Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (16 page)

There's a difference between reflecting on what's happened in your life—whether it's a setback, a stumbling block, or an outright failure—and ruminating about it. Rumination is passive, creating a closed loop of images, feelings, and thoughts that focus solely on the negatives, effectively preventing you from reframing your vision, coming up with solutions, and taking action. It's a closed room in the mind without windows and doors. At one point or another, most of us have found ourselves, momentarily at least, trapped in that dark night of the soul; for some of us, though, it is a chronic problem.

Studies have shown that
women are more likely to ruminate than men
, although the reasons aren't entirely clear. It's been suggested, by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and others, that women's tendency to ruminate may be a reflection of living a more stressful life than men (parenting strains, increased role burdens, and the like), or it may reflect how women are socialized.
Studies show that mothers tend to teach their male infants
to contain and suppress emotion in infancy, in part because they're often fussier than girl babies. Cultural norms that require males not to show negative affect, especially tearfulness, because it's a sign of weakness doubtless also play
a role.
In addition, mothers talk to daughters
about emotions generally and sadness specifically earlier and much more frequently than they do with sons.

Nolen-Hoeksema and Benita Jackson
, in a series of studies to investigate why women were more likely to ruminate than men, found that several factors contributed. First, compared with men, women tended to believe that negative emotions (fear, sadness, and anger) were harder to control, and this belief resulted in their having more trouble controlling those emotions. This belief too may have been bolstered by the widespread cultural belief that women are more emotional than men by nature. Second, women are socialized to feel responsible for the emotional tenor of relationships; this, the researchers hypothesize, “may make women vigilant to their own emotional states as barometers of how their relationships are going, contributing to their rumination.” Finally, the cultural belief that women have less control than men over the important events in their lives may contribute to increased rumination. Whatever the underlying causes, women should be especially attentive to how rumination figures in their lives and affects their ability to quit artfully.

Opening the windows and doors on rumination is what's called for, and getting support can make all the difference if you are stuck in a pattern. Gather friends whose judgment you trust, and talk to them about where you find yourself; listen to how they see your situation, and try redirecting your thoughts. Of course, a good therapist can also help you get off the ruminative merry-go-round. Focus on disrupting the ruminative loop with new thoughts, not just distractions. Remember that telling yourself not to worry is basically a strategy for inviting your worries to stay for a while. Consciously focus on positive cues, and push yourself into acting, even if it's only making a list of what you plan to do to get yourself out of the loop. As the lab studies make clear, visualizing a happy and stress-free event that has actually happened in your life can also help you cope with rumination.

Become conscious of how you're stacking the deck with negatives, and make a list of your worries. Sort them out: Which are likely to happen, and which aren't? One strategy for dealing with
repetitive and intrusive thoughts is to confront them head-on; confronting your fears has a way of defanging them. Imagine what you would do in the worst-case scenario you keep thinking about. What if you can't make things work and the relationship ends? What if you have to admit that the project you've embarked on will most likely fail? Or that you're not the right person to try to make it work?

Answering that last question—“Am I the person to make this work?”—was what finally gave Rita what she calls permission to quit: “I realized I was making myself responsible for everything that did or didn't happen at work, but when I took a hard look at how my job description had shifted—I was nothing but a fund-raiser—I realized how bad a fit it was for me. I didn't feel comfortable in the role, and it probably showed. Once I understood that, I stopped stewing and took an inventory of my life and what I wanted. And what I had to do was clear. I quit.”

Chasing White Bears: Outsmarting Your Shortcomings

Daniel Wegner, the very man who discovered the way white bears work in our thoughts, has offered some suggestions about how to deal with them in a piece called
“Setting Free the Bears
.” Most of the suggestions are eminently practical and worth pursuing, though none of them is, as he readily admits, scientifically proven. First of all, he suggests, recognize that stress and overload decrease the ability to exert self-control, so whatever you can do to lighten your mental load is helpful. Make yourself aware of the memory tasks you're juggling, and let go of the pressure to respond quickly. You can use the technique that's been shown to work for state-oriented people by visualizing a relaxing or happy time in your life, too. Wegner mentions that consciously assigning yourself a worry time—a specific time slot called “thought postponement”—works for some people.

While it may seem counterintuitive, inviting the white bear in may be the best strategy. Making the thought intentional has a way of exposing it. You can say it out loud or simply think about it.

Try meditation or other exercises that inculcate mindfulness. Originally a Buddhist technique, directing the mind intentionally to the present moment—the “now” of experience—has the effect of quieting insistent thoughts or worries that may occupy center stage. Various programs that induce mindfulness may include different elements, among them breathing techniques, yoga, or other exercise, but all serve the same end.

Learning Curve

By her own account, it took Jill thirteen years to quit the practice of law. Like many young people, she'd graduated from college unsure about her future career path. Even though her degree was in science, she knew she didn't want to go to medical school or pursue a Ph.D.; teaching appealed to her, but with student loans to repay, she considered that path too economically challenging. She ended up going to law school pretty much by default, realizing, she says now, “that I wasn't likely to be passionate about law or working as a lawyer.”

But she was good at it. She did very well in law school and joined a firm where she focused on litigation. She liked the people she worked with and they liked her. The problem was that she hated the adversarial nature of the work. “I know it sounds crazy, but it was the worst possible career choice for me because I hate arguing. I knew that from the start. But I'd invested so much time becoming a lawyer and then working that it was hard even to think about quitting, and besides, I couldn't envision any alternatives. So I kept going.”

Five years in, she moved to a large firm that offered her more money. She seriously considered quitting during her first maternity leave, but she found no support among her family and friends. She was making a large salary and working at a prestigious job, and the consensus was that she should consider herself lucky. She shelved the idea. The day-to-day, though, didn't get any better, and whenever she began to consider getting off the track and finding something
she was passionate about, she encountered stiff resistance. Even her husband thought the idea of quitting made no sense; if she hung in there until she made partner, she'd be able to cut down on her travel, work fewer hours, and spend more time at home. Then again, if she put in another ten years, she'd have enough money so she could retire, if she wanted.

“You have to understand that while I hated the hours and the time away from home, the idea of quitting wasn't about getting back on the mommy track, as it is for some women,” Jill says quietly. “The truth is that my kids were happy and thriving, and my husband was there when I wasn't. My salary made our life very comfortable. What made it hard was that wanting to quit was about me, my needs, and it felt selfish. The longer I worked, the more I felt obligated to everyone—my husband, my kids, my parents—to keep going. But at the same time, I just hated the work. So I focused on making partner as the interim goal and hoped like anything that it would change how I felt.”

Jill was treated for depression during these years and was sometimes put on medication. “Unfortunately,” she notes, “it wasn't about a chemical imbalance. I just hated the work I did and how uncomfortable it made me, even though I was successful at it.” She made partner and while she was then making even substantially more, nothing really changed. Then, the management made an offer to the partners: They could work part-time, if they chose. Jill jumped at the chance, only to find herself facing stiff opposition. “They retracted the offer,” she says. “It was as though I'd crossed a line somehow. They basically told me the work I did had to be done just the way I was doing it.”

That moment forced Jill to recognize that she only had two choices: to stay or leave. She decided to give her notice, a full year ahead so that she could fulfill all the obligations she had to clients and colleagues, and immediately felt better. The firm was grateful for how she handled things and treated her well in return.

“I felt I actually got to know myself in this long process of quitting,” she says now. “I was finally forced to figure out what I
wanted, instead of navigating a course that was defined by what I didn't want.” Even though she didn't have a plan B, she gave herself a year to find her footing. She decided to explore a career in education—something she'd been interested in long ago but had rejected as impractical at the time. But now, with her years of earning and saving as a cushion, a career in education seemed possible, and she began to explore it systematically. She volunteered at a school, then observed classes, and taught as a substitute. Convinced that this was the right path, she went back to school to earn a master's degree in education.

Jill is now happy in her work, teaching science, and loves being part of a team, mentoring young people and feeling that she's part of a larger community and serving a higher purpose. She's glad to have the luxury of time with her family, instead of being on the road or stuck in a court case being tried in another city. “A lot of people see the choices I've made only in terms of financial sacrifice, and I've taken some flak,” she says. “But there are also some of my former colleagues who say they envy me. It's true that life isn't as financially stable or easy as it once was, but at the same time, it's a blessing to love what you do every day.”

Conscious Goal Setting

While we've stressed cognitive and affective disengagement in this chapter, mastering the art of quitting includes the redirection of thoughts, feelings, and energy toward a new goal or goals, as well as strategies for their achievement. In the next chapter, we'll turn to the task of assessing the goals we have and those we will set for ourselves.

Your Quitting Aptitude

This exercise is intended to increase your awareness of how you approach the task of managing your emotions. Read the following statements, and decide whether they belong in the “me” or “not me” category.

1. I consider myself a realist, and I think my optimism gives me a leg up.

2. I consider myself a realist, and thinking about the downside doesn't overwhelm me.

3. The minute I finish one thing, I start worrying about everything else I have to do.

4. If I've done all I can about a situation, I put it out of my mind.

5. At work, I focus on making as few mistakes as possible.

6. I focus on doing the best I can in any situation.

7. When I'm bummed out, it's hard for me to focus on the positive.

8. I deal with stress by thinking of happier times.

9. When I argue with someone, I'm quick to flash and lose my temper.

10. Even when I'm fighting with someone, I try not to become hostile or demeaning.

11. I deal with stressful situations by pulling away consciously so I don't react.

12. I deal with stressful situations by trying to stay open to the other person's point of view.

13. Don't look to me to “kiss and make up.” It's not going to happen.

14. I try to come up with constructive solutions to a fight or disagreement.

15. I worry a lot about failing and what people will think if I do.

16. Sooner or later, everyone's bound to fail at something.

17. It's really hard for me to move on from a disappointment.

18. I've been concentrating on letting go of old hurts and disappointments.

19. I hate it when I feel nervous, anxious, or afraid. I do whatever I can to stop feeling what I'm feeling.

20. I listen to my inner voice when I'm upset or afraid.

21. I get hugely pissed off when I've lost an opportunity or an edge. I'm really competitive, and I can't stop thinking about what has happened.

22. When things go wrong, I do my best to remind myself of what I'm good at and that there will be other opportunities.

23. I don't believe in intuition, just clear thinking.

24. I think it's important to listen to my gut and pay attention to my feelings.

25. I get flooded with emotions under stress.

26. I'm able to calm myself down through exercise or talking to my friends.

27. I think showing emotion is a sign of weakness.

28. I focus on what I'm feeling before I act.

The number of even-numbered items you've identified as “me” in this list reflects how much you've already cultivated your aptitude for quitting.

 

Chapter Six

Taking Stock

Even though you might have assumed you were driving the car that's you when you started reading this book, you probably have come to realize that you're not in as much control of that vehicle as you thought. It's time to help you adjust your brakes, steering, and accelerator—your conscious behaviors —so you can start assessing your goals to see if they're feasible, congruent or conflicted, and, most important, making you happy. But first, we're going to tell you about the invisible gorilla, which may, once again, leave you feeling that you haven't been driving the car after all. The invisible gorilla is important at this point because it proves that for at least half of us, when we focus on a goal with full concentration, we also narrow our focus and make it more likely that we'll miss crucial information that's hiding in plain sight.

How and why our attention to detail doesn't come close to our mental image of it is important to understand as we set about the business of taking stock of the goals we have and considering whether we need to quit some of them.

Did You See the Gorilla?

In the late 1990s, two Harvard researchers, Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris decided to follow up on some startling
observations about attention first examined in the 1970s by Ulric Neisser. They videotaped two teams of students, one group dressed in black and the other in white, who were passing an orange basketball to one another. In the middle of the videotape, though, for a period of roughly nine seconds (the whole video was roughly a minute), a woman wearing a gorilla suit walked amid the players, faced the camera, thumped on her chest, and exited. Simons and Chabris showed the video to students in a lab setting, divided them into two teams, and had them count the number of passes made by the white team or the black team. The investigators ran a number of variations of the experiment, with students either counting just passes or combinations of passes and bounces. Then they asked the participants if they'd noticed anything unusual about the video, which finally led up to the last question: “Did you see the gorilla?” Most amazingly, roughly half of the participants missed the gorilla entirely; in fact, they were utterly shocked that there
was
a gorilla. (You can watch this video on YouTube or on the Web site connected to Simons and Chabris's book of the same name,
www.theinvisiblegorilla.com
. Of course, you'll see the gorilla because you already know it's there.)

We've already seen how much of what we “see” and judge is, in fact, governed by automatic processes or by the brain's relatively limited ability to take in the huge amount of stimuli and outside information offered up by our senses. The technical term for what makes half the people miss the gorilla is
intentional blindness
. The bottom line is that half the participants were so focused on counting the passes and bounces that they were blind to the gorilla hidden in plain sight; their missing the gorilla is only surprising to us because humans tend to overestimate the amount of detail we can pay attention to at any time. So much for multitasking. Intentional blindness accounts for why eyewitness accounts are hugely unreliable (we completely overestimate our ability to take in detail) and why memories of events and situations are often faulty.

One of the researchers, Simons
, and his colleagues wondered whether missing the gorilla had to do with the passivity of watching a video. Was seeing something in two dimensions making people
blind in a way that they wouldn't be in a real-world, three-dimensional setting? Their experiment, which involved an experimenter posing as a lost visitor on a college campus, holding a map in his hand, and asking directions from random pedestrians, is astonishing. As the experimenter and the helpful pedestrian are talking, two men carry a door between them, momentarily hiding the experimenter from view as they pass; behind the door, another experimenter takes the first experimenter's place, armed with an identical map in hand, and continues the conversation. The helpful pedestrians, by the way, ranged from age twenty to sixty-five.

Again, only half of the people noticed the switch! Interestingly enough, all of the people who noticed the switch were roughly the same age as the experimenters; all of the older people missed it. The researchers hypothesized that noticing the switch has to do with belonging to the same social group (someone close enough in age to be a student) and thus paying more attention to individual features. In other words, the older people simply automatically categorized the experimenter as “other” (young) and looked no further. Again, keep in mind that human beings are wired to assess situations (dangerous or not, friendly or not) without being consciously aware of the process.

To test that hypothesis, they ran the experiment again, this time dressing the experimenters as construction workers who would, of course, be “other” in terms of the population on a college campus and thus outsiders to their social group. But these men were visually readily distinguishable, even though they were similarly dressed; one had a construction hat with lettering and wore a tool belt and a light blue shirt while the other wore a hat without a logo, no tool belt, and a black shirt. This time, all the pedestrians who were stopped were young. And this time, only one-third of the pedestrians noticed the switch—even fewer than the first time!

If you're shaking your head, thinking that this had to be an extraordinarily oblivious group of pedestrians and that you would notice the switch for sure (just the way you know you'd have seen the gorilla), then you've got plenty of company. In fact,
in a follow-up experiment by Daniel T. Levin
and others, change-detection scenes were either described or shown in the form of still photos to participants in the experiments. A whopping 83 percent of them said with confidence that they would have noticed the switch—a rather larger number than the 11 percent who did notice when they participated in the actual experiment. When it came to the pedestrian asking directions in the door-switch experiment, almost 98 percent were sure they would have noticed the switch.

Knowing about intentional blindness and change blindness is useful, especially as it pertains to goal pursuit; when we're focused on one goal, we may not be seeing what's actually in plain view. In fact, the invisible gorilla may be most valuable as a metaphor for what
can
happen when you're single-mindedly in hot pursuit of a goal and completely focused. Substitute what you will for the word
gorilla
—the tensions in your marriage you're ignoring, the signs that you are no closer to achieving your goals despite all your efforts, how your focus is shortchanging you and others, or even the more accessible goal that might yield more life satisfaction—and you'll have a glimpse of the possible cost of not seeing that gorilla. In the same way, your overconfidence in your ability to spot detail and assess a situation accurately may blind you to other aspects of goal seeking. Knowing that the gorilla might be there, even if you can't see it, or that you might be missing the forest for the trees in a very literal way—not noticing that the person you were talking to has been replaced by someone else, for example—is a first step in self-correction.

If you're thinking to yourself that there's no doubt that you're part of the 50 percent who saw the gorilla, we'd still like you to keep the gorilla in mind. And that goes for the almost 98 percent of you who are positive you notice every change in your immediate environment. Keep in mind that both how you set goals and how you pursue them are also influenced by all the unconscious and automatic processes described in the first chapter and elsewhere. When you're rating how successful your efforts are, you're likely to be paying more attention to hits than misses, and it's likely that you'll be qualifying some of those misses as near misses, too. After all, you're only human.

Because much of what passes for popular wisdom about goals, goal setting, and motivation, alas, is wrongheaded at worst and simplistic at best, it's likely you're not thinking about your goals in the way you need to. Let's take a look at some of it and see what applications there are to the task at hand.

“Goals Gone Wild”
: You As Your Own Manager

No, that's not a typo (we got your attention, though); it's supposed to be
goals
, not
girls
. “Goals Gone Wild” is actually the title of a Harvard School of Business white paper that challenges some of the wisdom cultivated in the last twenty-five years of research and advice about goal setting in the work environment. Some of what they have to say is pretty counterintuitive and has more than a little application to the task of assessing your own goals, as well as analyzing how the company you work for uses motivation. If you're thinking of establishing a start-up, working on something entrepreneurial, or going into partnership with someone, these observations are valuable; they can equally be applied to relationships. The point here is to get you thinking about goals consciously, and what better place to study goals than in the business world?

Let's begin with what theorists have proposed first, as discussed
in an important summary by Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham:

“Specific, high (hard) goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one's best.'”
This statement basically repeats the mantra of “the higher the bar, the better the jump,” but it has an important qualifier: The person has to be committed to the goal, has to have the ability or skill to achieve it, and must not have any conflicting goals. The question about conflicting goals is especially important because while it may be possible in a work environment to rule out conflicting goals—particularly since a third-party is determining them—in the larger setting of life, it's often difficult. Congruency
matters. The mantra assumes that the harder goal will inspire not just more motivation but also greater feelings of personal success and satisfaction than an easy goal.

But the virtue of the high goal is, in part, contradicted by certain important caveats that apply to the goals you set for yourself as well. These too demand attention.

Learning goals
aren't
enhanced by raising the bar in this way.
This is a point everyone, especially parents, should keep in mind. Focusing on a learning goal only in terms of performance can lead to tunnel vision—worrying about the grade instead of the acquis
ition of skills. One study, for example, showed that
MBAs who embraced broader learning goals
beyond just getting good grades (focusing on mastering specific material, working on networking, etc.) actually ended up with higher GPAs than the students who focused on GPA alone. (This may go a long way toward explaining why the emphasis on test scores and grades in high school and college has resulted in not just lower levels of skill acquisition but a pandemic of cheating.)

It's important to frame the goal correctly.
In light of the discussion about both framing and avoidance and approach goals in the previous chapters, this caveat addresses how various carrot and stick approaches work in real-life situations. There's wisdom here that needs to be applied both to the goals you set for yourself—making sure that the bar isn't set too high—as well as to the goals set for you by others, both in relationships and at work. It's another reason to let go of the notion that failure is a learning experience from which success will, inevitably, come; most people don't learn from their failures. In addition, goals presented as challenges lead to higher performance than those that include the threat of failure.

Numerous studies, including one by Anat Drach-Zahavy
and Miriam Erez, have shown how framing affects performance directly. Their study, which had participants predict stock performance on the basis of business data, showed the difference between a task presented as a challenge, which promoted strategizing and
produced better results, and the same task presented as a threat, which focused only on immediate performance and the possibility of failure. In the experiment, they framed the task as a challenge by telling participants to provide their names and phones numbers so that the
best
performers could be contacted; the researchers also told the participants that only 15 percent of the students who had previously performed these tasks had succeeded. In contrast, in the threat framing, participants were asked to provide their names and numbers so that the five
worst
performers could be contacted, and the investigators added that 85 percent of the students who had performed the task earlier had failed. Finally, the participants were asked either to (1) do their best (easy, vague goal); (2) meet the goal of 80 correct predictions (challenging, performance-based goal); or (3) spend the first twenty minutes of the hour-long test finding the best strategies for completing the tasks successfully (challenging, broader goal). Not only did the challenge participants outperform the threat group significantly, but those who were focused on strategy over performance did the best of all.

How you frame your goals is essential.

Remember the Pinto

So, is setting the bar high for yourself a good strategy? According to Ordóñez and the other folks who wrote the deliciously titled “Goals Gone Wild,” not necessarily.

Perhaps “Remember the Pinto” doesn't quite have the staying power of “Remember the Maine” as a call to arms, but it's one of the best examples that Ordóñez and her coauthors present. (Their paper predates the financial meltdown of 2008–2009, so they didn't have the skinny on the subprime mortgage debacle and the goals set by banks to draw on, but they do mention a precursor, the collapse of the Continental Illinois Bank.)

Anyway,
the short and long of the Pinto story
is this: In the late 1960s, Lee Iacocca, the legendary and flamboyant best-selling
author, president of Ford, and marketing guru, was concerned by foreign competition. He announced that the company would produce a new car that would cost less than $2,000 and weigh under two thousand pounds and, moreover, that the Pinto would be ready for the market pronto. The company went into overdrive (forgive the pun) to deliver on its promise. Alas, the pressures of both the goal and its timing essentially forced managers to take shortcuts to get the car out there. Among the things cut were safety checks, and it turned out that these shortcuts yielded a not-so-tiny problem: The Pinto had a tendency to catch fire in an accident. But the executives didn't stop and redesign; with Iacocca's goal still firmly in mind, they did the math and figured that whatever it might cost to settle lawsuits about the car's deficiencies would be outweighed by the number of cars they could sell and, of course, the achievement of the goal Iacocca had set.