5 reasons to quit your job

I think that what we do for a living matters. When you have to wake up everyday and do something that you don’t enjoy, interact with people you don’t agree with, work late to meet deadlines and give your time and energy to work that you don’t care about, maybe you should be doing something else.

I think we’re lucky that we’re liberated enough to have some choice about what we do. We have options. We have the opportunity to change our lives if we’re not happy with where we’re at.

And so here are some reasons to quit your job and move on to something better:

You no longer enjoy it
It requires more than you’re willing to give
You could get paid more at another company
You’re constantly saying you want to quit
You want to change careers

The right time is now

Sometimes you need a few words of encouragement to get started. maybe you’re afraid and keep putting things off because you think it will be much eaiser to do it later.

Instead you find that the longer you wait, the less you feel ready to begin.

You make excuses like it’s not the right time, you’re not good enough or that you need to spend more time planning and preparing. And it’s okay to need more time but it’s not much use without having a deadline for when you will begin. You could end up planning for the next 10 months.

You have to start changing the way you think about things, it’s rare that anything needs to be perfect before you begin putting it out for people. It could be blog posts, YouTube videos, a podcast or a bunch of other stuff.

The right time is now so don’t put off starting any longer.

You can’t be for everyone

Sometimes in an effort to be inclusive, the original message gets lost in translation.

Maybe the goal is to help a specific group of people but then over time that specific group becomes less and less specific until it now includes everyone. This makes things difficult because all these groups have different wants and needs that are impossible for you to meet all at once.

And so in trying to meet everyones needs you don’t end up meeting anyones.

You can’t be for everyone which might be difficult to accept but that’s okay, you can be for a select group instead. It’s better to help 10 people than to try and help 100 when you don’t have the time, money or resources because you may end up leaving them worse off than if you’d done nothing at all.

How to write 1001 blog posts

All you have to do is focus on each single post, one by one, day by day and suddenly you’ll hit 100, 250, 500, 1000 and then 1001.

If you miss a day or 2, you need to be willing to make it up to avoid falling behind so far that you’re unable to catch up. You have to be willing to commit and to write when it feels difficult, not just when it feels easy.

It’ll take a few months short of 3 years which seems like a long time but looking back, it’ll fly by.

If you think you might forget

Write it down.

Sometimes when preparing to have particular types of conversations we spend a lot of time gathering information and planning what we want to say.

We do this because we want to be prepared and we want things to run smoothly. Also, many of us have probably had situations where we got flustered or overwhelmed and forgot what we’d planned to say.

However, despite this, we sometimes don’t end up writing things down.

Maybe it feels silly and you’re worried about sounding rigid when you talk or appearing to be reading off some sort of script. And so when we have the conversation, even if it goes alright, once it’s over we realise their were things we forgot to say.

Setting boundaries badly

I think a big reason why we sometimes avoid setting boundaries is because we think don’t know how to do it. However, it turns out the setting boundaries is like everything else, getting good takes practice.

And so like Zig Ziglar said ‘anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can learn to do it well’.

Instead of shying away from setting boundaries because you think you’ll do it badly, embrace where you’re at and in time you’ll get better at it.

Another point of view

Sometimes when you encounter an issue you only look at it from your perspective. You focus on how you feel, how you’ve been treated and you can end up playing the victim (often unknowingly).

Sometimes we take the position of the victim because we want to be coddled and we want to be saved but doing so puts you at a disadvantage because you’ll always be waiting for someone else to make things better.

And when you go to people and tell them the problem you’re having you might find that they seem unsympathetic or as though they aren’t on your side. This can make the issue’s your having feel even worse.

But sometimes all it takes is looking at the situation from another point of view to realise that you’re so focused on yourself that you’ve ignored the experiences of everyone else around you.

Asking for what you want

I think that sometimes we’re afraid to ask for what we want because we’re afraid that we won’t get it.

And so, it seems easier to stay where we are and to stick with what we have right now than to seek more. If you don’t believe that you can have it then what’s the point?

But, I still think that it’s important to ask and to seek more. This is how you create the life that you want. If your expectations and ideas of what you can have and what is possible for your life are capped based what particular people will agree to, then you’re never going to have the life you want.

Just because one person says no, doesn’t mean you’ll never get a yes. It’s also important to remember that you might not even need anyone’s permission, you can decide what you want for yourself and then go for it.

Value in the workplace

When you go to work, you want to feel like you’re of value. Perhaps not to the point where the whole place would fall apart without you but at least like what you contribute each day matters.

When a person wakes up, gets ready and goes to work, if they feel like they don’t need to be there or as though everything would seamlessly continue if they walked out, the person won’t take much care in the work they do.

And deep down or perhaps just beneath the surface we all know that often the care comes before the feeling of significance. It tends to start with taking pride in what you do and then the feeling of value or making a worthy contribution comes after.

But what if you’re doing your best and that feeling still never comes?

I think a big part of feeling of value in your job can come from external validation. This isn’t about knowing that you’re working hard and doing a great job but your manager or boss is undervaluing you. This is about how you feel about yourself and the role you play.

I think when a person doesn’t feel like they make a valuable contribution at work, they also start to feel a loss of interest in their work. When it seems like what you do doesn’t matter, what’s the point in caring?

If you don’t see the value in what you do and you’re not interested in it anymore then chances are you’re not happy either. And so the next step is to think about whether or not it’s time to move on to something new or to find a way to make things work.

Disagreements aren’t a bad thing

It seems sometimes that we shy away from being in conversation or an environment with people that we disagree with.

I’ve previously written that I think it’s worth unfollowing people on social media that you disagree with. The reason for this is that on social media it’s rare that people with differing opinions have a back and forth that benefits either of them.

However, I don’t think we should seek to create a life that is simply an echo chamber of our own thoughts and beliefs.

It’s a great thing to be able to engage with people that have different opinions to you. I think the problem arises when we forget that we have the option to accept someone else’s opinion and understand that they see things differently without having to prove your point or change someone’s mind.