Not loving your job? Dreading Monday morning? You’re not alone. Only 21% of U.S. employees report feeling engaged at work, according to a Gallup Poll. While a record number of people quit their jobs during the Great Resignation, not everyone could make that leap.
It takes an enormous amount of courage to quit, especially if there’s nothing at the other end, says Julia Keller, author of Quitting: A Life Strategy: The Myth of Perseverance—and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free.
Fear of quitting can become physical and even paralyzing. For example, Keller says quitting often makes her feel sick to her stomach and dizzy, and she gets a terrible headache. “I have to lie down, like I’m getting the vapors,” she jokes. “I’m told by onlookers they can’t tell that; apparently, I’m able to disguise it well. But what I want to do is run around screaming in utter terror, ‘What if I never get another job? What if I’m never in another relationship?’ Quitting is rarely the easy thing to do.”
Finding the Courage
For her book, Keller spoke with more than 150 people who had quit jobs as well as belief systems. One way that many found the courage was to “quasi-quit.”
“It doesn’t have to be an on-off switch,” she explains. “You can quit by degrees. It can be a reset dial. You get a feeling of throwing out everything, but it’s safer.”
For example, if you want to quit a job, you can try to change what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, or the industry in which you’re doing it. “It’s a halfway change,” says Keller. “You’re not changing your whole profession, going from law to medicine, for example. You might go from law to social work.”
Another type of quasi-quitting is changing a belief system you hold around your job. Keller says a good example is Tiger Woods. After recovering from a serious car accident in 2021 that resulted in a shattered ankle and multiple fractures, he returned to play in The Masters in 2022. Always a ferociously competitive man, he finished 47th.
“A journalist asked him afterwards if just being able to show up and compete was a victory in his book,” says Keller. “Tiger Woods said ‘yes.’ He quit, but what he quit wasn’t the tournament or golf; it was the need to be perfect and flawless and number one, setting course records. It was a different kind of victory for him.”
Quitting makes a line of demarcation in our lives, says Keller. “Quitting is usually reviled as showing cowardice or weakness,” she says. “It’s really the opposite. Quitting is what shows strength and resilience. It takes strength of character and resolve.”
Quitting Your Way Into a New Life
By finding the courage to quit, you can quit your way into a new life, say Keller. “We have to quit one thing before we can get to another thing,” she says. “For example, if scientists held tight to previous beliefs, we’d still be using leeches, and we would still think that evil spirits inhabiting the body each time we had the flu. We need change, and we have to let go of the old and the familiar to leap into the new.”
Quitting allows you to move forward. “It might not right away reveal itself to be a better life, but ultimately it is,” says Keller. “In all of the interviews I did for the book, only two or three people said that they regretted something they quit. Almost always the regret came from not quitting something or waiting too long to quit and letting a situation fester and get worse.”
If you’re even thinking of quitting, it’s important to lean into that feeling to explore where you might make changes. Just the thought of leaving a situation can feel forbidden.
“Maybe you’re thinking, ‘Well, it’s not horrible. They don’t have me in leg irons and demand that I eat bread and water for my lunch. How can I possibly quit?’” says Keller. “Even to consider quitting takes courage because you’re saying there is something better on the other side of this. Make leaning into the idea of quitting part of your arsenal. It helps you become more nimble and willing to change. It’s saying, ‘I may be doing okay now, but I’d like to do better than just okay.’”
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