The steady, deliberate quit
Bringing yourself along as you leave something big
What do you do when your gut is saying that the best way to finish something (a job, a relationship, a project) is to quit, while the world says that quitting is for losers?
First, you can imagine what a good quit actually looks like.
Real-world quits are only sometimes cinematic — you know the scene: the quitter abruptly walks out after a broken last straw. Maybe once in our lives we’ll get the clean, righteous exit that leaves everyone in our wake stunned and suddenly admiring. But that kind of dramatic quit is more often what we dream about from the seat of our unhappiness: a decisive, single stroke that puts right everything that was wrong. We say, “No more,” and strut forward, perhaps in a slight puff of bitterness, but most importantly free of cobwebs and others’ negativity. The naysayers and difficult people, of course, are overcome with remorse for giving us trouble.
In reality, a good quit usually looks different and takes longer. It unfolds slowly over time, often invisibly forming and unforming itself, entailing long conversations with ourselves and others. On the surface, we seem to be bobbing and stationary, but underneath, our limbs are churning. Below the surface, rambunctious and unarticulated currents foment a riptide of indecision and courage until, at last, we decide on our strokes and get out.
In a real-life quit, you know you’re not a loser. Actually, you don’t even want to win anymore — not at this particular thing. You just want out. And you’d like to leave in a way you can live with. “Living with” quitting could mean anything from being financially stable enough to depart one job for another, or truly feeling that you didn’t waste years, sweat, and good intentions on a lost cause.
Career-change coach Rita Connor is a good person to talk to about quitting. Rita would use different words — she’d call it “reinventing yourself” — but the processes are the same: dig in to figure out what you really want to do with your one, precious life, resolve to go after it, and design the escape.
Rita specializes in helping others to, as she puts it, “supercharge the second half of life,” but she wasn’t always a coach. Like the workshops she designed by the same name, Rita has reinvented herself over the years, thoughtfully and incrementally evolving from one phase of her career to the next.
Two decades ago, Rita was working in sales for a luxury hotel chain. One grey February day, she woke up and felt she’d had enough. She didn’t want to make the usual sales calls or prospect new accounts. But she wasn’t exactly ready to quit her job. Instead, she posed herself a dig-deep kind of question: “What does my soul want to do today?” The answer that bubbled up? Her soul wanted to get a copy of Spa Finders magazine. So Rita pulled up at a Barnes and Noble, found the magazine and spent the afternoon reading up on exclusive spa resorts. She was after a getaway, but not the vacation kind. Then, she made a different set of calls — to the spas to see if they’d hire her as an independent contractor. She had set in motion the first step of creating her own company, Elite Resorts and Spas.
Buying the magazine instead of going to work-as-usual was a modest, but ultimately significant, move that initiated a big change. This moment would eventually replicate itself in her coaching philosophy, which emphasizes building up to life-changing decisions with smaller “action steps” that a person can try out right away without having to make a radical break. This approach works well for someone who wants to quit but isn’t necessarily up for a dramatic walk-out or a major identity crisis, if they can help it.
In her “Reinventing Yourself” workshops, Rita leads her participants through a “Creating your perfect job” exercise. They make an inventory of past successes, and also list all the ingredients of their dream job in some detail. Rita pushes them to conclude with an even bolder statement of the legacy they’d like to leave. “Be a little crazy here,” she says, list things “you’d almost pay to do.”
I did an informal, shorter version of this exercise with Rita a few years back after quitting New York. It’s effective, perhaps because it’s not just about dreaming wildly of what future-you wants to do, but it also has you take stock and feel proud of what you have done, what you currently do. Even as you visualize your future, you’re also getting “in touch with who you are today and what you truly desire” (from her book, Your Wow Years).
To quit in a way you can live with, it sometimes helps to feel that there’s a through line between our past selves and whoever we’ll be once we make a change — even a major one. “One of my favorite sayings,” Rita tells me over Zoom, is “what we’re working on becoming, we already are.” Quitting doesn’t have to totally erase what was in order to be transformative.
