"Notice and Do": The Two-Word Family Rule That Went Viral

Hey, beautiful boss mom. Pull up a chair.

I once started driving my second kid to school. I was running through my son’s birthday plans, the week’s lunches, who had the kids which nights, all of it. And then I realized he wasn’t in the car.

He was still at the house.

That’s what happens when you’re the only one in your family who notices everything. And if you’ve ever wanted to share the mental load with your family but had no idea where to even start, this episode with Sam Kelly is going to feel like someone finally opened a window.

Listen to the Episode

About the Guest: Sam Kelly

Sam Kelly is a mental health professional and parenting coach. She teaches busy, overwhelmed moms how to break the cycle of motherhood burnout and share the mental load of running a home with the whole family, by empowering kids to become proactive household contributors.

Her new book is Notice and Do: Raise Proactive Contributors, Break the Motherhood Burnout Cycle and Lighten Your Mental Load. Before the book, it started as an audio course, Little Cycle-Breakers, which listens like a five-part private podcast. She also created Mental Load Man with her husband. You can find everything at hellosamkelly.com and follow her on Instagram at @samkelly_world.

Sam lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and three kids.

The Red Marker Moment

Sam’s origin story is so ordinary it hurts.

Back in 2022, she’d been married for 12 years and had a 10-year-old, an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old. She hit a final-straw breaking point with her husband over how uneven things were at home. So they started having the hard conversations, and she started teaching him how to not just cruise past a full laundry basket because, eh, Sam’s got it.

(Side note, which she made herself: the fact that she had to teach a grown man that is its own symptom of the problem.)

A full year later, it’s a Friday night. She’s making a Saturday chore list for her kids with a red Magic Marker. And she drops the marker on the floor.

She’d just spent a year teaching an adult man how to stop relying on her to notice what needed doing. And here she was, however unintentionally, teaching her kids to rely on her, the mom, to do all of the noticing for them before they ever lifted a finger.

So that night, it changed. They were going to notice and do. You see it, then you make it happen. That’s the whole thing.

A couple of months later it was working, not perfectly, but shockingly well. She built some structure around it because kids do better with structure. Then one Thursday in October, she made a quick Instagram post in Canva thinking it might help a few people. It went crazy, and it changed her family’s life.

It’s Not the Doing. It’s the Noticing.

When I read the book, this is what stopped me.

The exhausting part isn’t always the grocery run. It’s noticing what’s in the fridge. It’s thinking about which lunches are happening and which days. It’s the plan for the week. As a divorced mom, it’s tracking which nights I have my kids and asking their dad what he fed them.

What if the first thing other people took off your plate was the noticing? Not the chores. The noticing.

Sam described the mental load as a thousand tiny open tabs in your brain. Details to track, follow-ups, reminders, things to anticipate. And she said something I haven’t been able to shake:

“We do not realize how much we’ve been carrying until even the smallest pieces start being lifted.”

She told me about a mom who DMed her a photo of her bathroom. A kid had noticed the toilet paper was running low and set a fresh roll on top of the toilet so it was ready. That’s it. That’s the whole story. But it mattered so much to that tired mom that she took a picture and wrote Sam a whole message about it, because for the first time she wasn’t the only person in the house seeing things.

Never underestimate small things being lifted. They add up to the biggest exhale.

“Yeah, But I Don’t Mind Doing It”

I’ll be honest. I caught myself mid-chapter, standing in my kitchen, thinking but I don’t mind doing this.

And then I stopped. That’s not the point.

I asked Sam how often moms come at her with the “yeah, but.” Yeah, but this is how I show love. Yeah, but serving them is our time to connect. Her answer surprised me: not that often.

“Women are by far and away not grasping for excuses to keep holding everything. The majority of the time we are looking for a way out. We just don’t know what that exit door looks like.”

Or we’re too tired to figure it out, so we keep our heads down and keep the status quo going.

And Sam isn’t writing this from a fantasy household. She’s the first to say her family is real, with real kids, including one very strong-willed one, so she’s lived every “but what about when this happens?” That’s why the book answers all of them. What she hears every day now isn’t “but what about.” It’s moms saying, you are never going to believe what just happened.

You’re not failing. You’re inside a system. Sam is clear that the overwhelm and burnout aren’t your fault. And once you can name the system, you can build a different one, where the mental load is a whole-family issue with a whole-family solution, and everyone has real ownership.

I told Sam my ex-husband never “babysat” his own kids. They’re his children. And when I got divorced and people asked what I was going to do, I said I’d be fine. I’d had the kids 100% of the time. It was going to be their dad who learned what it actually looked like. And Sam’s take on the dads who say raising kids was easy? Then they had a 24/7 safety net doing everything behind the scenes.

Empowered Care Is a Love Language Too

This is my favorite idea in the whole book.

So many of us equate love with doing. The perfect breakfast. The packed lunches. Being the cleaning fairy. I’m absolutely guilty of it.

Sam doesn’t tell you to stop. She says you’re doing an amazing job, you can still take care of your kids in a hundred ways, and also, let’s widen the definition of what care looks like.

Then she gave me the toothbrush picture, and I can’t unsee it. Imagine standing in the bathroom with your teenager, holding the toothbrush, scrubbing their teeth for them, telling them to spit, pouring the water in their mouth and patting their lips dry. We’d never do that. But every time we do something for our kids that they can do for themselves, that’s basically what we’re doing.

It robs them of basic life skills. And it robs them of knowing they’re capable. When kids feel capable, confidence comes, and confidence helps with anxiety.

Here’s the part nobody talks about: once kids actually share the work, they start to understand the work. And that’s when real gratitude shows up. Not because you lectured them, but because they get it now.

I apply this to business too. I tell moms to stop making their business a secret. We have a goal thermometer decal right by our door, and I put our revenue numbers on it. When we hit the goal, we all get to do something fun together. If your family only ever sees the stressed-out side of what you’re building, they never get the chance to step up.

The Sixth Grader Who Gets It

One of my big hopes is that my kids grow up and come to me with different problems. I don’t want to hear from my son’s future partner that he doesn’t contribute. I don’t want my daughter thinking her value equals how much she does for everyone.

Sam says that’s exactly why the language matters. Notice and Do isn’t just practice. It’s giving kids age-appropriate words for the mental load, for burnout, for the expectations our culture puts on men and women, so they can choose something different instead of sliding into the default.

Then she told me this story. A mom’s sixth-grade son got a little award at school because, during library time, he noticed some tables were messy and cleaned them off for the librarian without being asked. When his mom asked him about it, he just shrugged and said:

“Mom, it’s just doing the mental load.”

A sixth grader. He knows it’s real. He doesn’t have to be convinced. And he’s doing it out in the world, not just at home. Imagine that boy in 20 years, at work, in his marriage, teaching his own kids. That’s how a home changes a culture.

How to Share the Mental Load Starting This Week

Okay, so you’re inspired, and also you’re thinking have you seen my house? Have you met my husband?

Sam said if she were listening, she’d be rolling her eyes too. That’s why everything in the book was built for the burnt-out, super busy mom. Because that’s who she was when she made it.

Here’s the easiest way to start, which she calls a noticing walk:

1. Take 10 to 15 minutes. Walk around the house with your kids. Start with just one room if that’s all you’ve got.
2. Point out what to notice, specifically. Kids don’t know what they don’t know. If they’ve never been expected to do it, don’t assume it’s common sense. Show them what a clean kitchen counter looks like. The mail goes here. The milk goes in the fridge. Scooch the chairs in. In the bathroom, show them the all-purpose spray under the sink and the orangey ring around the drain that means it needs a quick wipe.
3. Everyone does one notice and do a day, of their own choosing. You showed them examples. Now they pick.
4. They come tell you what they did. Then you build from there.

I’d built a little family app called Family Quest, with points and streaks, because my son loves a streak. Reading Sam’s book, I realized the list was the training wheels. Sam agreed that a list is a totally fine place to start. But the goal is to grow past it, so kids check things off because they’re done, not hunt the list to find out what to do. The goal is ownership, not obedience.

(And for the record, when my daughter told me she didn’t need help because she’s a strong, independent woman, I told her strong, independent women get all the help they can get.)

You Get to Matter

Sam has been throwing spaghetti at the wall online for about 20 years. They’ve always needed two incomes, and she’s always needed to be building something. Notice and Do is the thing that finally took. Her advice, as simple as it sounds: don’t give up.

She also said something every mom needs to hear twice. Imagine what happens when women aren’t the engine running everything behind the scenes. They might finally figure out what they’re passionate about. Or just rest.

“Even if this book had zero positive implications for your kids, and it was only for you and you alone, that would be reason enough to do it, because you get to matter.”

I believe women are built for massive capacity. Just not 100% of the time. We’ve normalized running at full capacity forever, and now we don’t know how to relax, receive support, or even take a compliment. Sharing the load isn’t about moms doing nothing. It’s about choosing where your capacity goes.

Sam summed it up perfectly: less self-care, more supportive care.

And if you’ve got your own simple idea that you think is too obvious to share? Say it out loud. It’s usually the simplest thing that changes everything.

Your Next Step

Grab Sam’s book, Notice and Do. Read the little stories. Every one of them makes you think, okay, if they can do it, so can I. If you want the fastest way in, her audio course Little Cycle-Breakers is right on hellosamkelly.com, along with Mental Load Man, the course she made with her husband.

Then come into the free BossMom community. This is where we practice exactly this: getting clear on what you actually want your capacity to go toward, building focus when your time is limited, and doing business differently because you’re a mom, not in spite of it. You get free networking events, mindset workshops, daily mindset audios, and real connection with other moms, all in our own app, completely off social media.

When you’re ready to put that freed-up brain space to work, Raising Your Business is the next step. We build the right marketing plan for your business and give you the implementation support to actually hit your financial goals.

Go take a noticing walk this week. And then tell me what your kids noticed.

I’ll see you next week.

xo, Dana