Thoughts

How to know when to quit your job?

In the past few weeks, people have asked me how I knew it was time to quit my job. How I was doing what they could only dream of. The truth is, to get to your dream — you pretty much have to live a nightmare for a while, until you are ready to wake up…

 To review the circumstance, I was a six-figure executive, with a gorgeous office, accolades in the NYTimes and press. Fierce possessions. Had I not left the company, my boss had told me I would be the company’s Marketer of the Year. 

I felt empty.

I rarely had time with my family. I couldn’t tell you what was going on in my friends lives. My dog barely got excited when I home, because I never played with him. I wasn’t eating right, my health deteriorated to a point where I started to lose weight at a speed that was dangerous for my heart. I suffer from hyperthyroidism, an disorder that is exacerbated by stress and affects the auto-immune and heart. I wasn’t sleeping right. I would wake up in the middle of the night upset and anxious about meetings/decisions from the day before. For the past 6 months, I have been living off of coffee and gummy bears. 

That wasn’t the worst part. 

Everyday I would sit at my job and feel this enormous anxiety about doing something else, more meaningful. For the first time in my life, I felt an inordinant amount of guilt about not giving myself the time to pour my energies into my music and songwriting. I had been writing songs since I was 6 – never felt this way before. There was a tremendous amount of noise in my mind. Everyday it got louder and louder. For the first time in my life, I had pursued a dream far enough that it was pulling at my reality. It was killing me. I was dying emotionally. 

Death reminds you life is fleeting. 

Unfortunately, during this pinnacle of dissonance – there was a death in my family. The tenor of which changed my philosophy to sway towards swinging towards the fences. 

Guilt. 

It took me a few weeks to deal with the guilt of leaving my job. The economy and fact that some of my friends are looking for work – made me feel I was taking my life for granted. Everyone always jokes about my company and how “The Devil Wears Prada,” the truth is, the Devil can also buy you Prada. I have a Prada bag from my boss, a woman who despite all the crazy circumstance – I harbor no ill-will towards. 

Failure. 

If I didn’t want to fail, I wouldn’t have signed up for Failure Club. Long before I volunteered for the documentary, I had a very poignant conversation with a friend on failure. How I could almost write a book about Failure. I would need extra fingers and toes to count all my failures. I love failing. (At the time I hated it, but a year or so later I loved it.)

Success. 

Success at something you are not passionate about is indistinguishable from failure. 
Staying at my last job would be prolonging failure. The beauty about failure is being able to rebound and learn from it. Which is exactly where I’m at.

Resistance.

Resistance is a nasty thing. Like a life weed, I have been finding myself plucking away at resistance to clear my path. Thank you to my life coach in training for helping me gain this perspective.

That being said, this story is pretty much –

To be continued…