748: Should I Quit My Job? How to Know When to Quit and What to Do Instead of Quitting Reactively

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: I found myself about a year into one of my jobs, and for a couple of mornings in a row, I had the same set of crazy thoughts running through my head over and over again, and I was trying to figure out, like, how can I get out of this? Everybody else thought this job was going to be great, but that two stories up, what if I just jumped out?

[00:00:20] I'd probably just break my legs, and they'd have to give me time off, right? All these other thoughts would run through my head, too. Would insurance cover this? Would I get in trouble? And every single time, I talked myself out of it. And then I'd stress-eat myself sick at the burger place next door, and then I'd go back to my desk, and I would pretend to answer emails.

[00:00:37] Now, what was happening at the time is I was telling friends and family that the job was fine. It's great. But every time I was standing at that window, I wasn't asking myself, "Should I stay or go?" I already knew I wanted to leave. That part was very clear. I just actually didn't think I could. And if you're anywhere close to where I was back at that time, you might have some version of that running through your head.

[00:01:02] And maybe you're not at a window. I hope you're not at a window. But whether it's at your desk or the car on the way home or lying in bed at 2:00 AM. And in this episode, you're actually gonna hear from two different people. One of them spent seven years in a role that everyone told her she should be grateful for while she was slowly falling apart inside it.

[00:01:21] And then the other one quit very fast and convinced herself that getting out of the job would fix absolutely everything. And then the next couple years she spent finding out why it didn't. What finally worked for both of them isn't what you would guess, and it isn't what they guessed either, and that's exactly what we're gonna cover in this episode.

[00:01:39] Introduction: This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:02:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: If you've been having thoughts about, "Should I quit?" "Can I quit?" "I want to quit," any version of that, then you're going to want to hear these stories from Lisa and Amanda. Lisa stayed in comfortable, under-stimulating roles for years because leaving felt hard to justify, much harder to justify than staying.

[00:02:25] And Amanda, well, she quit pretty reactively, thinking the job itself was the problem, and then she found out that burnout doesn't automatically go away just because you've left the job. We're gonna cover the real questions worth asking instead of, "Should I stay or should I go?" These are questions like, "What does quitting without a plan actually cost you?"

[00:02:44] And questions like, "How can your partner be involved in this? What role should they play? And what do they determine if they are supportive versus not?" Also, "What does waiting too long actually mean for you if it happens?" And then underneath all of that, we'll get into the one question that most people don't think to ask.

[00:03:01] Okay, I've worked in a lot of different careers and jobs and industries and areas and sectors, all of it, like HR, operations, marketing, across many, many different areas, and that meant I did a lot of interviews in talent management, as a recruiter, as a hiring manager. And then somewhere in there, I got pretty tired of hearing the same rehearsed answers from every single candidate.

[00:03:26] So I started asking different questions to try and get to something that was real and genuine and allowed me to learn something about those people. Here's an example. When I first started, I was asking people like, "Hey, why are you interested in working here?" Some version of that, right? Like, that happened in many organizations.

[00:03:44] And most people would say, "Well, I'm really interested in growth," or, "I'm missing growth opportunities in that." And I would ask them, "What does growth actually mean to you?" And this is where so many people just literally didn't have an answer, or they'd come up with some BS answer along the way. And it was because although they said they wanted growth, they'd actually never defined it or thought about what it really actually meant for them.

[00:04:09] The other thing I found that was really interesting, though, is when I would ask people about their last job, "What made you start looking? Why are you looking in the first place?" Now, a lot of times people could answer that easily because so many people had a list of complaints or things that didn't work.

[00:04:25] But after asking, you know, variations of these questions to literally thousands of people, there was a pattern that became impossible to miss. Almost everyone knew exactly what they were running from, but very few people knew exactly what they wanted and what they were running towards. So here's a better question than all of the questions that I was just talking about here– "What are you actually running towards?"

[00:04:48] And it's okay if you can't answer that yet. This is part of why our podcast and our company exist. We help people figure out what they're moving towards, and this is very difficult work. But it also needs to happen because otherwise you get into this, "Should I stay or should I go?" loop. And that decision doesn't necessarily mean anything at all, because you're just in the same cycle without understanding what you're trying to move towards.

[00:05:14] It's hard to know if you should make a change if you don't understand what you are moving to, right? Now, Lisa found herself doing this same thing, the same running pattern for most of her career without realizing it.

[00:05:28] Lisa Vu: I think I thought about what I didn't like and what I would do differently, but I didn't really do the internal change type of stuff.

[00:05:35] And so I think that led me to kind of repeat the pattern of just continuing to stay in my comfort zone in this next job where I would be at for seven years.

[00:05:43] Scott Anthony Barlow: Lisa knew what she wanted to avoid, but she never built out what she wanted to move toward, and that is exactly what kept her circling in the same type of role for the better part of a decade.

[00:05:54] Now, here's another interesting thing that happens is I've had many conversations over the years in asking people about, "What do you want in the next job?" They will start quoting things that they don't want to lose or they don't want to give up. They'll be like, "I have a great schedule right now. I don't have a lot of stress. I have really good job security."

[00:06:13] And you know what? A lot of times those truly are wonderful things, and what people don't realize is that they're defaulting to making decisions based on avoiding a loss. This is called loss aversion. Lisa's story is a very clear example. So just a little backstory there.

[00:06:31] Lisa worked in research at the University of California, San Francisco, or UCSF, and she wasn't burned out in the way that we usually talk about burnout. She was bored, she was under-stimulated, isolated, and she wasn't getting the feedback that she craved because nobody was really overseeing her closely enough to give her any feedback at all.

[00:06:52] Lisa Vu: People would kill for a role where you didn't have to do a ton and got little oversight. I kind of got to do whatever I wanted as long as I got the job done.

[00:07:02] Scott Anthony Barlow: That is loss aversion at its purest form. She was staying because giving up the ease felt like giving up something valuable, even while the role was making her miserable.

[00:07:12] Now, here's the part that's abnormal. This wasn't very dramatic. It didn't look like burnout, and she didn't feel like these were really actually problems.

[00:07:21] Lisa Vu: I became very apathetic in my last job where I was at for seven years, and that was just such a dangerous place to be, and it's just so subtle, too, which makes it really hard.

[00:07:31] Scott Anthony Barlow: Whether you're burned out and over-stimulated or bored and under-stimulated like Lisa was, then you deserve work that fits you. You don't need to justify wanting to leave. The absence of a dramatic reason isn't proof that you don't have a real one. Now, there's actually a name for what Lisa was living through.

[00:07:47] This is called boreout. It's burnout's lesser talked about younger brother. If under-stimulation like that sounds familiar, then I'd encourage you to go back and listen to episode 704– What career burnout in 2026 actually looks like, and of course, how to fix it and find career satisfaction. It'll be linked up in the show notes.

[00:08:06] But we need to cover the part about what happens when you get to the point that you think you should quit. There are two very different ways that this type of decision plays out. Amanda lived both of those versions. She was exceptional at her job, managing mobility for the world's largest retailer, and being that good at a job that didn't fit came at a cost, and she eventually hit burnout, and she made the classic assumption, if you remove the job, then you remove the burnout.

[00:08:31] Amanda Love: I recognized I was burnt out, and here I am thinking corporate America, just quit, I won't be burnt out. That solves my problem, moving on. And it really did not. At all.

[00:08:41] Scott Anthony Barlow: She left the traditional corporate environment, and she took a job at a tech startup, and it lasted 30 days, and then she started her own sales brokerage business.

[00:08:51] Turns out none of this fixed the actual problem. Because the problem was never only the job or the employer. It was burnout itself, plus a set of behavioral patterns that she hadn't looked at yet. The turnout came when she stopped treating the next job as the fix, and instead built what we call a bridge role.

[00:09:12] In other words, a deliberate temporary step that brought her breathing room while she figured out and did the hard work to identify what she actually wanted.

[00:09:20] Amanda Love: I went to my husband and said, "I need something. I think I can leverage my network to find something that'll help keep the kids fed. And then we'll be good to go, and once everything picks up, we'll just go from there and decide when it's time for me to step away from this other role."

[00:09:39] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's the difference. The first time she quit reactively to escape something. And the second time, she created a step that was leading somewhere on purpose, even though it wasn't the final destination. I want you to notice something that Amanda did very well before she made her move. Now, she didn't just decide she was gonna do this and then inform her husband afterwards.

[00:10:01] She went and had several conversations with him about what was going on, what she needed, and what she was thinking about doing next. Now, my wife Alyssa and I have run into this exact same thing over the years many times, and I've done it very well, and I've also done it pretty, pretty horrifically. Now, the times that it went well looked like this.

[00:10:22] I'd go to Alyssa and say, "Hey, you know, here's what's going on. I am experiencing this in my job, and I actually think it's really important that I make a change. I wanted to talk with you about it. I wanted to hear your perspective because if I'm considering making a change, we're both in this together, so I want it to work well for both of us."

[00:10:41] For me and her, this was often just the first conversation, really just opening the door, and it usually turned into a series of conversations after that where we'd actually work out what each of us needed, what was important to each of us, what was going to make the change feel exciting instead of just crazy scary and what we were both worried about so we could figure out how we could handle those worries and work together on this.

[00:11:05] Now conversely, the times where it went really poorly, you might imagine, but I skipped most of that. I'd already decided I would go to Alyssa and said, "Hey, guess what? Here's what I'm doing." Then I would wonder why Alyssa would get very scared and seem not supportive. It wasn't that she didn't wanna support me; it was that I hadn't given her anything at all to work with yet.

[00:11:28] So what else is she supposed to do? So for Amanda and her situation, it was her husband who made a version of this leap first, and he left a career that he hated for video game design.

[00:11:40] Amanda Love: I would say I wanted what he had, and I told him that very specifically because I saw how excited he got when he would learn something new, and I wasn't talking about my career like that anymore. I wanted that, and I told him, "I want what you have."

[00:11:55] Scott Anthony Barlow: Watching someone close to you do this very well doesn't just make it feel possible. It gives you language for what's actually missing in your own work. But what if you feel like you've waited too long to make a change?

[00:12:07] What happens then? Well, as you might imagine, there's a real cost to staying stuck in the same loop for years or even months, and it shows up in your body. It shows up in your mind, not just in job satisfaction or not just in other areas. Now, remember the story I told you about considering jumping out the window?

[00:12:26] Well, during that same year, I gained almost 50 pounds. Crazy, right? I was developing panic attacks. I didn't even know what a panic attack was at that particular time. Amanda described a version of this same type of toll once she finally slowed down enough to feel it.

[00:12:42] Amanda Love: There have been times during the process that I was so mentally and physically exhausted from all of the work that I was putting into myself, it would put me straight to bed at 5:00.

[00:12:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: Lisa's costs showed up very differently, but just as real.

[00:13:01] Lisa Vu: It just really impacted my mental health to not get the interaction, even those little interactions with people.

[00:13:06] Scott Anthony Barlow: Neither of these was a dramatic health crisis, which is exactly the point. The cost of staying too long doesn't always announce itself.

[00:13:13] Sometimes it's a slow decline, whether it's physically or mentally or any other way, and one that you only recognize once you're far enough outside to look back. The thing I've seen most often when our clients are considering quitting is that the real fear has almost nothing to do with the job itself.

[00:13:31] This was definitely true for Amanda, and the job was never the whole story here.

[00:13:35] Amanda Love: I was burnt out because I didn't have great boundaries. I was burnt out because I was constantly looking for praise from everyone. I just wanted to be validated.

[00:13:46] Scott Anthony Barlow: So many people come to us because they are looking to find a better situation, a better job, a better version of work.

[00:13:54] However, the reality is that if we oversimplify this for just a minute, there's actually two things going on here, really similar to what Amanda experienced, and that is we can get all of the parts and pieces aligned with creating the right situation for you, the right type of people that you're getting to hang out with that have maybe similar values and care about what you care about, the right type of cause that you're excited about and is meaningful to you, all the things that make up the right company and right environment and right situation.

[00:14:26] However, if you can get to that situation and you haven't changed some of your behaviors and how you're going about work, then you can be in a really wonderful situation and not being able to take full advantage of it. So here's what that means for you. There's really these two parts, and both have to work hand in hand in order to create a phenomenal version of work and life for you.

[00:14:50] And what that means is that the first and most important part is that you have to define it. We talked about earlier defining where you're running to, and then the other portion of that is being able to understand how you can show up and work best to take advantage of that wonderful situation. Both are important.

[00:15:09] The second way is understanding how you need to work differently and what behaviors need to change. For example, Amanda had to change some of her boundaries that she was drawing so that you can operate well in the new situation once you're there. Only then can you take full advantage of work that fits you.

[00:15:26] If you want help with that, by the way, then I would love to invite you to drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team, and we'll have a conversation. We'll understand what you're trying to accomplish. We'll understand some of the concerns that you have and help you figure out how to navigate through your exact situation.

[00:15:47] It's what we do, and it's what we love to do. Until next time, I'm Scott, and this is Happened To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.