WHEN IS IT OK TO QUIT?
There are a gazillion motivational quotes with beautiful pictures telling us these “bumper sticker” messages of how to be a winner.
Doubt Kills More Dreams Than Failure Ever Will
Tough Times Don’t Last But Tough People Do
Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
God Never Sends You More Than You Can Handle
They sound kind of good, a spark of motivation might ignite within you to keep trying because only losers quit right? Winners never say die! But maybe there is a growing part of you that is unhappy in that job, relationship, project. Maybe you aren’t feeling good or performing well with that regimen or diet. Should you keep going? When is it OK to quit? Based on the motivational posters, never.
That is the problem with taking advice from a bumper sticker or poster, it doesn’t show you the real work behind the facade. It slaps advice on the problem with a weak adhesive and you are left wondering if you’re the reason why it all keeps falling apart.
WHY DO WE HATE QUITTING?
We hate quitting because we can’t accept the loss, that the money/time/value is gone. So, we will do everything to avoid it. We motivate ourselves to base our future decisions and behavior on the idea that we can recoup our loss. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we keep going it will be worth it.
Daniel Kahneman writes about this false belief, that we can recover the lost value/money/time/effort, in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He calls it the “Sunk Cost Fallacy”.
Let’s say you have flight tickets bought for a conference in Bali. You have to go, it’s freaking Bali. And it’s a mandatory conference to attend for work. But you have the full-blown-laid-out flu. You start to justify why you can make a 30-hour flight work despite being the “incredibly unable to move except for emergencies” type of ill.
There is an amounting pressure that you will miss out on, maybe you will even lose your job if you don’t go. You have already bought the not-so-cheap tickets and not the insurance. Regret swirls up inside of you. You start to think about how dumb your choices leading up to this moment will make you look foolish to your boss, friends, family. Better to forgo your health (and future earning capabilities) and suffer through than to be seen as “less than” and wasteful of money that has already been spent.
Hopefully, when you read the example above you can easily see the folly in that choice to push through and go.
If you have a boss that cares more about your attendance than your health, maybe it is time to look for a better boss. If you want to continue to be a healthy individual who can work, you probably should take the time to recuperate. There are always other flights, conferences, and jobs.
Almost everyone has made the same choice to not get the extra insurance. If someone talks bad about you for that choice, they are not the kind of person you should want to impress.
But still, there are books and research done on this fallacy belief because we humans keep buying into it. Where does this type of thinking come from?
GROWTH VS FIXED MINDSETS
From grade school, we are taught to focus on the prize. Get good grades, get the gold stars, get the praise for talent and smarts, then you can feel good about yourself.
When we are taught to focus on the immediate rewards we ingrain in our thoughts and patterns in a devastating fixed mindset.
Professor Carol Dweck is the leading field expert in mindset psychology. Her research has some interesting conclusions if we praise the effort rather than the outcome we teach others and ourselves out of a debilitating fixed mindset and into a healthy growth mindset.
NOT YET
Dweck has these great little phrases, “yet” and “not yet” to build a learning curve bridge from a fixed mindset that is gripped in the tyranny of NOW to the growth of abilities in the future.
If we accept failure as growth potential; not yet, then we continue to have an open mind ready to keep learning.
Before COVID I attended these neuro-science lectures at the University of Texas (thankfully they have moved them online). One particular talk was about what trying and making mistakes did to the synapses (connections) in the brain. The conclusions from these case studies were that we learn and remember more if we go ahead and try, despite failing attempts than if we studied and perfected first before trying.
We learn more about something when we view failure as growth potential.
“Not yet” means that right now it isn’t happening, but that doesn’t mean it will always be that way. A fixed mindset - perfectionism, has the idea that success is attached with worthiness and reward, and it is what keeps us in a sunken fallacy.
We can’t quit because we have attached a story to who we are from that failure.
UNTANGLING THE WEB
Brene Brown famously writes in her Daring Greatly book about the web that shame lies will weave in our lives. The message that shame tells us constantly is “not to expose our weakness and vulnerability”.
For women that can mean we are not enough, all the cool girls laugh at us, we need to strive harder to be perfect and hide those failures from social media and prying eyes. For men, it can mean feeling defective and appearing soft.
The narrative plays so loudly that we reword shame as justified reasons. These are the very things that keep us trapped in perfection behaviors that prevent us from knowing when it is OK to quit. I am sure you’ve heard or thought one of these:
you should keep investing in a losing company - because you’d be losing the money that could have gone to rent or to put food on the table
keep watching that horrible movie - you just drove an hour to get here with your friends
keep doing that diet even though you never lose any weight - all your friends are losing weight and you’re that fat ugly one now
keep doing that fitness regimen even though you keep getting re-injured every time - pain is weakness leaving the body
stay in that partnership even though you are unhappy - your parents will be ashamed of you for not being able to “cut it” and the kids will come from a broken home.
keep living on credit, in this perfect house/clothes/car - no one will know that you are struggling financially and they will love you despite the fact you’re defective and unable to make it
Growing up. I was raised by two jaw-dropping gorgeous genius-level-tested and athletic parents. Just being in their presence could set one up for feeling insecure. They were always stopped and asked if they were someone famous. They could pick up any sport easily, they could read, comprehend subjects, and figure out math problems faster than most people.
In short, they were superheroes.
My little brother and I played every sport imaginable and were expected to excel in academics. My two-years-junior brother tested into the genius-bracket at three years old, and I... was never told my score (my parents tried to spare me the pain) I did everything to try and keep up with my god-given-talent-Olympic-competing younger brother. The only things I could ever beat him at were foreign languages and in the two sports: showjumping (when you and a horse jump fences), and cross-country - but barely and I think he just let me have those.
I also loathed doing my homework at the kitchen table. Everyone (mom, dad, brother) could see the solutions and comprehend what was going on just by glancing at my work while walking by. I used to hide in my room to avoid looking stupid. I eventually stopped raising my hand to ask questions in school too.
The narrative of being shamefully dumb was being woven.
Daniel, my little brother, tried out for the Olympics in swimming and missed the cut-off by .03 seconds, however, because he has the aforementioned god-given talent, he was spotted and asked by the handball coach to try out. Which he did, despite never playing the sport, he made the team and went to the summer Olympics of ‘94.
I wanted to go to the Olympics too in track, but I never could motivate myself to dedicate that much time and train enough to be as good as he was naturally. I was so embarrassed by quitting my dream that I haven’t told a soul about it until this blog, a full 26 years later.
He obviously belonged to our parents and I was the “Danny Divito from the 1988 ‘Twins’ movie” child.
It wasn’t that my parents didn’t support me, they did. It wasn’t that my brother laughed at my inequities, he always encouraged me.
Not understanding the power of shame had set the stage for my mindsets, behaviors, and choices.
It has been years of self-work since I was a shame-faced cross-country star with mediocre grades who could pick up languages with ease and fluency. But I was smacked down recently, with the realization that the habits of hiding my imperfections, toughing out the pain, and not quitting are still deeply ingrained. I’ll write more on that later.
The first step to knowing when to quit and objectively learn from your failures is understanding where that web of lies and shame has been woven around your life’s story.
UNCOVER THE BIGGER STORY
Knowing something is a false belief and realizing that failure is an opportunity to grow still doesn’t make quitting any easier to bear.
Why is that?
We all have stories that have been told to us about who we were raised to be. Stories that we tell others about who we want them to think we are, and the ones we tell ourselves about who we really are.
It is a web of deceit that we spin trying to convey to the world that we belong. When we are faced with the possibility of failing or quitting it physically hurts. It manifests in anxiety, fear, shame, and brokenness.
We will do everything to avoid a mismatched representation of our story. For me, it was covering my dreams and hiding my imperfections.
What is it for you?
Vanessa Loder the co-founder of Mindfulness-Based Achievement, the new MBA, wrote, “Once you uncover the story, notice that it is just that. A story. And see if you can re-write it by creating a more positive response such as ‘I’m willing to take risks, I learn from my mistakes and move on,’”.
HOW TO UNBURDEN
Release your old story. First, take some time to listen to the narratives that burden your mindset and write them down. Second, change the perspective. Write about how that story served your higher purpose.
Let’s use my example of not being on the same intelligence level as my family. “Nicole is the dumb one in our family.” Becomes, “Nicole had to work hard for everything she learned, and because of this, she has a great study ethic,”.
I’ve done this exercise before but I gotta tell you rewriting that release has me feeling better all over again, so it might behoove us all to do it several times for several years to keep achieving and maintaining a growth mindset.
Shame forces us into hiding. The only way out of shame is to bring it out of hiding. This step of writing down your story helps you to process with words what you are feeling. Then when you rewrite from the perspective of how it served you, that helps to rewire what was broken and create a new mindset.
BUT FOR REALZ, WHEN IS IT OK TO QUIT?
It is ok to quit when it does not align with your purpose.
To figure out our purpose we have to understand first what we know and what we tell ourselves. This is why the earlier work of understanding our mindsets and where they come from is vital. Once we have a perspective on that we can check in with our alignment.
Heatherash Amara writes in her book, Warrior Goddess Training that alignment is becoming clear on what you want, seeing what is present at the moment, and then aligning with that understanding.
Back to my realization smack-down. During the 2020 quarantine, I had verbally set a goal of wanting to be stronger for my family. My husband had (thankfully) finished building out our home gym/power rack and we all worked out daily (what else could we do?!).
One particular evening I was lifting and an old injury in my knee flared up, I lost my grip and went down lightning fast. My 16-year-old caught my bar and helped ease me into a more comfortable position and held my hand through the initial waves of pain. My worried husband grabbed a bag of frozen peas and some pain medicine. I cried tears of anger masked in agony not even able to appreciate the love and acceptance that was surrounding me.
My thoughts were engulfed with “I was just getting somewhere with this strength training!”.
I asked my son to grab my knee brace off the wall and help me up. My husband said, “You’re done for the night. Don’t even think about finishing.”
“But if I don’t finish, that’s quitting and I can’t quit now, I have just got into the groove of this new habit!”
My 16-year-old son spoke softly to me, “Mom, I thought your goal was to be strong? You can’t get strong if you push through an injury instead of letting it rest.”
That was when I realized that I was not yet aligning with my goals. I needed to quit.
My goal was to get strong. I viewed quitting at that moment as a weakness, the opposite of strength.
I needed to assess the reality of my situation, I am not weak, I am injured and I need to recuperate.
I aligned myself to my reality (due to my baby boy’s wisdom) and started to understand that in order to keep working on getting strong I need to quit and heal.
It all writes so simply but the reality was I felt a wave of emotions and a quick descent into a spiral of shame. I know we all feel these feelings, it can be applied to any scenario life throws at us, not just with working out but in relationships, money, jobs, education… on and on.
The next time you are thinking about quitting go through these three checkpoints first:
THREE CHECKPOINTS
Check Your Fear - we now know that we can learn more from failure and that makes it possible to remove fear and be OK to try.
Check Your Sound - what narrative you are listening to within, if shame is involved you now have a technique to process.
Check Your Alignment - what do you want, what do you have, what do you really need.
