Should you quit your job?

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After becoming a mom, I wrestled with the idea of quitting my job but felt trapped in golden handcuffs. I needed to feel sure that quitting was the right move, but I never felt 100% certain. It took a year of soul searching to feel the inner peace to finally quit and in today's podcast, I’m sharing how I got there.

Topics in this episode:

  • What it takes to feel “certain” about your decisions

  • Why making “gut decisions” is often not useful

  • 3 specific exercises you should be doing if you are considering quitting your job

  • Developing a compass to make decisions

  • Finding peace with your decision to stay or quit

Show Notes:

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Transcription

Intro

After I found out I was pregnant with my first, I wrestled with the idea of quitting my job. The problem was it paid well, I liked the people I worked with, I held the benefits for me and my husband and my soon to be child and I felt sorta stuck. I knew that if I was going to leave the job and the company I needed to feel certain it was the right move. The problem was I didn't feel certain. I didn't know what I wanted, I didn't know if the next job would be more fulfilling, I was really searching for the right answer, which took over a year to find. In today's podcast, I'm going to share for you the journey of why I decided to quit my job and how I was able to make that decision feeling 100% certain it was right.


Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you’re looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home then this is the place for you. I’m your host Rebecca Olson, let’s get to it! 


Hey there working moms, I’m excited to be connecting with you today and sharing a little bit about my story of when I decided to move on from my job, after having my first baby. 


This is a season when many working moms feel stuck. 


And if you are feeling stuck right now and asking yourself if you should quit your job or change careers or just be a stay-at-home mom for a while, this podcast is going to be really useful to you. 


Having had literally hundreds of conversations with working moms, what I know now is that my own story is not uncommon. 


Many moms wrestle with the idea of quitting their job after they have kids.


I have essentially had three careers. My degrees are in theater arts and after college, I was a professional stage manager. At the age of 22, I got my dream job as a production stage manager, working for a theater company in Seattle, WA. I LOVED that job and I happened to meet my husband working at that company, he was an actor. We met and married in Seattle and one year later decided to move back to the San Francisco Bay Area where my family lives and both of us knew that we were not going to be looking for work in theater. 


Rebecca’s Story

I left that career in Seattle because it wasn’t a career path that truly excited me. It was what I had always done. I had been dancing and singing and acting since I was 5 years old and certainly loved it as a kid and enjoyed it as a young adult… but this doesn't pay very well, and you have to be really passionate about it if you're willing to not make a lot of money. And I just wasn't.


So we moved to California and I started looking for work in event management because of that management and stage management are virtually the same thing, one is just dealing with shows and the other with events. Again, I found another dream job working in the city doing high-level event management, working for a facility that hosted events as small as 10 people and as large as 20,000 people. After five years in that job, I got pregnant with my little girl and a lot shifted for me internally during that season of being pregnant. It had actually taken us about a year and a half to get pregnant with Lillian and when I finally did, I started questioning my career.


Because I knew that I wanted Lillian, we had struggled with infertility and had been focused so much on starting our family, that when it finally happened it was only natural that I started to question if I wanted to continue to work and in what capacity.


Is it worth leaving my kid to go to work?

The biggest question I was asking myself was, is it worth it? Is it worth leaving my daughter every day, a daughter we had struggled to conceive, to go to this job? 


Now I knew pretty quickly the answer to that question was no. At that point I had been in the job for five years, was commuting over an hour each way, and was starting to get bored.


But of course, it wasn't just as simple as quitting, there were a lot of factors to consider. The biggest being I had no idea what I wanted to do otherwise. At this point I am 31 years old, I made probably around $20,000 more than my husband, I held the insurance for us, I was paying significantly into our retirement because my company had good retirement incentives, I had just crossed over the five-year mark at the company which gave me more paid time off, the maternity leave was better than average, I really loved the people I worked with and my boss, there was some potential opportunity for me to grow, actually they even tried to give me a department to get me to stay… so the job had all of these other things going for it, lots of pros and really over here on the con-side was me being unfulfilled and the commute. A long pros list and a short con list.


The Golden Handcuffs

Many people call this the golden handcuffs, there's a lot of financial incentive and advancement in your career but you're handcuffed because you don't really want to stay. You feel like you have to stay because of the money and opportunity.


I stayed through my daughter being born, through a four ½ month maternity, I actually stayed a whole nother year after that, because I struggled to get out of the golden handcuffs. I didn't want to be wrong. I didn't want to change careers or even change jobs in the industry only to be unhappy there too. I wanted to know. I wanted to know that I would be just as financially successful and fulfilled.


Answering the question  “should I quit?” is mostly about KNOWING. 


Knowing it’s the right choice. 

Knowing you will be happy.

Knowing your family won’t be making a sacrifice on your behalf. 


The problem is there really is no right answer. What is right for you and your life and your situation may or may not be right for my life and my situation, “rightness” is completely subjective.


That deep down knowing that we all long for when we make a decision about our career. That deep down knowing isn't universal. It's just a feeling. Oftentimes I hear people describe that deep down knowing or that “rightness” as a gut feeling. It's like a peaceful feeling in the center of your body that feels very calm and assured. YES! I wanted THAT feeling when I was trying to decide if I should quit…and you probably do too. 


In coaching, with my clients, I use the term “alignment”. I actually call my 1:1 6 month coaching program “aligning motherhood” and the goal is to get what it is you want, what it is you feel and what it is you are doing all in alignment with each other: your wants, your feelings and your actions. 


How to find alignment in your life.

The problem is I see working moms try to find that alignment in a backward way. Because remember what we're all looking for is that feeling of rightness, that deep down gut knowing that you're making the right decision. So what I see them do is start exploring their options. And imagine that with each option, what they're doing is they're putting on a new hat and they're seeing how that hat feels. 


They explore quitting and staying home with their baby, they put on that hat they imagine that life of being home, of doing mommy and me activities, of taking their kid to the park every day, and they think about what they are letting go of to stay at home – the adult interactions, the challenge, the money. And they're paying attention to how it feels in their body, does it feel calm and peaceful?


Then they explore staying at their company but shifting roles. They put on that hat, imagine another job, imagine working with a different team, imagine the challenge of doing something slightly new…and they check in with how that feels in their body and in their gut. 


Then, they explore leaving the company altogether. They put on THAT hat and imagine trying something new and they do a gut check on how that feels in their body. 


Your gut is always going to feel uncomfortable with change.

Curious if you see the problem here though. You put on a hat, you imagine life while wearing that hat and then you check in with how it feels, but your gut is always going to feel uncomfortable with change. Every hat you wear, every scenario you consider that is not you staying in your current job at your current company it's going to feel uncomfortable because it requires change. But, of course, staying in the job also feels uncomfortable and doesn’t sit well in your gut either. 


Hence the confusion. Nothing ends up feeling just right. Nothing hits your gut with that sense of calm and peace. And so, just like I was, many working moms just end up doing nothing and feeling stuck. 


Here is what I did to get myself to that place of “rightness”, that sense of inner peace. I stopped listening to my gut because I realized my gut is based on that little voice in my head that is trying to keep me safe and secure. That’s why every scenario outside of just staying put felt so uncomfortable because my safety brain was screaming at me not to make a change because change is scary. 


What is it you really want?

Instead, I had to approach this in a different way…by answering the question, what is it that I want? I needed some way of answering that, that was not me searching for a magical “gut” feeling of peace. Because I realized that what I wanted may not feel peaceful…in fact, it might be really really scary (like going back to school and starting a coaching business). 


What is it that I really want? The exploration of this question took me about a year. I sought mentors, I read books – one book, in particular, I found super helpful called “Free by Mark and Lisa Scandrette”, I prayed, journaled and I was looking at what I wanted not through the lens of my job, but just in life: what motivated me, what de-energized me, what were my passions…and by the end, I had language to really describe myself and what was core to me. 


And knowing that, it allowed me to explore quitting and changing industries entirely because I could come back to this work on who I was and what I wanted and use it as a filter. Now it didn’t feel like I was guessing and just hoping for that magical gut feeling. 


This deep down knowing of who you are and what it is you want, I walk all my 1:1 clients through exercises of naming this. 


3 exercises to get clear on who you are and what you want.

I distill this all down into 3 exercises:


Naming your core values

Understanding your identity

Finding your purpose 


After walking through these three exercises what you will have is a list of 10 – 15 words and phrases that are core to who you are. So then from there, just like I did, we take this filter and we start looking at the question, “should I quit?” and answering it with certainty. 


We can be more systematic with our questions. We start broad and work our way down: 

Do you even want to work? Why?

How does your current job align with this filter we created? How doesn’t it? 

How does your company align? How doesn’t it? 

What does your filter tell you about what you want and what you don’t? 


The filter which is based on who you are at the core becomes your compass. My client Laura, really succinctly described her experience with this compass, and I just want to read it to you, “Rebecca helped me clearly define my values and purpose and set me on a path to feeling fulfilled in life. When I make decisions now, I hold up my options against my values and my purpose...and it's easy for me to decide what path to take. Now I feel like I'm at the wheel driving my life, rather than watching my life go by as I sit in the passenger seat.”


Creating your own internal compass.

After creating for myself my own compass, I felt the same way…like I was at the steering wheel of my life - I could tell you exactly why the theater work I had done and the event management work I was doing weren’t fulfilling to me. My values and my identity and my purpose all focused on people development. Even at the job I was in, the most rewarding part was the deep relationships I had with my colleagues and the ways I got to manage and develop my staff... But the job itself of course wasn't about that, it was about managing event logistics. Defining my compass really gave me a lot of languages to describe what wasn’t working for me and I knew that the next step in my career had to be about people development and of course, I became a coach and started a business and here I am in the 3rd iteration of my career. 


When I started going through my certification program for coaching, yes there were still a lot of questions about how the business was going to work and how I was going to transition out of my jobs but I was certain I was making the right move despite not knowing exactly how it was all going to play out.


Creating certainty.

When you answer the question “should I quit my job?” you want to be certain of the answer. You want to KNOW. Change is hard and uncomfortable and your brain is always going to put up resistance to it, so if you're going to make a change in your job you want to know that it's the right change for you.


And that deep sense of knowing, that comes from inside of you. It comes from knowing what it is you value, and what energizes you, and what your purpose in life is, why you're motivated by the things that motivate you…it’s about you knowing you. 


And if you can't answer any of these questions, if you've never really explored who you are and what you desire at a very deep level, then that's your starting place. There are tons of books and personality tests and resources that will help you to answer some of these questions, or if you are looking for a guide through the process, this is the core of what I do.


I help you define who you are, get clear on what you want and then support you through making any necessary changes in your career or life to align with that. 


So if you're someone that does better with clear structure and process then coaching will be a great container to help you answer this question, “should I quit?” with certainty and then decide what is next based on your answer. 


If you want to chat about potentially coaching with me, then you can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to fill out a quick form and schedule a free call. 


But more than anything, here is what I hope you gain from hearing my story….


  1. It is normal to question your career and what it is you want when you become a mom.

  2. There is no right or wrong to what you do in your career – and searching for the “right decision” is going to keep you feeling stuck because you’re going to feel so much pressure.

  3. To find that deep sense of KNOWING, search inside yourself. Get to know who you are and your values, identity and purpose – that is how you will build that sense of certainty within you as you make big decisions about your career.

  4. If you need or want help through this process I am here for you. You are not alone. Not only have I gone through the process of wrestling with my career after motherhood, I have supported hundreds of working moms through the process as well.


Ok. See ya next week! 

Rebecca Olson