Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I'm actually super excited because today, September 10th, 2024 doors are open to my membership, the Quitter Club. If you have been around here for a while, you've probably heard me speak about it. This is where I actually help you quit the route race and quit all of the things that you hate about your career and actually take control of your career and figure out what you wanna do and go after it.
And it's where I coach you, where you get access to all of the video lessons and worksheets and the community and private podcast feed. And I love being in the club. I love working with people kind of in depth on their plan, on their strategy, on how they're going about their work and helping them not give into the craziness that happens in our mind when we're trying to navigate this stuff alone. So if you are interested in joining right now is the best time, it is the cheapest that you will get it all year. I give you a year of the club for about 80 bucks a month and you get access to an insane amount of stuff. So if you wanna know more, if you wanna join, doors are only open at this price for the next week, you can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub.
I will link down below if you wanna check it out and see everything that you get and how much it is. I hope to see you in the club because while it's great to listen to these podcast episodes and you can start implementing some of the stuff, we all know what happens when we actually go to do it. We get plagued with fears of I'm not gonna stick to it anyway, it's not worth it. What if I fail? What if it doesn't work? And then we give up and then I want you to do that. I want this year for you to actually quit in the next 12 months. I want you to figure out what it is you're quitting and quit that and start figuring out what you want and create that on purpose. So join me in the club. I would love to have you.
And that leads me into doing this episode because when I was creating the curriculum for the club and the roadmap, I was really thinking about where people needed to go to get to the place where whether they wanted to quit their career or not their job or not, you know, how are they gonna be at a place where they actually are thriving and they're loving their career and they're doing what lights them up and they're feeling fulfilled and they have balance. And one of the things that I've noticed is that I think for so many of us, we wait until we get super burned out, until we're fed up. Like we tolerate it, tolerate it, tolerate it until we're the point, like a breaking point. And then we just wanna quit. And I think that people think that quitting is just this one singular event that you do.
Unfortunately, I think for a lot of people, they don't do any prep before they either get pushed to the point where they just quit on the spot or they think they have to build themselves up to the point of like just going in and handing their resignation and then they're left with a lot of stress and a lot of spinning of like, well, what do I do now? And what I work with with people in the club? And what I want you to understand from this episode is that there are stages to quitting and you, I want you to really think about where you are in this quitting journey. And again, when I say quitting, I don't necessarily mean that you have to quit your job. What I mean is like for a lot of us, we wanna quit the rat race. We wanna quit what corporate America has told us.
Like this is what a career is like, this is what jobs are. Jobs aren't fun, suck it up. You have to give it your all. You have to basically kill yourself and be exhausted at the end of the night. And a lot of us don't want that anymore. And we wanna find a different way where we can do work that we actually like and that we have some balance and we have some capacity to do things that we love outside of it and we make good money and all of those things. And so it's really like, how do I quit the approach that I've been taught to go after jobs and really create a different way? I create a different path for myself. And so I want you to think about these stages, even if you are wanting to quit your job. Like what are the three stages that you're gonna go through and really figuring out where you are in that journey, okay?
So that you don't get to be like, I'm just so fed up. I can't do anything about it. I have to quit. That's the only answer. We don't wanna get to that place because you don't normally make really great decisions from that place and it's usually very stressful. So here it's the first stage that a lot of people tend to fall into, unfortunately is this stage of burnout. And I think the first thing that you need to quit is that you need to quit burning yourself out. You need to quit the overwhelm and the overworking. And I think for a lot of people, they are in this place of survival where they are really just trying to make it day to day and they're trying to keep their head above water. And if that feels like you, I'm very sorry. The good news is that there is a way out of it.
And what I want you to really understand about this stage, if you are in this stage, is that it's a terrible place to make decisions from. It's not a good place to start thinking about long-term what you should be doing. Unfortunately, for a lot of us, we wait until we get to this place and the pain is so acute, like it's so unbearable that we do make really big decisions. And that tends to cause a lot more stress. That tends to set us back a couple of steps that tends to make us really frantic, where we're sort of just running around jumping from job to job or trying to find something. And what I work with people on. And what I really recommend is not making a decision from that point. And I know that's really hard, but it's really figuring out like how do I get myself to out of survival mode into a stable place?
How do I get myself to a place where I'm not really living day to day where I'm not in this, you know, place of, I just have to make it through where I can have some clarity of thought, where I can start really assessing what my options are from less panic from a place of calm where I can actually make an informed decision instead of a desperate, like I need something to change. So whatever comes my way, I'm gonna end up taking it. Now if that has happened to you or that is happening, it is totally understandable, right? It's like if I have a very bad wound, I just have to get the bleeding to stop right? Before we like actually figure out how to heal it. Maybe I have to just make sure that we are no longer bleeding out. So it's not to say like if you are in a situation where you're like, my mental health cannot handle this anymore, I'm not saying that you can never quit or that you shouldn't, what I'm saying is that like typically if you're gonna do something in the short term to kind of buy yourself a reprieve, that's totally fine, but we're typically not making our best long-term decisions from that place.
So even if it's like I have to quit here to at least get myself to a place where I have enough bandwidth to even think about what I wanna do, fine, maybe we figure out what we do in those couple of months where we get ourselves back. But just know that you should focus on kind of the short term at that point. You shouldn't really be trying to figure out like what do I wanna do for the rest of my life? You don't have like the brain capacity at that point. Your brain is like so overloaded with just surviving with fight or flight or freeze that you aren't really in a place where you're gonna be making really grand decisions about your life. And that's okay. So the first place you wanna get out of is that survival mode. You wanna quit that burnout. You wanna figure out how do I get back to baseline, right?
How do I start understanding what went wrong to get me there, right? What were all of the things that I ignored? Likely, it's a lot of people pleasing, like not saying no to people doing a bunch of things you don't wanna do. It's likely a lot of perfectionism where you always had to do the most and the best. A lot of anxiety, a lot of not thinking you're doing things well, often coupled with maybe bosses that are less understanding, more demanding, really demanding deadlines, things like that can obviously exacerbate it. But I want you to know that like your focus in that stage should really just be your own health, both physical and mental. Like how do you start eliminating some of the stuff you're doing? How do you start delegating whether that's at work or at home, so that you can buy yourself some time and space to rest, to really get back to a place of stability, to do things that bring you joy, even if it's outside of work.
You have to find a way to try to fill up your cup a little bit because you can't pour from an empty cup. And so if you find yourself in this burnout stage, I really want you to shift your focus on like, you know, what should I be doing from with my career and should I find another job to really, like how do I get myself out of burnout? And that might be some very, very deep rest. It's not like a weekend away, it's like, do I need months and months of rehabilitation and resting and doing things that calm my nervous system and doing things that bring me joy, right? That's what I wanna focus on. Because when you get out of that is when you can kind of have the frame of mind to really think about what you want for your future. And so that takes you kind of to stage two.
So once you learned how to properly manage burnout and you've quit burnout, you get into kind of stage two where it's really figuring out what you want and not what everyone else wants for you, right? And so I label this, quit playing small, right? Stage two is when you quit playing small, when you've gotten to a place where you've gone from survival to staple. If you're doing okay but you still don't know what you want, like you've done what everybody else wants you to do for so long that you really don't even know who you are anymore, right? You can sort of see evidence of this if like you can't even really pick where you wanna eat. You've spent so much of your life trying to be amenable to people trying to be easygoing. Try to go with the flow, try to be a team player.
It becomes really hard to remember who you are and what you like. It's hard to like remember what your wants are, what your desires are. And so for a lot of us in this stage, our life is manageable. We're just going through the motions. We're doing okay, but we really feel unfulfilled and we really feel like there has to be more. I just don't know. I have no idea where to start. I don't know what I like, I don't know who I am, I dunno what I want. And this is a good place to start making decisions from because if you're not to the point where you're completely exhausted all the time, you can find pockets of time. You don't need to have tons of leisure time. You don't need to quit your job so that you have like eight hours a day to work on this.
You simply just need to like find pockets of time to really figure out and ask yourself these questions of like, who am I? What do I like? This is like an exploration phase in my mind. I think that a lot of people have spent so many years suppressing who they were when they were children, you know, as they were growing up. So many of us learned to suppress what we actually like because you have to do what is successful or you know, the smart thing or rational or whatever we were taught, it's like you wanna get the stable job and you wanna make sure that you're secure. And so for a lot of us, we stopped listening to kind of our own curiosities. We stopped really thinking about what it is that we wanted to do. I mean, hell, a lot of us stopped listening to our own body cues.
Like you stop listening when you're hungry or when you have to go to the bathroom or when you have to sleep because it's like, hey, I gotta finish the deadline or I have to keep working or I have to get this done. And so this is like coming back to yourself of like, what is it that I actually like? What is it that I actually want? What does my body need right now? How much rest do I need, right? Like for so many of us, I think we're just not conscious about what it is that we need. And so this is like a reawakening to that consciousness. Like it's becoming aware of like, oh, I'm actually not interested in this subject at all. Why am I working in this, right? Like I'm actually really interested in this subject, or I could talk about this all the time.
And so what I would focus on in this stage is really giving yourself a healthy amount of time to explore. That can be through classes, that could be through online communities in-person communities, that could be through books, forums, movies, whatever it is is truly just figuring out more who you are and what you like and paying attention to that and being more assertive and stating what you like and going after it and giving it to yourself. Allowing yourself like the permission to pick the restaurant you want to eat at, even if other people don't want to eat there. Like letting yourself take up space, letting yourself be okay with who it is you want. 'cause it's fascinating. The more you do that, the more you start realizing that those things that were suppressed are still there. They're just a little dormant. And I can't tell you how many people start doing this work and start realizing like, oh, I always knew I loved X, or I really love Y.
Like I've always loved writing. I really wanna be in a field that requires me to write, right? And like, okay, that becomes a lot easier to start figuring out what do I wanna do ultimately, right? I think for so many of us, when we're unhappy, we just like wanna know what the next thing is, right? Then an analogy I like to give is like let's say I'm dating someone and I break up with them and I'm really wanna get married soon. If my attitude towards dating then becomes like the next person I meet, I have to marry. Like I don't wanna waste my time, I just wanna find someone I marry. It's not to say that you're not allowed to have those desires, it is just that that's not gonna bode that well for your dating life. Like if you're going with that pressure, the way that you are showing up, the way that you are dating, the way that you are talking to people, likely will create a situation where, I don't know, there's too much pressure, you're too frantic.
You might be giving off different energy than how you actually are because you're panicked. And I think a lot of people, they get so worked up about finding like the right career, the one career which there isn't. And I think that they end up creating more of a rushed panic state that doesn't help you actually figure out what you wanna do. And so you wanna give yourself a little bit of time to just like without pressure, really figure out like what would I like exploring? What do I like learning about? You wanna brainstorm without limiting yourself, without limiting to like what's realistic or like that doesn't really get paid or whatnot. 'cause once you start uncovering things, you can figure out a lot of different industries that might relate to the same thing. So in this stage, I would really spend time exploring and I would also really spend time with short-term goals.
I wouldn't try to set a lot of long-term goals. Like I mean you can set obviously long-term goals about other things. Like if you wanna have a financial goal or something, but you wanna sort of figure out like, okay, maybe I have to stay in this job for the next three months or six months or a year. Okay, that's my goal. I'm gonna stay here while I explore and I'm gonna schedule out three hours a week where I'm gonna really dedicate to exploring. I'm gonna pick some days like Tuesdays and Thursdays at night and Saturday mornings I'm gonna go to meetups, I'm gonna try to find networking events, I'm gonna go online, I'm gonna take a class. Those are the times that I'm gonna give myself to sort of like sit in this inquiry of exploring more about myself, take some time to really learn how to quit playing small and to quit doing what everybody else told you you have to do.
And it takes a little bit to kind of stand in that power to come into a place when you've done it for so long where you've decided like everybody else's needs are more important than mine when you've had to take care of so many other people that it takes a little bit of time for you to get outta that and decide like, hey, my needs also matter and I wanna work on this thing or whatnot. And then when you've learned how to do that and you've learned how to quit playing small and you really kind of like get into what it is that you want in your life, then you go into kind of the quit staying stuck era. And that's when you are really like making moves and you're experimenting and you're testing the waters. And you might be like, you know, taking a part-time job or shadowing someone or changing careers or creating like the quit plan and creating long-term visions.
Like five-year plans of like let's say I want, I decide I wanna be an author. Okay, what am I gonna do over the next five years and how am I gonna break into this industry and how am I gonna network and how am I gonna meet other authors and agents and publishers? And how am I going to like work on my creative writing? Like I can plan that out over the next couple of years. 'cause now I have a better understanding of what I'm each actually wanting to do, right? And I can set really big goals. This is like the stage where you're thriving. This is where you see a lot of people that are really designing their life on purpose. I think a lot of times we can watch people on social media and it seems like, oh my god, they kind of have it all together and they keep going after bigger goals in different areas of their life.
But I guarantee you all of those people is because they had spent so much time doing this work on themselves, like so much time getting themselves to a place where they have a lot of self-trust and self-compassion and they worked through a lot of their own, like people pleasing and a lot of the things that keep so many of us stuck to be in a place to be able to kind of put themselves out there in a big way to go after big things, to not care as much what other people think. And I say this to say because like it's possible for all of you, it's possible for everyone. Unfortunately what happens is that so many of us just wanna get to that end point very quickly. It's like I'm miserable, I just wanna know the thing that I'm gonna do and I wanna go after this big life.
Like I, I hear this all the time, and I'm not saying I used to be like this too. When I was quitting my job as a lawyer, I just wanted to know like what was gonna fully fulfill me and light me up. And I wanted to do it within a year and I wanted to be successful at it. And unfortunately that's just not how it works. And it took me years to kind of do this work and to figure out what I like and to start growing it and to set bigger goals. And now my whole world is different. Now I've created this foundation for myself and who I am and kind of becoming aware in this of myself that I can now go after really big goals and bigger goals and constantly try to see what's possible for my life. But I couldn't do this 10 years ago when I quit.
And I think that for a lot of people, if you just realize that like maybe you're just not at that stage yet and that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that and that is still worth working through these other stages because all of this is work that you should be doing anyway. And it's work that you can take with you the rest of your life, right? Like learning how to quit burnout, learning how to get outta that survival stage is important regardless of whether you quit your career or not, right? Learning how to stop playing small, learning how to stop doing what everybody else wants you to do is like the pinnacle of adulthood is like the crucial part of leaving behind all of the Bs that you were taught in your childhood and your early twenties of like caring what everybody else said and did and living your life according to other people.
And really trying to like do the work of realizing, no, I get this one life. What do I want my life to be? And then you get to the place where it's like, okay, I'm gonna quit this job. I'm gonna take this risk, I'm gonna make the big jump. I'm gonna do the quit plan, I'm gonna know all of my finances. I just don't want you to think that you're doing something wrong because you can't figure that point out. The only thing that's happened is that you might not have a couple of layers of that foundation yet. Like you still haven't done the other work in order to kind of get there to make it easier for yourself. And so I want you to know that like all of it's possible and even quitting some of the other stages is really important. It's really not just important in order to get you there, but it can fundamentally change the quality of your life.
Like just getting out of surviving, just getting out of burnout can fundamentally increase the happiness and the fulfillment and the pleasure that you feel in your life, right? Just getting from stability to thriving, like just learning more about yourself can fundamentally shift how you feel about your day to day and how much stuff you do for joy and how you fill your free time and you know how you entered into different relationships when you can fully be yourself. And so it's all worth doing. It doesn't have to take a ton of time. It's not to say that like you have to spend years and years. Some of you will and some of you'll go through it much quicker and all of it's okay 'cause the time is gonna pass anyways. I just want you to know that there are these different stages, there's these three phases that you're gonna have to go through.
And some of you may not be in burnout, you might already be in stage two. Great, you're, you know, one step closer. But I think for so many of us, we're not in stage three yet and we're trying to make a lot of changes and be in this kind of thriving environment when we haven't really done the work to be there when there's so many unresolved issues that we still have to take care of. And that is what I want to help you with in the Quitter Club. Honestly, the reason I created the Quitter Club and the roadmap that I created is because I want you to realize that there's so much that you can change in your life right now, exactly where you are, even if you don't quit to create so much more happiness. And that there are steps to get to this place where you can then decide what you wanna do for your career without so much angst and fear and spinning.
So if you want to go through this roadmap with me, if you want help, if you want to like go through a step-by-step process and learn how to go through these stages so that you can quit all of these things so that you can quit burnout and you can quit playing small and you can quit staying stuck and you can ultimately quit your job and you can do that in a way that is sustainable and that is gonna set you up for knowing what you wanna do. And I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. You can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and join me in there and you can finally get off of this hamster wheel and stop the madness that is the rat race in corporate America and take control of a career that you actually wanna be a part of, that you actually enjoy and get, you know, fulfillment out of.
I hope to see you there because one of the biggest things that I've learned, and one of the things I wish I can impart on people is that so much of your suffering is unnecessary. You don't have to have it, you don't have to go through it. And I think the biggest thing I hear from people in the club is how much more peace they feel, how much more calm they feel, how much less crazy they feel in their brain. And I think that is worth everything, right? I think for so many of us, we are prisoners of our own minds and we spend so much time in a state of unhappiness and panic and stress and overwhelm, and it doesn't have to be that way. So if you want to actually take control of your career and change something, join me for the next year and let's quit it all.
Let's do all of it. Let's quit all three phases and get you into the career that you want. I hope to see you there, and if not, I'll see you back next week for another episode.

Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.