Ep 4: When to Walk Away
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[00:00:00] Welcome to The Love What You Do podcast. I'm Kelly Dugan, former HR executive turned career coach and personal brand expert.
And I'm here each episode sharing strategies to help you discover your unique value, leverage your personal brand, and take action to create a career you love.
Welcome back to The Love What You Do podcast, my friends. I am so excited to dive into today's topic because this is the first topic that has actually been submitted by one of you, one of our listeners. And we are diving in to how you know when it is time to leave your job. So if you have a topic on your mind, I just wanna remind you, you can send me an email anytime at [email protected] and we'll make sure that we create an episode on that for you. , or you can also make sure you're following me on social media @yourplaceatthetop, on Instagram. You [00:01:00] can follow me at Kelly Duggan on uh, LinkedIn as well. And we do take some listener requested topics that way too. So, if you have a question that you need answered, just letting you know it's an open door, we can do that for you.
But like I said, today we're gonna talk about how you know when to leave your job. And the first thing that I'll say about this is that there's a lot of advice out there that might seem like hard and fast rules, right? Like you wanna make sure that you're staying in a role at least two years, or you wanna make sure you haven't stayed in a role with limited mobility within that role for anything more than five years. I am not a fan of blanket rules in general when it comes to our career paths and discovering what we wanna do because the fact is each situation is incredibly different. And if you're not taking into account all of the unique pieces [00:02:00] of your actual path, you might be being led to make the wrong decisions for you.
So what we're gonna dive into today is not those hard and fast rules, but how you can look inside yourself and know what the right thing to do is for your specific situation. And when we think about when it is time to leave a role, you know, there are really two paths that happen for anyone to exit an organization.
There is the voluntary path and there is the involuntary path, and, the unfortunate fact is that for some of us, we don't get to make the decision of when to leave an organization, and that's an in incredibly difficult topic that we're gonna cover in a future episode, I promise, of how you can pivot in those situations and, and cope with those moments when leaving an organization wasn't necessarily your decision.
But what we're [00:03:00] gonna focus on today is the challenges that come from it being your decision, because sometimes when we have the gut feeling that it might be time to leave a certain organization or current role or our current job, we don't take action. And because this path requires both decision and action, it comes with unique challenges.
So, what I'm gonna share today are what I think are some of the signs of how, you know, it might be time for you specifically to walk away. And one thing, I'm just gonna call out upfront. I am getting closer and closer to my due date for baby girl here. So I very well could be running out of breath a few times during this podcast.
So please bear with me. Um, if you hear me taking a few extra breaths or taking a little bit longer, uh, to get some words at out today. That's [00:04:00] just, that's just where we are on this journey over here. So okay. Back to, what are the things that you wanna look for that may be indicators that it is time for you to pivot and walk away from your current role?
The first one is when there is nothing left for you to give in that organization. And here's what I mean by that. When you are showing up to work every day and you feel like you are showing up in your unique value, right? We've talked about unique value on the podcast before. If you're not familiar with that, go back and listen to one of our previous episodes.
But when you're showing up, providing the unique value that you provide, and you no longer feel like that is being received by either your coworkers or your manager, your team, the organization more broadly, it's not being valued like it once was. That's an indicator that you [00:05:00] may not have anything left to give to that organization.
That does not mean that your unique value is not valuable. It does not mean that what you bring is not valuable. It just means that in that specific circumstance, at that specific place, at that specific time, it may not be what is needed. And when you're feeling that, it can feel be an incredible blow to your confidence, right?
Because you are showing up to work every day. You are showing up to provide the value that has worked for you at that organization for months, maybe even years. And suddenly it doesn't feel like a fit anymore. So what's the first thing that we do? We start looking in the mirror and saying, well, what's wrong with me?
And one thing I wanna encourage you to think more deeply on is. Is [00:06:00] this a problem that's inward or is this just a mismatch for this particular time in this particular place? Other ways that you might feel like you have nothing to give to the organization is, you know, if you start to feel as though your ideas are maybe being rejected in meetings where they were at one time being celebrated, or maybe you've lost the motivation to even come up with new ideas or.
Want to pitch them at all. Maybe projects that you once found very interesting are now not going to you, but going to others, or projects that you once found very interesting are no longer the priority of the organization and are no longer being invested in. These are all things that can make you feel incredibly disengaged in your work and can be a huge indicator that maybe this is the end of the path for you at that organization.[00:07:00]
The second indicator that I wanna call out is very similar, slightly different. This time, it's if there is nothing left for you to get from that organization. Maybe you still feel as though you are contributing. But you're contributing only for the organization's benefit, and you're no longer gaining any benefit out of that mutual relationship.
So that could look like lack of advancement opportunities. You're looking around and saying, you know what, in order for me to achieve that next level. I don't see a pathway for that to happen here. It could be a lack of professional development opportunities. Maybe they're not investing in your learning.
You're not able to, go out to the conferences that you wanna go out to or experience the things that are going to help you grow as a professional. And it can also [00:08:00] look like not having anyone to learn from in the organization. Mentors are incredibly important in our career. That's a whole episode in and of itself right there that we can talk about how mentorship can impact your career and the different types of mentors that you can have.
But when you find yourself at an organization where you're no longer learning from the people who have more power than you have, it can be incredibly de demotivating and the what's in it for you of that role starts to fade. And then another piece of this is compensation, right? Sometimes the compensation that we have at, at the role that we're in is not where we wanna be, and there's not a pathway to increasing that compensation there.
And that, again, can be another indicator that you are falling into that category of, you know what, I have nothing left to gain from being here. So those are our first two. We've got, there's nothing left for you to [00:09:00] give and we've got, there's nothing left for you to gain from that organization. And those are two indicators that it might be time to leave.
The third is that you find yourself being more annoyed than you are excited, and I don't want you to, your takeaway from this podcast to be, oh, I feel annoyed at work sometimes, must be time to go because the sad fact of life is most human situations that we are in work related or not work related, come with some level of annoyance at some point in time, right?
But I want you to think of it as a scale and. Yes, there may be things that frustrate you. There may be politics that get to you, but those things should never outweigh the good of what gets you excited and wanting to show up to work every day. Even if those things are equal, maybe they're out of balance for a bad week, but things should always kind of fall back into [00:10:00] place where the excitement is outweighing the annoyance.
But if you find yourself complaining every day of these annoyances and not able to appreciate the things that once made you excited. That can be a huge indicator that maybe it is time to leave the organization. I can say from personal experience, this was the one. That started to get me when I knew it was time to transfer out of corporate and for what my chosen path was, go into my own coaching and consulting business.
Because I found in my, in my job that I had loved through, a 10 year tenure there that I was starting to be annoyed by small things that at one point in time never would've bothered me. I always was able to have the mindset and the attitude of, you know, what? That is [00:11:00] logistics.
That's minutia. We don't need to focus on that. Let's focus on the big picture and get excited about the things that I was building. So excited in fact that the little annoyances, like they didn't even matter and then suddenly. The things that were bothering me were starting to outweigh my excitement for wanting to invest in the growth of what we were doing.
And at first, it was my gut instinct as I think many people's gut instinct would be, is to get annoyed at the organization. Right? Like, wow, why do people, why do they do these things this way? Why do they make these decisions? And I realized that really wasn't fair of me because the organization hadn't changed. Nothing there really was different than it had been for my whole tenure. But what had changed was me, and things that didn't use to bother me were suddenly under my skin. And you can stay in a situation like that, [00:12:00] but at the end of the day, some of those big things that might be annoying you are not going to change overnight.
So if you can't change the reality of the environment that you're in. You have to change your environment and you have to change to make an adjustment to who you've changed to turn into. And there's nothing wrong with that. The organization's not at fault. You're not at fault. It's just time to move on and time to go.
And like I said, this was my major indicator that I experienced, and I would say that the fourth indicator that it may be time to leave your organization. Falls into how seriously you find yourself contemplating and daydreaming this question. If it's on a weekly, daily basis, when you're asking yourself, how do I know when it's time to leave?
How do I know when it's time to walk away? [00:13:00] I am willing to bet that there's a part of you that has already made up your mind and you know it's time. To turn and walk away from that organization and to, to make an exit plan. Uh, but maybe you have a little bit of fear of taking action. Maybe there's a limiting belief mindset that's at play that's keeping you there.
If you find that you are really passionate and wanting to dive into this decision and put the time into thinking of if it's right to leave. Generally, a part of you already knows that it is time and what might be holding you up is creating the action plan to make it happen, because taking action is scary.
Making a huge decision like this is scary, and especially anything that involves changing the status quo. The easy thing to do is to show up [00:14:00] to work every day, be a little annoyed about things that are happening, feel like maybe you've given all that you can give or you've gotten all that you can get, but you just keep showing up to to work every day because that's what you've done for the last how many months or years.
That's the easier path. In a lot of ways, the harder path is accepting the fact that it is probably time to walk away and creating a plan that's going to allow you to do that. And that my friends, is going to be the topic of our very next episode. We're going to dive into when you know. That it is time to leave your current role, how do you go about deciding what to do next and making an action plan to make it happen for yourself? Because I'm sure we've all had those days where we just wanna quit on the spot and walk out the door. But unfortunately, most of us have things like rent and a mortgage and food to [00:15:00] pay for families to support, so that's not always possible. So we're gonna talk about how you can make a realistic action plan. Uh, if at the end of this podcast you're starting to realize, you know what, that's me. I do need to make a plan. It's time for me to leave where I am right now. So make sure you tune in for that. I can't wait to dive into that topic.
And I thank you so much for joining us on today's podcast.
Thanks for joining me on today's episode. As always, if you're looking for coaching support or would like to submit a question, you can drop me an email at [email protected]. And if you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review so this podcast can find its way to other amazing listeners just like you.
