Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (22 page)

 

Chapter Eight

How to Quit Well

Sometimes our ability to galvanize ourselves into action and quit has less to do with personality, character, or innate habits of mind than it does with our personal histories. The words
personal histories
refer to the events of our childhood years and the tenor and quality of the attachments we had to our parents and caregivers. Those early attachments are tied to broad patterns of behavior which affect our ability to regulate emotion, whether we take an avoidance or approach stance in life, and our attitudes toward success and failure. People who were securely attached in childhood tend to gravitate toward healthy and nurturing situations—echoing their childhood emotions—but also have a better bead on potentially uncomfortable or toxic situations. Insecurely attached people may find themselves attracted to people and situations that echo the past but make them actively unhappy.

There's something else to consider as well: bad events have a more lasting impact on people than do good ones. This isn't terribly positive, we know, but it's realistic and confirmed by lots of scientific inquiry.
As Roy Baumeister and his colleagues write
in “Bad Is Stronger than Good,” “bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.”

These events aren't always consciously remembered or even realized, but they affect our conscious actions and our decision making nonetheless. We may not always recognize why we're acting
a certain way or making certain choices, not because of the brain's automatic processes but because of past patterns that lie beyond our conscious awareness.

These patterns may get in the way of both goal engagement
and
disengagement, stopping us from going after what we need or want or keeping us in a holding pattern when we really need to quit. As with all unconscious processes, the solution is to become aware and conscious of these patterns.

The story of Carolyn, an aspiring photographer, demonstrates one way in which these old patterns may influence both your thinking and your goals. Carolyn was from the Midwest but moved to New York City after college with high ambitions, as so many young people do. She landed what looked like the opportunity of a lifetime as the receptionist in the studio of a renowned photographer. It was the bottom of the ladder, but after two years of diligence, she became one of the photographer's assistants. The staff of the studio was always in flux, with people coming and going; the photographer was brilliant, but she was also testy, brusque, and a perfectionist. She'd lose her temper in a flash, berating the person closest at hand, and most of her assistants just gave up and quit. But Carolyn hung in, even though the photographer was likely to rail at her to take more initiative and then to excoriate her for “violating boundaries” when Carolyn did.

In this no-win situation, Carolyn's sense of self took a beating. Her friends and even her colleagues counseled her to quit and move on, but she was determined to try to weather the days at work. She thought that staying put was what she needed to do, that it was the best avenue to further her dream of becoming a photographer and having her own studio. She hoped that what she was learning about her craft would ultimately outweigh how miserable and upset she was, day after day, week after week. Another year passed and things were no better.

She hung in until the day her sister came in from California and tagged along on a shoot. Her sister was there when the
photographer unloaded on Carolyn for not setting the lights up correctly, even though she had personally instructed Carolyn on their placement. Carolyn apologized profusely, even though she'd done nothing wrong. Afterward, her sister commented on how abusive the photographer was and how the tirade reminded her of their hypercritical father's rants when they were young and how Carolyn used to apologize to him just to stop him from belittling her.

Carolyn was shaken and surprised by her sister's observation but, with a sudden burst of clarity, understood why she was still in her job and had been so hesitant to quit. Her boss was treating her just as her father had, and Carolyn was placating the photographer just the way she had her father when she was young. It was at that moment that she understood that she had to get out, that it wasn't healthy or productive for her to stay. She set a new goal for herself—moving on—and put the word out that she'd be amenable to a change. A few months later, a rival photographer offered her a job, and she jumped ship.

Carolyn was lucky to have an astute and observant older sister who'd done her own work dealing with the fallout from her childhood. Luckier still, Carolyn was able to recognize the pattern once it was pointed out. For most of us, the path to understanding will be a bit rockier, and it will take time and effort to figure out why we're persisting at something that is actually either no longer satisfying or even making us unhappy.

That was certainly the case for Bill, who felt stuck and dissatisfied in his job in the banking industry, where he'd started at the age of twenty-two. There wasn't really room to grow in the department, but despite his lobbying, he hadn't been tapped to move within the organization. Despite his frustration, he still couldn't get himself to start looking for a job outside the bank and to quit. After six years, he was comfortable in his work, he liked his colleagues, and he felt both responsible and loyal to them, as well as to the company that had given him a start. Loyalty was important to him as a first-generation American and the eldest of four. He'd been his parents' right
hand growing up, doing what needed to be done for his siblings; he was the first to attend high school and then college, and he valued and appreciated his parents' support. Bill wasn't able to separate his own feelings of loyalty for his work “family” from his own need for growth and autonomy in his work without feeling conflicted. Working with a therapist helped him sort out those issues, and he was finally able to begin to look for a new job more suited to his needs and quit his old job.

Companies and corporations aren't families, of course, but not surprisingly, many of us will unconsciously transfer feelings about our original families—good, bad, and indifferent—onto the workplace setting, most usually in the relationships we have with coworkers and even bosses, as the stories of Jill and Bill demonstrate. What we learn during our formative years about adapting to the situations we find ourselves in—dealing with a critical parent or a fractious sibling and the broader patterns of how we express ourselves—can be triggered by events at work. These “comfortable” patterns—which don't really offer comfort except that they are familiar to us—explain why we sometimes sabotage ourselves unwittingly, participating in our own unhappiness by staying put or persisting when we need to leave.

These patterns, though, assert themselves most often in the area of personal relationships, especially romantic alliances and friendships, and often it's the pattern, not just the specific relationship itself, that really needs to be given up, artfully and consciously.

Elizabeth had grown up with an often distant, highly critical mother, the kind of attachment described as insecure. Like all children, Elizabeth desperately wanted and needed her mother's love and approval and did what she could to please her, to no avail; the pattern persisted throughout her childhood and into her young adulthood. While Elizabeth appeared, on the surface at least, to be functioning successfully in the world—she had gone to Ivy League schools, had a fulfilling career in finance, enjoyed close friends, and was interested in lots of things—she foundered over and over again
in intimate relationships. Unknowingly, she was most attracted to men who treated her as her mother did; inevitably, they treated her in ways that made her miserable, but she always stayed anyway and rarely, if ever, initiated a breakup. When she reached her late twenties, she understood that she had to deal with why she was choosing the men she was, and started working with a therapist. It was with his help that, in time, she stopped re-creating the emotional circumstances of her childhood. She left her last critical and demanding boyfriend and set herself the goal of finding a partner in life who treated her differently.

These comfort patterns can get in the way in the office, at home, and even among friends, as Dawn realized in her mid­thirties. Dawn could never turn down a request for help, no matter how inconvenient it was for her. She was the go-to person in the office when a project ran late, because she was the only one without children; that was true as well when it came to helping her aging parents, even though she was one of three children. Being helpful was how she'd managed in her childhood as the go-between for two bickering parents; her helpfulness had been the basis for many of her friendships during college and after. She was the impromptu picker-upper of everyone's slack, which she didn't mind because being there for people made her feel good about herself. But when she married Rick, he resented having their plans and sometimes even their needs put on hold or scotched because someone needed her to pitch in. Even though she understood Rick's complaints, it was nonetheless hard for her to break these patterns until she and Rick consulted a therapist and she realized that she had to set boundaries. Even so, it remains, even now, something she has to work on and be conscious of.

Thousands of years ago, when the ancient Greeks went to the Oracle at Delphi to get counsel about their decisions, whether to follow one course or to leave another, what they saw first were the words “Know thyself.” That wisdom remains just as valuable today as it was then. Use mental contrasting to ask yourself whether
persisting is what you need to do, or whether you need to work harder at being able to quit. Ask yourself questions about how the situation in which you find yourself fits into your own patterns of behavior. What follows is a series of questions you might want to begin with as you explore your own interior reasons for staying put or leaving.

• •
  Does the situation I find myself in feel familiar? In what ways?
  
• •
  What benefits would I derive from continuing on this path? How do these benefits measure up against the possible benefits of changing course?
  
• •
  How much of my behavior is motivated by avoidance? Can I articulate what I'm trying to avoid?
  
• •
  Do I see myself responding to people or situations in ways that I've responded in the past? How does responding this way make me feel?
  
• •
  How much of my persistence is fueled by my fear of the unknown—of what might or might not happen next?
  
• •
  Am I persisting to gain control of the situation? Is it even possible to get control?
  
• •
  Am I using the right strategies to manage my emotions? Do I feel flooded with feelings? Am I beset by intrusive thoughts?
  
• •
  How motivated am I by fear of regret? Of making a mistake by quitting too soon or by quitting altogether?
  

Considering possible regret in relation to action or inaction is closely tied to the other persistent habits of mind we've already discussed, including the sunk-cost fallacy and the escalation of commitment. But these are ways of thinking. While regret involves thinking (comparing what you did and where you ended up with what might have been, setting reality against an imagined construct), it is an emotion, one that flits in uninvited and insinuates itself into your decision making, including the setting of goals as well as disengaging from them.

Managing Regret

Of all emotions, perhaps regret is one of the most complicated, which is why it has been studied by theorists in the fields of psychology, including consumerism, and economics. All of us have felt regret at one point or another in our lives—an emotion falling somewhere on the spectrum from Édith Piaf's “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“No, I regret nothing”) to the line written by Arthur Miller for one of his characters: “Maybe all one can do is end up with the right regrets.”

Regret comes in all sizes and shapes, from the tiny (wishing you'd gone to that party on Friday night instead of staying home, or bought that dress when they still had it in your size) to medium (if only you'd taken that job offer instead of the one you did, or invested in that stock your buddy touted) to enormous (you should have broken up with your girlfriend instead of marrying her, or held on to your inheritance instead of gambling it away). We can feel twinges of regret about things that will end up being insignificant in the long run as well as deep regret over decisions that cast a long shadow over our days and are truly life-changing. Regret can be closely tied to blame, self-recrimination, and remorse.

As Dutch psychologists Marcel Zeelenberg
and Rik Pieters point out, unlike more basic emotions such as happiness, fear, or sadness—all of which babies feel—regret isn't accompanied by a facial expression and is acquired later in life. One study found that while seven-year-olds were capable of regret because they could contrast what was with what might have been, five-year-olds were not. The technical term for this process of comparison is
counterfactual thinking
.

Understanding how big a role avoiding regret plays in your life facilitates artful quitting and helps elucidate the reasons behind your patterns of persistence.

One of the first theories about regret
was proposed by the Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as a result of a study that asked students to consider which of two hypothetical situations would yield a greater sense of regret. The respondents
were asked to picture two investors, one of whom owns stock in Company A, considers selling it and buying stock in Company B, but decides against it; the investor learns that he would have made $1,200 if he'd gone ahead and bought the Company B stock. The second investor owns shares in Company B and sells them in order to buy stock in Company A; he too learns that he would have been $1,200 richer if he'd stayed with Company B. Which of these two investors feels more regret?