Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (15 page)

Participants in Barrett and her colleagues' study kept daily diaries of their most intense emotional experiences, both positive and negative, as well as accounts of their efforts to regulate their negative feelings over two weeks. The hypothesis was borne out: Individuals with a better bead on their feelings were able to regulate their negative emotions with skill and efficiency. This aspect of emotional intelligence is an enormous advantage when it comes to goal engagement, as we've already seen over and over in these pages. The management of negative emotions (as opposed to their suppression) is one of the lynchpins of artful quitting.

The final branch of emotional intelligence, the capacity to regulate emotion and use it for emotional and intellectual growth, is also central to artful quitting:

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  The ability to stay open to both unpleasant and pleasant feelings
  
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  The ability to engage or detach from an emotion, depending on whether it's useful or not
  
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  The ability to monitor emotions in relation to oneself and others
  
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  The ability to moderate both positive and negative emotions without either repressing or exaggerating the information they convey
  

It's here that the intelligence part of the theory really shines through. This last branch involves using your emotions and emotional understanding to inform your vision of yourself, your decisions, and where you find yourself. Openness to emotion is key to the process—even though it may not necessarily be pleasant or painless—and to mastering the art of quitting. This branch of emotional intelligence involves thinking about thinking, and thinking about feeling, and is necessarily a part of the aptitude for quitting as described in this chapter. Since goal disengagement is about disengaging your thoughts and feelings, how much intelligence you can bring to bear on the process is an enormous plus. The fancy name for this is
metacognition
, but it all boils down to being able to know what you're feeling and thinking at any moment in the process. Later in the book, we'll be talking about how to bolster whatever level of emotional intelligence you bring to the table.

The Marshmallow and You

Learning to manage your emotions is closely tied to your ability to regulate impulse or, put another way, to delay immediate gratification in the cause of another goal. This is where the “marshmallow” of our subtitle comes in.

In a famous experiment in the 1960s, Walter Mischel and others put a large number of four-year-olds—the offspring of Stanford University faculty, graduate students, and employees—to the test. The children were put in a room where a researcher told them to stay seated at a desk; a plate with a single marshmallow on it was placed in front of them. They were free to eat the marshmallow, but they were told they could get a second marshmallow if they waited for the researcher to leave and come back. They were to ring a bell if they decided to eat it right away. The researcher was gone for fifteen minutes, an eternity if you are only four and there's something yummy parked right in front of your nose.

There are videos of some of these experiments; it is both hilarious and excruciating at once to watch these very small people struggle with the choice. A number of them simply went for it, forgoing the possible reward immediately, popping the treat into their mouths before the researcher even made it to the door. Others fidgeted, stroked the marshmallow longingly, licked its edges, their faces scrunched up, trying so hard but finally succumbing to the lure. But roughly 30 percent of the children waited it out—­fiddling with their hair and clothes, laying their heads on the desk or covering their faces with their hands, trying desperately to distract themselves until the door opened and the researcher came in—and they got the second marshmallow.

What put this experiment into the psychological hall of fame was that Mischel and his colleagues tracked down those four-year-olds much later, when the participants were in late adolescence. Through the reports of parents, SAT scores and grades, psychological profiles, and other evidence, the researchers discovered that the small cadre able to resist that marshmallow and delay gratification had ended up with very different skill sets than their marshmallow-grabbing peers. It turns out that the children who were able to delay in preschool were more likely, as late adolescents, to exhibit self-control when frustrated and were more intelligent and focused, less distracted when they tried to concentrate, and less likely to yield to impulse. They were planners who could think ahead, concentrate, and respond to and use reason, unlike the kids who couldn't delay.
The researchers concluded
that “the association between preschool delay behavior and adolescent competencies may reflect in part the operation of ‘cognitive construction competencies.' In this view, the qualities that underlie the effective self-imposed delay in preschool may be crucial ingredients of an expanded construct of intelligent social behavior that encompasses social as well as intellectual knowledge, coping, and problem-solving competencies.”

So, ask your four-year-old self this question (he or she is still in there): Would you have gone for the marshmallow, or would you
have waited? Better still, ask your adult self what you're likely to do when faced with a “marshmallow” challenge (you can substitute whatever you want for the candy); are you the type who'll wait for the payoff, or will you simply go for it?

Taking an Inventory

Take a moment and answer the following questions. Just thinking about the answers will, we think, give you a better sense of where to locate yourself in terms of your quitting skills.

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  Do I usually focus on the long term, or am I quick to grab the short-term solution when I feel frustrated?
  
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  How do I react when things go badly? Do I find it easy or hard to deal with my emotions?
  
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  Is initiating action easy or difficult for me?
  
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  How good am I at knowing how my thoughts are being influenced by my feelings?
  
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  Do I tend to react more to negatives or positives in my life?
  
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  How often do I second-guess myself?
  
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  Do I seek out support in times of stress, or do I tend to go it alone?
  
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  How good am I at reading situations and what other people are feeling? How good am I at knowing what I'm feeling when I'm feeling it?
  

Cultivating Your Quitting Aptitude

Quitting artfully has applications beyond just being able to extract yourself from situations or endeavors that no longer serve your needs. While it may seem counterintuitive, being able to quit after you've been fired or laid off from a job or, for that matter, a relationship, is equally important, as the following stories show.

Jack had been fired once before, years ago, when he was in his early thirties, after he got married but before his children were born. He recalled how angry he'd been because his supervisors had essentially told him he had to go for the promotion in corporate relations to show his allegiance to the firm, to make his bones as a would-be player. The truth was, he loved his niche in the company and the day-to-day routine, but he'd been told flatly that he would never last unless he showed the bosses some real ambition. So he did what he was told, and less than a year later, he was fired. All these years later, his face still darkens with anger when he tells the story.

But he had lasted six years, and with his marketable skills, he landed another job. The eldest of five—with three brothers—he'd grown up in an athletically competitive family where persistence was the mantra. He was at his next job for seventeen years, which, given American culture today, seemed like a throwback to another era. There were signs, now and again, that things could change for Jack—the business was no longer growing at the same pace as it had when he had started, there were new competitors and a new management team—but Jack felt reasonably secure. He knew he was good at what he did, and it wasn't in his nature to shake things up, so he stayed put. Then, someone much younger—and who made considerably less money than Jack did—was brought into the department by management. Six months later, without ceremony, Jack was ushered first out of his office, and then out of the building, through the lobby he'd walked into every morning and out of every night for seventeen years.

There was no question in Jack's mind that he'd been fired because he was older and made more money. He seriously considered a lawsuit but hesitated when he was told that the litigation might take up to two years to even get to court. He was angry and resentful and couldn't stop revisiting how he'd been treated, and a lawsuit seemed both appropriate and fair. But, after taking counsel with his family and friends, he realized that pursuing a lawsuit would effectively keep him stuck where he was, leaving his being fired front and center in his life. Did he really want to live that way?
He had never quit anything important in his life, but now, it was clear that he needed to “quit” what had happened.

Jack was lucky, in a sense, he says: “I don't tend to ruminate much, so once I figured out that I had to put this behind me, I did by starting to make other plans for myself. I didn't really know where I was going next, but just the mere fact of going out there and talking to people about possibilities got me going again. I didn't think about it as quitting at the time, but it was, in a real sense. The only way I could get my life back was to leave where I'd been all those years—not because they threw me out but because I decided to leave all of that behind. It sounds like a mind game, but it honestly wasn't.” He pauses and adds: “Maybe I've always had a somewhat inflated image of myself, perhaps built on a sterling education and the ego benefits I've derived from several high-profile jobs. But when you fire me, in time I'll more than likely feel that it's your loss, that the company will miss me more than I'll miss the company, that I'll land on my feet in what's probably a better place.”

What he's talking about, of course, is affective and cognitive disengagement. His decision not to pursue litigation and recognizing that it would leave him stuck contrasts with the many cases of divorce that effectively leave people stalled in a holding pattern for years and years, because they believe they should persist and “win.”

Delia faced a decision too, and it was a difficult one for her. The mother of four had had the good fortune to work long distance for close to twenty years, literally out of her kitchen, as part of a mail-order company that sold organic baby gear. The idea for the company had been a friend's. Delia was an unpaid volunteer at first, but she really believed in the mission; it wasn't long before she was being paid by the hour. As the company grew, so did Delia's involvement. Over time, however, the disparity between what she brought to the enterprise and how she was profiting began to nag at her. The problem was that she had trouble asserting herself and was completely conflicted about making demands: “I didn't know how to put myself in the equation,” she says. “I loved the work, the people, the goals—basically everything—but at the same time, I
felt I was being taken advantage of. I didn't know how to ask for what was fair or how to say no. I've dealt with most things by being loyal and persistent, staying involved, instead of pulling back and setting boundaries. I really didn't know what to do.” It won't come as a surprise that her relationship to her friend and boss became more and more strained.

What ended up happening was that Delia got sick as the stress of unresolved conflict took its toll. Study after study has shown that being sick with worry or stress isn't just a figure of speech but happens on a literal level. In the end, Delia did quit but only because her doctor pretty much insisted on it. She's still sorting out what was lost and gained in this experience but now recognizes that being able to quit has to be part of her skill set in the future.

Being able to quit—even when a circumstance or situation isn't of your own making—is one way of getting control back over your own life.

Faking Out the Ruminator

Rita's story sheds another light on why it's sometimes hard to quit. “I'd gone to work with an old friend to set up a new nonprofit,” she explains. “At the beginning, it was really exciting—brainstorming, coming up with a mission statement and plans for both the organization and its functions, laying the groundwork, doing publicity, and getting the word out. I felt terrific because I was finally using all the skills I'd accumulated and honed in two decades of corporate work and putting them to use for a goal bigger than advancing sales. But three years in, I realized I'd become a kind of nonprofit beggar, begging for money from companies that supposedly supported our cause but honestly didn't want to give us much of anything. It didn't help, of course, that all this effort pretty much coincided with a recession and a retrenching of corporate giving.”

She describes how her work life just deteriorated. “My friend was my boss, and to be sure, she was bummed and frustrated too,
but she was sure that if I only tried harder, I could make it work. She pushed me hard and wouldn't listen to what I reported back from these meetings, where I would pitch and smile and they'd smile and make promises and then no check would be forthcoming. She laid all of that at my feet.”

Rita wanted to quit, but she was also hesitant: “Hanging in has always been my stock-in-trade. I felt I owed it to the organization and my boss to keep going. I finally began to run out of gas, but every time I thought about quitting, I was enveloped by worry. Every story of every person who couldn't find a new job after quitting stuck in my head—horror stories about people who'd been looking for work for years. I did the math on what our family finances would be like without my income, and I clutched. I couldn't stop myself from thinking about the worst-case scenarios, not even at night. I was utterly stuck.”