Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (13 page)

That was certainly the case for Henry, a fifty-eight-year-old lawyer who had, by his own account, never quit anything. Seen from the outside—his twenty-five-year marriage, the steady climb of his career, his twenty-nine-year association with a single law firm—his
life seemed to testify to remarkable stability and persistence. He'd grown up in comfortable circumstances, but his childhood had been chaotic; his father was a binge drinker who disappeared without notice and returned as abruptly without any discussion or overt acknowledgment within the family. Nothing was ever talked about, and Henry unconsciously applied this lesson to his life, avoiding confrontation at all costs. But he finally reached a tipping point and came to realize how deeply unhappy he was. How he left his marriage was clumsy and fractious, took years to resolve, and left his relationships with his children in tatters. He now says that he wishes he'd had the tools to deal with things far earlier, because it would have been better for everyone.

Sometimes, an avoidance strategy—adopted by someone with performance goals—can also have an effect on well-being. Quitting in the real world, as opposed to the laboratory, is sometimes a complicated affair, a decision freighted with consequences. That was the case for Sarah, who at the age of twenty-two landed her first postcollege job at a large public-relations firm in San Francisco. She was reasonably confident in her abilities since she'd held six internships over the years, and she thought this was a good fit. She had applied for literally dozens of jobs during the summer, had made it to the interview stage for several positions, and was pleased that the process was over. She started work with high hopes and energy, one of several new, entry-level employees. Ironically, she received another offer just weeks after she started work. Her managers practiced a brand of tough-love leadership; she and the other new employees were criticized (scolded, actually) regularly. Her first review, six months later, was daunting: In six or seven pages of written review, there was not one word of praise. For the next six months, Sarah redoubled her efforts, but her boss remained highly critical, even hostile. When Sarah did well, landing significant publicity for one of the company's clients, she was faulted for some other omission. She began to dread going to work.

But she was only one year out of college, in a lousy economy and with rent to pay. She applied for jobs at every opportunity but
now had the problem of being “in between” skill levels. Though she was not quite a beginner, she also lacked the skill set for the next promotional level. Desperately wanting to quit, she nevertheless worried about how this would look on her résumé and how she would pay her bills; her parents encouraged her not to quit. She did her best to try to disengage emotionally and adopted an avoidance strategy, engaging her boss as little as possible, and began to focus on finding a new job. But hanging in took a toll on her health. Over the next six months, she developed a series of stress-related health issues. She came close to landing a few jobs, but found it hard to keep up the effort consistently. Her next review—roughly eighteen months after she started—was a clarifier: They were going to let her go if she didn't “improve.” The review was full of personal remarks that had little to do with what she had accomplished. At that point, finding a new job became the only goal she had, and three months later, she quit right after receiving a good job offer.

She says now that if she had it to do over, she would have quit the job much sooner than she did, without a safety net: “If it happens again, I'll take bigger risks and figure it out. It just wasn't worth being that unhappy for so long; it literally made me sick. I should have simply left and taken my chances. I think I would have found a new job anyway. It would have just been a matter of time.”

Sarah is young and at the very beginning of her working life, but her story still illustrates that once you put goal disengagement in a real-world setting, the question of how to manage it gets more complicated. It's more nuanced and fraught than the diagrams you see in psychological studies, which have a box labeled “goal disengagement” and an arrow pointing to another box marked “new goal/positive outcome,” suggest. Sarah was lucky in that she was a performance- and goal-oriented person and could summon up the energy to continue applying for jobs, even though she was mightily discouraged and upset.

If, as Carsten Wrosch and others argue
, goal disengagement is part of adaptive self-regulation and helps lower stress and raise the potential for positive outcomes, we also have to acknowledge
that in a real-world setting, regulating your emotions takes skill and concerted effort.

Another Perspective on the Talent for Quitting

What's your coping style when life goes south? Or when you're under a great deal of pressure? Do you choke, or does pressure just rev up your engine? How do you react when you realize you've missed a fabulous opportunity? Do you come up with a plan to try to recoup it, or do you drop back five and stew about it? How do you resolve conflicting goals or demands? What would you do if the boss told you that you had to work this weekend, the very weekend that you promised your loved one would be a getaway without distraction? Would you cancel or go? When you have to give up on a goal, do you summon up your vision of your best self and move on? Or do you feel so down that you're unable to act?

Those are the kinds of questions another
psychological theory called
personality systems interactions
(PSI) has asked and answered over the last three decades by focusing on two kinds of coping: action-oriented and state-oriented. This theory, another way of looking at goal engagement and disengagement, differs from approach-avoidance theory, although PSI also connects to attachment theory and parenting styles. PSI specifically acknowledges the stress induced by goal implementation and disengagement and thus focuses on coping skills. These orientations,
action
and
state
, are also formed early in life. It's been estimated that roughly half the people in the Western world are action-oriented and the other half predominantly state-oriented. The orientations represent a continuum of behavior, can be specific to a situation or domain, or can be a dominant trait. Under extreme stress, almost everyone becomes state-oriented.

Let's define a few terms.
Action-oriented
is actually what it sounds like, that is, people who, when they are under stress, are capable of regulating negative emotions, can muster up positive and
confirming images of self, are decisive, don't rely on external cues, and are effective in the sphere of action, in terms of both goal engagement and goal disengagement.
State-oriented behavior
, on the other hand, refers to the way an individual's emotional state dominates how he or she functions in the world under stressful conditions. When there's stress or conflict—what's called a high-demand or threatening situation—state-oriented people become flooded with negative feelings and can't manage them. When they have to choose a new path under stress, they tend to hesitate. They ruminate, are sensitive to external cues, depend on structure and deadlines, and tend to procrastinate. They have trouble staying focused on their own. They have difficulty disengaging.

While the action-oriented disengage from thoughts of failure when they're pursuing a goal and ignore distractions, the state-oriented become preoccupied with the possibility of failure. Under stress, the action-oriented initiate and the state-oriented hesitate. While the action-oriented focus on tasks, the state-oriented are more volatile. The latter may become unfocused, get sidetracked, or simply give up without letting go on the levels of thought and emotion.

As James M. Diefendorff and others have noted
, these differences between action and state orientations may explain “why two individuals who have similar goals, knowledge, ability, and desire to perform well nonetheless fail to achieve the same level of performance.”

How these orientations look in the real world may be easiest to see on the playing field. Imagine that two golfers of roughly equal ability are in a competitive match and find themselves tied on the last hole. The hole lies behind a bunker. One golfer is focused on the hole, mentally rehearsing his swing and what he needs to do to make the shot and win the match. He puts the pressure of the tied score and the bunker out of his mind completely, pumping himself up by reminding himself how he has made shots like this dozens of times before. He doesn't see or hear the crowd of spectators; it's all about the shot. The second golfer, who had enjoyed an early lead in the match, is focused only on avoiding the bunker; all he can
think about is the tied score, how he blew his early lead and how stupid that was, and how if he hits it into the bunker, he'll surely lose. His rumination is a distraction, and his focus has shifted from the win to avoiding the loss. He's not concentrating on the shot, because he's painfully aware of the moving, murmuring crowd of spectators. This is what action and state orientations look like on the golf course, but the phenomenon of the
clutch player
—the person who's high-functioning under stress—is well known in almost every sport, at the negotiating table, in the courtroom, and in many other endeavors.

PSI posits that goal implementation happens on both a conscious, volitional level and an unconscious one. Similarly, affect is both consciously and unconsciously regulated. An action orientation is distinguished by the ability to take advantage of
intuitive affect regulation
, a largely automatic process that functions outside conscious awareness and takes place quickly and effortlessly, unlike the conscious processing of thought and emotion.

To simplify, if a person can successfully regulate emotion at a time of stress, he will also have access to those intuitive programs which contain his own emotional preferences, his self-representations, and autobiographical experience. That's what the first golfer is doing in our example when he brings his best self to mind under stress. He's using his inner self-portrait—his skills, his history as a golfer, his confidence—to execute that shot. Put another way, action-oriented people are more in touch with themselves and have better access to what motivates them on a purely unconscious level which is then combined with more conscious motivations.

In contrast, state-oriented people behave the way the second golfer did. He's mired in negative thoughts, effectively cutting off access to the good things he knows about himself. He's taking his cues from the environment, which is, from his point of view, primarily defined by a blown lead. This behavior is typical of the state-oriented; under stress, they can't bring their mental images of their best selves to mind, and they lose access to those unconscious and intuitive motivators.

When action and state orientations are measured
in a laboratory setting, the questions posed are like the following, which are drawn from the scale developed by Julius Kuhl in 1994. As you read, answer the questions for yourself.

1. When I know I have to finish something soon, (a) I have to push myself to get started, or (b) I find it easy to get it over and done with.

2. When I'm told my work is totally unsatisfactory, (a) I don't let it bother me for long, or (b) I feel paralyzed.

3. When I have a lot of things to do and they all must be done at once, (a) I often don't know where to begin, or (b) I find it easy to make a plan and stick to it.

Question 1 depicts a high-demand situation, and the action-oriented answer is (b). Questions 2 and 3 represent threat situations, and the action-oriented answers are (a) and (b), respectively.

These orientations appear to be shaped
by socialization during childhood rather than by genetic factors. Children learn how to self-regulate during infancy and childhood. An infant in distress turns to his or her mother to be comforted, and with secure and attuned attachment, the mother helps the baby to self-regulate consistently. In this safe and sustaining environment, the baby eventually learns to self-soothe, thus internalizing the cues the baby has learned from the mother, using the same neural pathways forged by those initial maternal behaviors. In that way, the securely attached individual becomes autonomous in a self-regulatory sense, while still needing connection. With insecure attachments, if the mother's comforting and attuned behaviors are inconsistent or absent, the progress of self-regulation is hampered.

The development of self-regulation continues past infancy, of course, and in early childhood, parenting styles either facilitate or hinder a child's ability to manage his or her emotions. Environments that provide structure without being controlling and attuned parenting styles that set firm boundaries for a child while
encouraging exploration yield people with an ability to self-regulate and who are action-oriented. In contrast, an authoritarian way of parenting, with high demands and an insistence on conformity to parental rules and where the child is made to feel bad about himself or herself for inconsistency or lack of achievement, facilitates a state orientation. So does an environment that ignores a child. It has been theorized that parental divorce may contribute to state orientation as well.

An experiment conducted by researchers in Amsterdam
, the results of which were published in an article aptly titled “Getting a Grip on Your Feelings,” demonstrated how action- and state-oriented people cope in the same situations. After filling out questionnaires on action or state orientation and self-esteem, half of the participants were asked to visualize a demanding person in their own life and specifically to recall not just incidents dealing with that difficult person but also their feelings at the time. To make the visualization even more vivid, they were also asked to identify that person by his or her initials and to type up some of their experiences. The other half were asked to go through the same exercise, but this time visualizing their experiences with an accepting person in their lives. All of the participants were shown alternating screens of schematized faces showing emotions (happy, sad, or neutral) and tested to see how quickly they could identify a discrepant face—that is, a single happy face in a crowd of angry ones or an angry face among happy faces. Finally, all of the participants were asked to identify or not identify (“me” or “not me”) with a series of words pertaining to traits evenly divided between positives (creative, reliable, etc.) and negatives (silent, impulsive, etc.).