Tool 43 · Develop yourself
This exercise gives no legal or financial advice and does not push you either way. Stay and change one thing is a real answer.
A guided 18 to 22 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Whatever is on that list is not a reason to leave, and it will be waiting for you when you arrive.
Staying on purpose is a decision. Staying because you have not decided is the thing that wears people out.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
Most people who ask me whether they should leave have not yet said what is wrong. They have said it is not working, which is a verdict rather than evidence. The first useful ten minutes is always spent getting to a specific thing that happened.
The distinction that does most of the work is between the role, the manager and the organisation. A bad manager is often survivable and sometimes solvable, a role that has drifted can usually be renegotiated by somebody who is valued, and an organisation that has changed shape is generally not fixable from below. Those three call for entirely different responses and they feel identical on a Sunday night.
I would also ask what leaving would not solve, because that list travels. If somebody is bored, under confident and drifting, a new logo on the payslip does not touch any of it.
And I have a lot of time for staying deliberately. Staying six more months to finish a qualification, bank some money or wait out a market is not cowardice. It is a plan. What corrodes people is staying without deciding to, which is what most people are actually doing when they arrive at this question.
What you'll get
01
Where the fault sits
02
What leaving solves
03
What travels with you
04
The condition that flips it
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
The fault located specifically.
02 · Test it
Ask for the specific change you want, in writing, and see what happens.
What I would do
Start with an incident, not an atmosphere.
Work out whether it is the role, the manager, the organisation or the trajectory.
Write the list of what leaving would not solve. It is the useful list.
Find out whether you have actually asked for the change you want.
Decide what would have to be true for the answer to flip.
Test it
What happened, specifically, and when?
What would still be true on your first Monday somewhere new?
What have you actually asked for?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the job is wrong. Two alternatives are commonly stronger. The fault may be one person rather than the job, which is a different and often shorter problem, and one that leaving solves at considerable expense when a conversation might have done it. Or the dissatisfaction may not be about work at all, in which case a new employer inherits it intact within about four months. There is also the case where the job is genuinely fine and the trajectory has stopped, which is a real reason to leave and a completely different argument from being unhappy.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If the question is really about the price you are paying
Further thinking
Quit
Annie Duke
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
An Unfolding Model of Voluntary Employee Turnover
Thomas Lee and Terence Mitchell
Book
Annie Duke
The counterweight to almost everything else written about avoidance. Duke argues that we are far better at persisting than at stopping, and that most of the cost of a bad commitment is paid after the point where we already knew. If the thing you keep postponing is something you have quietly decided against, this is the book that gives you permission to say so and a way to test whether you are right.
Book
Herminia Ibarra
Ibarra followed people through major career and identity change and found that almost none of them thought their way to an answer first. They acted first, in small reversible experiments, and their sense of who they were caught up afterwards. It is the strongest available argument against sitting still until you feel certain.
Article
Thomas Lee and Terence Mitchell
People rarely leave a job because of accumulated dissatisfaction. They leave after a shock, and often without a plan. Worth reading before you trust your own account of why you want out.
Article
Frederick Herzberg
Herzberg's argument that the things which make work tolerable and the things which make it satisfying are not the same list. Fixing the first will not deliver the second.