're going to talk about what that is, which is opting

into surrender. Now, if you're like me who's retired from being a default fighter, like your only response is to

fight, surrender probably feels like a really uncomfortable word.

In fact, when we look at surrender through dominant culture lens, the lens of history,

when people mention surrender, they always attach it to

a battlefield. And whoever surrenders in the battle is in fact the loser. And so that type of thinking

can enter into our lives. I know it certainly entered into mind where I always associated with fighting where the only

goal of fighting was to win. And there was no concept of surrender. That surrender meant that

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