TAIU

Where to start looking

Should I leave my job?

You have thought about it more than once, and more than once you have talked yourself out of it.

The reasons you give other people are not quite the reasons you give yourself.

You can picture handing in your notice. You cannot picture the Monday after.

Leaving might be the answer to a question you have not asked out loud

People rarely want to leave a job in general. They want to stop something specific: a person, a pace, a feeling of being watched, a sense that the work no longer resembles them. If you can name the specific thing, you can find out whether leaving is the only way to end it. Sometimes it is. Often it is not, and the answer changes shape.

Wanting to leave is information, not yet a decision

The wish to go tells you something true about the situation. It does not tell you what to do about it. Those are separate matters, and collapsing them into one is what makes the question feel urgent and impossible at the same time.

The version of leaving in your head is usually unspecified

It has an ending and no next scene. That is not a failure of nerve, it is just an unfinished thought. What you would be going towards is a harder question than what you would be leaving, and it is the one that decides whether leaving helps.

What this usually connects to

  • What the job costs you outside work, in energy, temper or attention.
  • Whether money is genuinely the constraint, or a reasonable place to put the decision down.
  • Whether you would still want to leave if one particular person were not there.

A question worth sitting with

  • If nothing changed at all for another year, what would you be most sorry about?
  • What would have to be true for staying to be a real choice rather than a default?

Mark

I have left jobs for the right reasons and stayed in one for two years too long for reasons I could not have defended if anybody had asked. Nobody asked. That is the part I would want somebody to know.

If you want to work this out properly rather than read about it, the session takes the question apart with you.

Should I leave

It is a conversation, not a questionnaire. You can stop at any point, and finishing it does not mean anything has to change.

If the question turns out to be a different one