How Do You Know When To Quit?

Career advice: Quitting. I don’t know about you, but, for me, knowing when to quit has never been easy.

My morning has been full of digital fxxk-ups:  When none of the ‘devices’ will speak to each other. When I cannot open a simple document or print it (especially printing – see Eddie Izzard on that subject!). When the piece of code I just put (very tentatively!), into the site has turned the whole thing red….. this is when I need to quit.

fresh hints for you CPD

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 Some people seem to be able to see the sanity in letting it go … I, however, have a tenacity that can drive me, and those who love me, to distraction when I refuse to give up.
Career Advice: Quitting
Sometimes it’s as simple as walking away from that task for half an hour and doing something entirely different.
Sometimes it means walking away from a job or a contract with some kind of grace. Whilst there was no better feeling than deciding that working in HR in retail was so not for me in my 20s. I took off my heels and literally slammed the door behind me as I flounced away! In hindsight, the pleasure in this action was short-lived & did few favours for my reference… there needs to be some middle ground here …
So why is it that I believe that if I just put a little bit more energy into this ‘thing’ then it will ‘give’. This BTW is energy that I don’t have by this point, and a project I’ll have been shoving for a while now!
My husband says:
“I see things as they are. You see things as they could be.”
On one hand, this is absolutely the biggest compliment he could give me. Never, ever do I want to lose the ability to see the potential in everything. The shadow side of this optimism is that I need to learn when to quit. I need to quit before I become destructive to the very project I am trying to create. Have any of you been tempted to hurl the MacBook out of the window? Yep! that’s exactly the kind of destructive I am referring to.

Career advice: Quitting

I need to be able to say “I’m hungry and tired and I have given my best”. I need to learn to pause, to take care of me, then and only then, might I show up at the coal face again and make an informed decision about whether to continue.
Sometimes the answer will have appeared. “The spaces in between” allow us to receive the wisdom we might be ignoring because we are way too busy shoving our way forwards.
Sometimes the decision needs to be to really quit.
That might feel like a loss, but often it clears the space for a new and better thing to come in …
Try quitting – I dare you

You can Find Rebecca here at the Daemon Career Coach