I am scared. “I haven’t been scared in years, what is wrong with me?” I am sitting at my work place trying to act busy while I wait for the meeting with my boss. “Let’s meet in 5 minutes!” he wrote me in a quick email. I panic. I don’t know why I panic right now?! Somehow the thought of me making the biggest mistake ever rushes into my mind. I decided to quit my job and asked for a meeting with my boss, but now I just want to undo everything I said and go back to normal. “Why am I feeling like this right now? Am I making a mistake? How shall I survive without a regular income? I NEED THIS JOB! Did I miscalculate? What if it does not work out?”
I am rushing to the toilet because I feel overwhelmed with this whole situation. I look myself deep in my eyes in the mirror. I see fear and anxiety and I rarely recognize myself. “What is wrong with me?!” I haven’t felt like this in years. In my hand I hold my little letter which contains my resignation. I read it again. I feel unsure about all this, but somehow don’t even know why. “Isn’t that what I wanted? Shouldn’t I be happy?” Weird thoughts rush in. I feel like I disappoint everyone here. It feels like I left my whole team in a very important project phase behind and now everybody will be mad at me.
“Are you ready?” my boss asks me. I follow him to the meeting table and we sit down. My heart is rushing and I am still confused about why my body reacts in this weird way. I explain him that I want to quit and I push my little letter over to him across the table. “OK. Well, that’s a pity.” he says and was about to leave again. Rather confused about his reaction I asked him how this will work out now and how everything will be handled and he just quickly explains me that he must look through all the files and then I get a final letter and it’s done. “Well, that’s a pity.” That was all I got after 2 years of working 40+ hours a week.
Then I went home. Relieved and at peace.
Now check out my 10 reasons you might have to take the leap and leave your job as well:
10 Signs You Need To Leave Your Job
- You can’t wake up. It takes you forever to get up. You need an extra 10 minutes of “slumber”. Then another 10. It might be a sign that you don’t want to go to a certain place (it was one for me).
- You get physically hurt. When somebody hurts you while on the job for no real reason, you need to leave. Never happened to me yet, but if it does, I’m gone in an instant!
- You don’t feel like returning emails or phone calls. Not checking emails or returning on phone calls might be a sign that you are either super busy working and you don’t want to be interrupted (good) or you just don’t give a fuck (also good?). As soon as the number of unreturned emails or calls hits 20, you better leave!
- You feel like the company does not reflect on your personal values. If the people in charge are constantly forcing you to do stuff against your own personal values, there might be a LITTLE bit of conflict inside you. Conflict leads to a lot of unnecessary drama, which you could (and should) avoid. For example by leaving your job.
- You are afraid to run into people in the office for no real reason. This also might be a sign that it is time to move on. You are avoiding people to talk to, because you feel like they “might know” how you feel about all this, how you don’t feel like belonging here. You don’t want to be found out (or maybe this is just me?).
- You are not creating any additional value for yourself. View yourself as a business. Is the value of “your business” going up or down spending time at your job all day long? The fact that I was spending 40+ hours a week to work on somebody else’s problems in my last job (problems which also conflicted with my personal values (see 4.)), showed me that I had not been creating additional value in my business. So I quit.
- You are only staying because of fear of the unknown. Are you only sticking with your job because you are scared of the uncertainty you might experience without this “secure” job? When first had the idea of quitting my job this fear literally forced me to linger around and waste 4 more months until I finally decided to do it, because I felt like I am not ready yet. Whatever that means. You are never ready anyways. It is weird how this works.
- Someone yells at you. You are not a kid. Yelling is abusive. Nobody should ever yell at you. Ever. But that’s a hard habit to break if you are used to people yelling at you.
- You catch yourself gossiping at work. You start to complain a lot. About little things and also about “bigger” stuff. But actually neither does really matter. You want to put the responsibility for your own happiness and wealth onto other (external) circumstances, because it gets easier to handle this way. But that is not how life works. And you know that. Deep down you now what the real cause of your problems is. And also how you can fix them.
- You can’t sleep at night. Back then when I had a job, it felt like I was wasting my whole day just to make ends meet, to pay my bills. Then I was arriving at home at around 7 pm with the deep desire to scramble as much of “life” into the rest of the day as possible. I did everything I felt like missing out. I met with friends and girlfriends. I played computer games. I ate garbage food (because I deserved it after such an draining day, right?). I stayed up late, because I didn’t want to have this “good time” to end. I felt alive, at least for some hours. Sometimes I even stayed up all night, because the stuff I did (like building my business) was more fun, then everything the next day at work had to offer me.
What now?
I think 90% of people should quit their jobs right now or do something utterly drastic to shake things up. “What would I do?” people can then ask, “I have responsibilities, mouths to feed, mortgage to pay. You don’t get it.” Well, yes I do. Because I felt the same way. You throw yourself in the abyss and you don’t know what will await you. You get scared, pretty scared to be honest. You stay up late at night thinking and thinking and thinking and your head never seems to stop. You feel like the death of emptiness is worse than the slow death of your job. But once you jumped you’ll somehow figure it out. You jump. But you will not fall. One by one all of your old colleagues will disappear from your life. They will die.
But you’ll be still alive.
