24. When to Leave Your Job
My whole podcast is about how to love your job before you leave it. I obviously think digging into (and solving) the reasons we don't like our current work is very useful, even if we know we won't be at that job forever.
But I don't want y'all to think that means that you *have to* or even *should* love your job before you leave it.
You get to leave your job anytime you want to, for any reason you want to. Why? Because you are an adult and you have complete agency and authority over your life.
There are no universally right reasons to stay in a job or to leave it. You get to decide what the right reasons are for you. You get to choose what makes sense for you and what doesn't.
That being said, you may not be used to thinking about things like this. You may not be used to being the authority in your own life. (It's not how most of us were taught to think about ourselves and our decisions).
To learn how to cultivate this kind of authority in your own life and how to make your own decisions for your own reasons, be sure to check out this week's podcast.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If you want guidance in walking yourself through my deep dive strategy sessions, subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts! Make sure to follow the instructions here to receive an email from me with the PDF document!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why so many people spend a lot of time in confusion and overwhelm about when to leave a job.
How people use the idea of loving your job before you leave it against themselves.
What you can discover when you learn to love the job before you leave it.
A tool to help you discover whether or not to leave your job.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to receive an email from me with my deep-dive strategy session PDF document so you can walk yourself through it!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we are talking about when to leave a job.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week we’re talking about a very special topic, which is when to leave your job. As y’all know, the podcast is called Love Your Job Before You Leave It, but I still get a lot of questions about when is it time though to leave the job?
But before we get into that, I want to take a moment to read a podcast review. This review is called, “Great podcast,” by - I’m just going to take a guess here, Monipoodiva. Probably I mispronounced that, my apologies. The review reads, “Kori’s podcasts are practical, specific, and presented in layman’s terms. I can’t wait to hear more.”
And thank you so much for that lovely review and it’s my pleasure. I am so happy that you are enjoying the podcasts and finding them useful. Alright, now we’re going to get into the main question, which is when should you leave your job? When is it the right time to leave a job?
So on the podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about how to love your job, how to have a better experience of your job, how to have a better experience of your coworkers, how to manage your mind about the job you have before you leave that job and get a different job or launch a business or do whatever it is you want to do. Travel the world for a year, you know, whatever you want.
But I get this question a lot. When is it okay to leave? And I think this is a really interesting question and the basic answer is whenever you want to. I think that we get this idea that there’s a right reason to stay in a job and a right reason to leave a job, or perfect timing, and that we’re going to just sort of know when the timing is perfect.
And then a lot of us spend a lot of time in confusion and overwhelm, kind of trying to figure out when that exact perfect time is. Leaving our job is a fruit that’s going to get ripe and we need to pick the fruit and eat the fruit at the exact moment of its ripeness. And I just don’t think that is actually how it is.
In my opinion, there is no right reason to stay and there is no right reason to leave. And when I say there’s no right reason, I don’t mean there aren’t good reasons. You get to decide what the good reasons are. What I mean actually is that it’s up to you. You have total agency, you get to choose, you get to decide when to stay, when to go, and what the reasons are that make sense for you.
Obviously with this podcast, I am focusing on managing our minds and doing the internal work to enjoy the job that we already have, and I teach that way because I do think there’s a lot of value to learning the skill of loving the job you already have.
I think it’s a great way for us to unpack all of the thought patterns we already have as they’re playing out in our current workplace and whatever’s bothering us about the workplace, that’s always a really good way to tap into what thought patterns do we have that are going on here and how is this workplace revealing those to us so that we can work on them.
That being said, I think the idea of loving your job before you leave it is something that people can use against themselves and something that people often do use against themselves. Like oh, if I don’t love my job yet it’s not okay to leave it, or how do I know if I love it enough? Questions like that.
And so I think it’s really important to also return to the idea of agency and your own authority over your own life to make whatever choices you want to. Now, are there some things that might be good to have in place when you want to quit a job? Sure. Are there some things you might want to think through? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that means that any time is right or wrong, or that what culture decides is a good reason is necessarily a good reason for you and what culture says isn’t a good reason, I don’t think that should necessarily prevent you if what you want to do is leave the job before you love it, without doing any work on it, whatever you want.
Now, as a coach, there’s obviously some caveats here and one of them is that our experience of our workplace is filtered through our thought patterns. So in coaching, we discover those thought patterns and then we work on them. We change those neural paths and we choose new thought patterns, and the new thought patterns allow us to have a different experience of our work and they allow us to create different results in our workplace as well.
So we can keep the same job, keep the same manager, keep the same coworkers, but end up with a completely different experience of that, or we can keep doing the work we’ve been doing, but through changing our thought patterns maybe we can produce a lot more work, or we can produce work at a higher level, and then we can create a result like getting a promotion that we weren’t able to get before.
Those are all things we can do with coaching. So when we talk about loving your job before you leave it, part of learning to love your job is discovering all those thought patterns, choosing which ones you want to keep, choosing which ones you want to change, and then doing the work to change the ones you want to change. And that is the exact work we do in coaching.
We discover the thought patterns, we see what they’re doing, and then we go through that effort of changing them, which you can have one coaching session that can really totally change the way you see something. But to change the actual neural pathing in your brain, usually does require consistent effort, repetition, and practice.
And there’s a whole podcast episode about how to rewire your brain. I don’t remember which number it is, but you can look that up and it’s super helpful for this as well. But anyway, so that’s all the work that we can do in a job and when we keep a job that we feel kind of annoyed about, or has some things we don’t like in it, or where we really struggle with a boss or a coworker.
That’s a perfect place to do this work because it’s highlighting our own thought patterns and then we can resolve those, clean them up as we sometimes say in the coaching industry. I don’t always love the clean it up framing. I would say more revise it. Let’s like - I’m more writerly and kind of messy honestly as a person. Like a little bit of that creative chaos messiness over here, although I do have a healthy respect for order.
So let’s not call it clean it up. Let’s just call it revise it, edit it, and be intention about it so that even if we’re keeping our old thought patterns or we’re choosing new ones, we are being intentional in choosing what we want based on what it’s going to create for us, versus just keeping the thought patterns we’ve always had, which are almost always in large part just our social conditioning and what we learned as children, what it means to be good, what we need to be and do to belong, et cetera, et cetera.
So that’s all of what we discover if we stay in our job and do this work that I’m teaching on the podcast. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay in your job. That doesn’t mean you have to do this work here. And I think there are all kinds of reasons you could have for wanting to leave your job and do something else. And then you can just do this same work over there.
Because that’s the thing y’all; your thought patterns will go with you. So you can change your job, you can leave your job and launch a business like I did, you can leave your job and get a different job. You can try to get a different role in your same organization. You can leave the organization entirely. You can leave your field entirely. You can do whatever you want to.
And I actually want to put a lot of emphasis on that too because a lot of people have a pretty limited idea of what’s possible for them in their lives. Like I’ve always done this, and I’ve always been like this, so I always have to be like this.
And as a coach, I’m like, abso-fucking-lutely not. You can create results that you’ve never created before, you can do things you’ve never been able to do before. Again, how we do that is we discover the thought patterns that are creating your current results and then we revise and tweak as we need to so that you can create different results.
And I like to really take the rails off and think about anything being possible. I don’t know a lot about the field of statistics so I don’t know the statistical likeliness of you getting a certain kind of outcome, but from a coaching point of view, I love to help people work on their goals even if their goals seem wildly improbable, especially if their goals seem wildly improbable because that’s a really wonderful way to figure out what those thought patterns are that would be blocking them from getting that goal and then work on those and then see where they can get.
And one of the things that I’ve heard said in the coaching industry a ton is even if you don’t create the thing you set out to create, it’s about the journey, it’s about who you can become. And sometimes you can blow your own mind with where you can get to, even if you don’t achieve the goal.
I was coaching someone a couple months ago who wanted to create a million dollars in their business I think and it was like, okay if you don’t believe that’s possible, you don’t try, you definitely don’t create a million. But if you believe it’s possible and you really work at it and keep going and break down those old thought patterns and do all the things and maybe you get to $750,000, is it a million? No. But maybe it’s still way beyond what you thought was possible.
So that’s just a side note on wildly improbable goals. But to bring it back around, my point is you can do the thought work, which is what we call the work of coaching, the work of revising those thought patterns, noticing them and revising them so you can have different experiences and create different results. You can do it anywhere.
You can do it in your current job and have a really different experience of that job. You can quit that job and start a business and then do the thought work in your business. You can get a different job in a different industry and then do the thought work over there.
It is true that if you do different things, they will be different. That sounds very straightforward. It’s like, I used to work in corporate, now I have a business, and they are different. But something I can tell you from my own experience is that the thought patterns that I did not revise before I left corporate, they just came with me and then I worked on them in my own business.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, there’s no like you have to be this tall to ride. It’s not like you have to revise all your thought patterns before you can quit. You can do whatever the fuck you want because you’re an adult and you have complete agency and authority over yourself and your own choices.
But when you’re dealing with thought patterns, it’s often like deal with them here or deal with them over there. Deal with them while sitting on this couch or deal with them while sitting on that couch. Deal with them while doing this work or deal with them while doing that work.
And I think there is a lot of benefit to figuring out the thoughts while you’re in the job you already have. But again, you don’t have to. And you get to do whatever you want for whatever reason you want. And there’s a tool I want to teach you about that too and it’s very simple. The tool is these two questions. Do you know your reasons? Do you like those reasons? So when you think about how to know when to quit a job versus to stay in that job, I would ask myself what would be my reasons for staying? Do I like those reasons? What would be my reasons for quitting? Do I like those reasons?
Now, when you do this, you might discover that you like your reasons for both. You might discover - this has actually happened to me, that I was like, oh, I don’t like my reasons for either. And then you can keep the action you want and just change the reasons.
But discovering first what your unmanaged brain’s reasons are is really informative. Does your brain just want to quit this job because it never wants to see your boss ever again? It’s good to know that if that’s the case and then you can decide, do I want to quit? Do I want to keep that reason? Or do I want to manage my mind about my boss? Do I want to quit anyway and change my reason?
And on that note, I want to bring it back around though to that idea like, there is no right reason, there is no wrong reason. There’s just you being honest with yourself about what your reasons are and then just deciding, do I like that or not?
Once I’m honest with myself, do I like that or not? And if I don’t like it but I want to keep the action, what reason could I choose instead that might feel better for me? So I want to keep this podcast really simple.
Just to recap, the question is how do I know when to quit my job? And the answer is whenever the fuck you want, for whatever reason you want to because you’re an adult and you have complete agency over your life. And you get to choose. There is no authority over your life that is bigger than you.
When people hire coaches, there’s this hierarchal element to the coaching relationship but as a coach, what I know is I don’t have your right answers. I have a very awesome, powerful set of tools that I can use to help you understand why you do the things you do in your life and how to do things differently, how to have a different experience, how to create different results.
But when it comes to who has the knowing about your life? That is you. You are the one who knows. The coaching toolkit is what helps remove the obstacles and extra information to help you discover your own knowing.
To say it more eloquently, I’m actually going to read - this is what I wrote to a friend of mine that I gave some coaching to. “It’s not that this is what coaching can do, it’s that this is what you can do. Coaching is just a toolkit that helps us reveal your own capacity, your own capability, your own knowing to yourself.” So when it comes to who knows when and why you should leave a job, that’s always only ever you.
And of course if you want some help sorting that out, you know where to find me. I would be honored to coach you about whether or not you do want to stay in this job and learn to love it, or whether you want to leave it before you do. It’s always, always up to you.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that. There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week we’re talking about a very special topic, which is when to leave your job. As y’all know, the podcast is called Love Your Job Before You Leave It, but I still get a lot of questions about when is it time though to leave the job?
But before we get into that, I want to take a moment to read a podcast review. This review is called, “Great podcast,” by - I’m just going to take a guess here, Monipoodiva. Probably I mispronounced that, my apologies. The review reads, “Kori’s podcasts are practical, specific, and presented in layman’s terms. I can’t wait to hear more.”
And thank you so much for that lovely review and it’s my pleasure. I am so happy that you are enjoying the podcasts and finding them useful. Alright, now we’re going to get into the main question, which is when should you leave your job? When is it the right time to leave a job?
So on the podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about how to love your job, how to have a better experience of your job, how to have a better experience of your coworkers, how to manage your mind about the job you have before you leave that job and get a different job or launch a business or do whatever it is you want to do. Travel the world for a year, you know, whatever you want.
But I get this question a lot. When is it okay to leave? And I think this is a really interesting question and the basic answer is whenever you want to. I think that we get this idea that there’s a right reason to stay in a job and a right reason to leave a job, or perfect timing, and that we’re going to just sort of know when the timing is perfect.
And then a lot of us spend a lot of time in confusion and overwhelm, kind of trying to figure out when that exact perfect time is. Leaving our job is a fruit that’s going to get ripe and we need to pick the fruit and eat the fruit at the exact moment of its ripeness. And I just don’t think that is actually how it is.
In my opinion, there is no right reason to stay and there is no right reason to leave. And when I say there’s no right reason, I don’t mean there aren’t good reasons. You get to decide what the good reasons are. What I mean actually is that it’s up to you. You have total agency, you get to choose, you get to decide when to stay, when to go, and what the reasons are that make sense for you.
Obviously with this podcast, I am focusing on managing our minds and doing the internal work to enjoy the job that we already have, and I teach that way because I do think there’s a lot of value to learning the skill of loving the job you already have.
I think it’s a great way for us to unpack all of the thought patterns we already have as they’re playing out in our current workplace and whatever’s bothering us about the workplace, that’s always a really good way to tap into what thought patterns do we have that are going on here and how is this workplace revealing those to us so that we can work on them.
That being said, I think the idea of loving your job before you leave it is something that people can use against themselves and something that people often do use against themselves. Like oh, if I don’t love my job yet it’s not okay to leave it, or how do I know if I love it enough? Questions like that.
And so I think it’s really important to also return to the idea of agency and your own authority over your own life to make whatever choices you want to. Now, are there some things that might be good to have in place when you want to quit a job? Sure. Are there some things you might want to think through? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that means that any time is right or wrong, or that what culture decides is a good reason is necessarily a good reason for you and what culture says isn’t a good reason, I don’t think that should necessarily prevent you if what you want to do is leave the job before you love it, without doing any work on it, whatever you want.
Now, as a coach, there’s obviously some caveats here and one of them is that our experience of our workplace is filtered through our thought patterns. So in coaching, we discover those thought patterns and then we work on them. We change those neural paths and we choose new thought patterns, and the new thought patterns allow us to have a different experience of our work and they allow us to create different results in our workplace as well.
So we can keep the same job, keep the same manager, keep the same coworkers, but end up with a completely different experience of that, or we can keep doing the work we’ve been doing, but through changing our thought patterns maybe we can produce a lot more work, or we can produce work at a higher level, and then we can create a result like getting a promotion that we weren’t able to get before.
Those are all things we can do with coaching. So when we talk about loving your job before you leave it, part of learning to love your job is discovering all those thought patterns, choosing which ones you want to keep, choosing which ones you want to change, and then doing the work to change the ones you want to change. And that is the exact work we do in coaching.
We discover the thought patterns, we see what they’re doing, and then we go through that effort of changing them, which you can have one coaching session that can really totally change the way you see something. But to change the actual neural pathing in your brain, usually does require consistent effort, repetition, and practice.
And there’s a whole podcast episode about how to rewire your brain. I don’t remember which number it is, but you can look that up and it’s super helpful for this as well. But anyway, so that’s all the work that we can do in a job and when we keep a job that we feel kind of annoyed about, or has some things we don’t like in it, or where we really struggle with a boss or a coworker.
That’s a perfect place to do this work because it’s highlighting our own thought patterns and then we can resolve those, clean them up as we sometimes say in the coaching industry. I don’t always love the clean it up framing. I would say more revise it. Let’s like - I’m more writerly and kind of messy honestly as a person. Like a little bit of that creative chaos messiness over here, although I do have a healthy respect for order.
So let’s not call it clean it up. Let’s just call it revise it, edit it, and be intention about it so that even if we’re keeping our old thought patterns or we’re choosing new ones, we are being intentional in choosing what we want based on what it’s going to create for us, versus just keeping the thought patterns we’ve always had, which are almost always in large part just our social conditioning and what we learned as children, what it means to be good, what we need to be and do to belong, et cetera, et cetera.
So that’s all of what we discover if we stay in our job and do this work that I’m teaching on the podcast. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay in your job. That doesn’t mean you have to do this work here. And I think there are all kinds of reasons you could have for wanting to leave your job and do something else. And then you can just do this same work over there.
Because that’s the thing y’all; your thought patterns will go with you. So you can change your job, you can leave your job and launch a business like I did, you can leave your job and get a different job. You can try to get a different role in your same organization. You can leave the organization entirely. You can leave your field entirely. You can do whatever you want to.
And I actually want to put a lot of emphasis on that too because a lot of people have a pretty limited idea of what’s possible for them in their lives. Like I’ve always done this, and I’ve always been like this, so I always have to be like this.
And as a coach, I’m like, abso-fucking-lutely not. You can create results that you’ve never created before, you can do things you’ve never been able to do before. Again, how we do that is we discover the thought patterns that are creating your current results and then we revise and tweak as we need to so that you can create different results.
And I like to really take the rails off and think about anything being possible. I don’t know a lot about the field of statistics so I don’t know the statistical likeliness of you getting a certain kind of outcome, but from a coaching point of view, I love to help people work on their goals even if their goals seem wildly improbable, especially if their goals seem wildly improbable because that’s a really wonderful way to figure out what those thought patterns are that would be blocking them from getting that goal and then work on those and then see where they can get.
And one of the things that I’ve heard said in the coaching industry a ton is even if you don’t create the thing you set out to create, it’s about the journey, it’s about who you can become. And sometimes you can blow your own mind with where you can get to, even if you don’t achieve the goal.
I was coaching someone a couple months ago who wanted to create a million dollars in their business I think and it was like, okay if you don’t believe that’s possible, you don’t try, you definitely don’t create a million. But if you believe it’s possible and you really work at it and keep going and break down those old thought patterns and do all the things and maybe you get to $750,000, is it a million? No. But maybe it’s still way beyond what you thought was possible.
So that’s just a side note on wildly improbable goals. But to bring it back around, my point is you can do the thought work, which is what we call the work of coaching, the work of revising those thought patterns, noticing them and revising them so you can have different experiences and create different results. You can do it anywhere.
You can do it in your current job and have a really different experience of that job. You can quit that job and start a business and then do the thought work in your business. You can get a different job in a different industry and then do the thought work over there.
It is true that if you do different things, they will be different. That sounds very straightforward. It’s like, I used to work in corporate, now I have a business, and they are different. But something I can tell you from my own experience is that the thought patterns that I did not revise before I left corporate, they just came with me and then I worked on them in my own business.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, there’s no like you have to be this tall to ride. It’s not like you have to revise all your thought patterns before you can quit. You can do whatever the fuck you want because you’re an adult and you have complete agency and authority over yourself and your own choices.
But when you’re dealing with thought patterns, it’s often like deal with them here or deal with them over there. Deal with them while sitting on this couch or deal with them while sitting on that couch. Deal with them while doing this work or deal with them while doing that work.
And I think there is a lot of benefit to figuring out the thoughts while you’re in the job you already have. But again, you don’t have to. And you get to do whatever you want for whatever reason you want. And there’s a tool I want to teach you about that too and it’s very simple. The tool is these two questions. Do you know your reasons? Do you like those reasons? So when you think about how to know when to quit a job versus to stay in that job, I would ask myself what would be my reasons for staying? Do I like those reasons? What would be my reasons for quitting? Do I like those reasons?
Now, when you do this, you might discover that you like your reasons for both. You might discover - this has actually happened to me, that I was like, oh, I don’t like my reasons for either. And then you can keep the action you want and just change the reasons.
But discovering first what your unmanaged brain’s reasons are is really informative. Does your brain just want to quit this job because it never wants to see your boss ever again? It’s good to know that if that’s the case and then you can decide, do I want to quit? Do I want to keep that reason? Or do I want to manage my mind about my boss? Do I want to quit anyway and change my reason?
And on that note, I want to bring it back around though to that idea like, there is no right reason, there is no wrong reason. There’s just you being honest with yourself about what your reasons are and then just deciding, do I like that or not?
Once I’m honest with myself, do I like that or not? And if I don’t like it but I want to keep the action, what reason could I choose instead that might feel better for me? So I want to keep this podcast really simple.
Just to recap, the question is how do I know when to quit my job? And the answer is whenever the fuck you want, for whatever reason you want to because you’re an adult and you have complete agency over your life. And you get to choose. There is no authority over your life that is bigger than you.
When people hire coaches, there’s this hierarchal element to the coaching relationship but as a coach, what I know is I don’t have your right answers. I have a very awesome, powerful set of tools that I can use to help you understand why you do the things you do in your life and how to do things differently, how to have a different experience, how to create different results.
But when it comes to who has the knowing about your life? That is you. You are the one who knows. The coaching toolkit is what helps remove the obstacles and extra information to help you discover your own knowing.
To say it more eloquently, I’m actually going to read - this is what I wrote to a friend of mine that I gave some coaching to. “It’s not that this is what coaching can do, it’s that this is what you can do. Coaching is just a toolkit that helps us reveal your own capacity, your own capability, your own knowing to yourself.” So when it comes to who knows when and why you should leave a job, that’s always only ever you.
And of course if you want some help sorting that out, you know where to find me. I would be honored to coach you about whether or not you do want to stay in this job and learn to love it, or whether you want to leave it before you do. It’s always, always up to you.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that. There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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