Alicia McKay
Last Friday, I announced I was retiring Not An MBA, an executive leadership programme I founded in 2021. It's been a wild ride. For the most part, the response has been overwhelmingly positive: comments, messages and emails wishing me well for the next thing, celebrating the Not An MBA journey and a few expressing disappointment at not being able to do the programme while it was running.
It got me thinking about quitting, leaving, and doing it well. In Annie Duke's masterpiece Quit, she argues that quitting can be as powerful as persisting - but those stories are rarely told. She also makes the case that most people quit things far too late.
There are many situations where leaving is not your choice, such as redundancy, or when leaving can't be positive, such as escaping a toxic relationship or unsafe environment. But for situations without a burning platform, how do we know if we should quit, and how can we do that well?
Here are a few thoughts from me on that.
Timing your exit: leave before it's bad
Leave before you're at the point of desperation.
If you wait until you're burnt out to take a break, your recovery will be longer and harder.
If you wait until you hate your spouse before divorce, you'll struggle to be loving, fair and patient during the separation.
If you wait until you'd rather stick pins in your eye than go to work for another day, leaving with grace, dignity, and intact relationships will be hard.
Once you're at your wit's end, it's hard to be someone you're proud of. So leave before it's terrible. As some of these clever commenters suggested on LinkedIn this week: leave the party while you're still having fun, especially if you can see the winds changing ahead. If you suspect things are about to get bad, they probably are. Listen to your instincts and take action.
Don't let guilt hold you back
I've always struggled to set boundaries. I've been a mother since I was 16 and spent my childhood shouldering responsibility for the feelings and behaviour of adults.
These experiences result in a tendency to take on responsibilities, feelings and concerns that aren't mine to hold. Of all the reading, thinking and experimenting I've done around boundaries, the most impactful I've encountered is in Gabor Maté's book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress.
When I read the following excerpt, I stopped cold. I paused. I underlined. I wrote it down, texted it to three friends, and reread it.
"A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide."
You might feel guilty about leaving, worried you'll hurt people's feelings, or concerned they won't cope without you. Chances are that you're overestimating your importance and underestimating their abilities. That's not compassion, it's control. Compassion requires boundaries.
“Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.”
―Brené Brown
Make intentional choices about what is your responsibility and what isn't. Your responsibilities include living in alignment with your values and integrity, how you spend your time, energy, and effort, what thoughts, relationships, and activities you allow into your life, how you manage your emotions, what you believe in, the contribution you make to the world, and the way you communicate and treat others.
Things that are not your responsibility: how anyone else feels about the above or anything else.
Pruning the bush: be willing to end good things
Ending bad things makes sense. Why would you keep doing something that sucks? We might find it hard to leave a bad relationship or job, but we know it's time to change, and eventually, we get there.
It's harder to end good things. It reminds me of the rosebush story in Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud.
Rosebushes produce more buds than they can sustain and require regular pruning to be healthy and thrive. Cloud distinguishes between three types of pruning. The first is to remove dead branches. These branches no longer contribute and are taking up space, making it harder for others to grow. Easy. The second is to remove sick and diseased branches, which are unlikely to recover and take energy away from healthy branches. Not bad.
The third type of pruning, though, is the removal of perfectly healthy buds. Too many ‘good’ buds prevent the rosebush from thriving by directing energy away from the potential to be great buds. Without this critical third type, your rosebush will never be fabulous.
Like rosebushes, people produce more buds than they can sustain. We have so many good ideas, potential projects, and plates spinning that it is hard to put some down. They all could be great! Yes, they could be. But they won't be if we try to do them all.
For personal and career choices, I like Gay Hendricks's Zone of Genius model. I love that the Zone of Excellence is identified as a trap. The Zone of Excellence is very alluring. It's often well-paid and where other people would like you to stay. In the Zone of Excellence, you're doing things you're great at, and you're being rewarded for them. So why spend any less time there?
...Because it's preventing you from your genius, where the greatest potential lies.
When you say yes to things in your Zone of Excellence, you say no to exploring options in your Zone of Genius.
Things don't have to be bad for you to end them. You can end them because other, more fulfilling and exciting things are coming for you, and you want the opportunity to explore them.
Tips on leaving well
“Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.” - Annie Duke
Here are a few pieces of advice to help you leave well.
- Tell people you're going
- Give people time to process the news
- Don't put too much pressure on the next step
- Work until the end with enthusiasm and respect
1. Tell people you're going
Chances are the people you need to tell already like you, care about your future, and will support you in achieving goals, chasing dreams, taking space, or putting yourself first. Quitting is not shameful, and you shouldn't feel guilty or embarrassed. Don't sneak away or stay quiet; doing so will cause people to think you don't like or care about them.
2. Give people time to process the news
You might have been thinking about this for weeks, months, or years, but it's probably news to the person you're telling and might even be a shock. Your boss, friends, spouse or colleagues aren't privy to the conversations you've been having in your head, so tell them clearly and with kindness, then provide space and time before talking further. Also, don't put much stock in people's initial reactions. Some people are better on the spot than others, but most will be great eventually, given the opportunity.
3. Don't put pressure on yourself for the next step
If you aren't leaving a situation because it's bad, then surely you should be doing it for the irresistible lure of your perfectly crafted, super-amazing next step... right?
Nah. You don't have to know exactly what's coming next to justify quitting, and you don't have to make up a grand narrative to keep others happy, either. You might need to leave this thing to create the mental and temporal space to work out the next thing, and that's fine.
4. Work until the end with enthusiasm and respect
In F45 classes, you repeat the same exercise for 30-60 seconds, take a break when the buzzer goes, and then do it again. When I'm tired at the end of a workout, it's tempting to stop 5 or 10 seconds before the buzzer sounds, but my trainer has a sixth sense for when I'm about to do that. He keeps me going until the buzzer goes, and I'm always pleased he did.
Don't check out early. Once you've given notice of your intentions, work until the buzzer goes—with the same enthusiasm and respect you brought on day one. This is a great way to maintain relationships and fill your integrity bank.
Closing thoughts
You don't have to martyr yourself to be successful or a good person. Things don't have to be bad to leave them, and you don't have to know what you'll do after you leave. You can leave.
You don't need to explain your timing, either. I woke up one morning without a plan and quit my 22-year nicotine addiction. I'd tried many times over the years and never succeeded for long. By the time it finally worked, I hadn't consciously considered quitting. I just woke up one day and knew it was over. Sometimes things happen like that.
Polyani's Paradox tells us that we know more than we can explain. And you, my friend, don't have to explain anything if you don't want to.
Til next week,
A