Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (18 page)

Many of us will choose a different path, trying on a number of things for size—different jobs, different relationships—to find out what will make us happy. Others of us will find work we like but may discover that it doesn't satisfy other important needs and goals at the time. Because our identity is fluid at different points in our lives, our goals may change in relation to each other. That was certainly the case for Daniel, now in his late fifties, who'd been happy teaching at a private school in his twenties, but became dissatisfied with the pay and how the role defined him. “I wasn't seeing myself in twenty years, wearing a frayed tweed jacket, still lecturing to sixteen-year-olds about Shakespeare,” he says. “I just wasn't. So I retooled myself, first as a newspaper writer, and then, through a friend, I got a job at an advertising agency. I frankly wanted some prestige—it was important to me that I felt as worldly and accomplished as my friends—and how much money I made absolutely mattered. But with my kids grown, my sights began to shift. The truth was that teaching fed my soul in ways that my other work didn't; advertising was fun, competitive, and lucrative, but I still wanted something else.” With his kids grown, Daniel was able, not without difficulty, to get back into teaching, which is what he's doing today.

Distractions, competing or interim goals, or even pressures of day-to-day life may complicate or disrupt our ability to reach an intended goal. That was certainly the case for Carolyn, now fifty-three, who decided to quit graduate school when she was twenty-four—a decision that, she says, is now “the bane” of her existence. “I loved my classes, and I was only twelve credits away from my degree—I had twenty-four out of the thirty-six—but I was also
frazzled and clueless about what I wanted. I was going to school, holding down a job, trying desperately to sort myself out, and going through all the turmoil that twenty-somethings go through when they don't know what they want. Anyway, I quit graduate school.” She ultimately got married, took some counseling classes, and then had a series of jobs she loved, doing prevention work and counseling for teens. After augmenting her education with graduate classes and then working as a drug counselor, she then quit to stay home with her three children. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, both economically and emotionally, but I was miserable,” she says. “I felt like a useless lump, and when I got a call about a possible job, I jumped. I quit full-time motherhood without a single regret.” She spent the next ten years doing drug and other counseling in a public school system until budget cuts made the job disappear.

This is the part of the story where that early decision—almost thirty years ago—comes in. Carolyn hasn't been able to find work as a counselor, a position she's held for two decades, because she doesn't have a master's degree in social work or another advanced degree. Nevertheless, it's clear that her overarching goal—wanting to work with people and counsel them—has stayed remarkably consistent over the years, even though she lost sight of it at the beginning and at other points in her life. Like many of us, she made her decisions caught up in the day-to-day, distracted by other interim goals, without being fully aware of her larger goal.

The truth is that Carolyn is not all that unusual. What she says now, though, reflects what she's learned: “I think the most important thing you can do for yourself is find out what's important to you before you find out what's important to everyone else. When I quit graduate school, I had no idea of what I really wanted, and no long-term vision. I didn't know how to pay attention to myself or my instincts, and that's been a struggle for me over the years. I've gone back to school and have gotten sidetracked because we needed money or other issues. Now, with my youngest child about to graduate from high school, I know both what I want to do and what I need to do to get it.”

All of us juggle priorities and goals in the day-to-day, which is all the more reason we need to work on being clear about our aspirations. As Daniel Gilbert asserts, we don't just stumble into happiness, but also stumble into jobs, relationships, and all manner of other situations. Life is a lot messier than the laboratories in which experiments take place and theories are tested. That's why consciously appraising our goals is necessary, as Lynne's story of what is now known as a starter marriage demonstrates.

“I married a man my parents had introduced to me at the age of twenty-two,” she says. “He was six years older than I, which was a substantial age difference—he was working and stable, and I was just out of college—and I had my doubts but somehow was swept into the energy of it all. He proposed to me in front of thirty people—what could I say, after all?—and though I thought about not going through with the wedding, I don't think I was sure enough of myself to do anything. But once we were married, I felt utterly stifled, boxed in. It was clear that he and I had different goals for ourselves, different ways of looking at the world, different priorities. I lasted two years, trying to see if I could make it work, and then I fled, literally fled. It is the first and only time I quit anything important; I married again at the age of twenty-eight, and I've been married for thirty-one years. I still wish I had handled it differently—talked to my ex-husband directly instead of being a runaway bride—but I wasn't able to at the time. I felt lonely and terrible afterward but not nearly as lonely as I did during the two years I was married.”

Now, all these years later, with a satisfying career that she was able to balance with raising three children, she says, “What I did realize from this experience is that I needed a relationship that gave me more autonomy than that first relationship. That became one of my goals, and it's stood me in good stead.”

Becoming as conscious as we can be of what we really want takes time, effort, and more than a little strategizing.

The Cost of Shifting Identity

Considering and evaluating our goals consciously, and perhaps even going a step further and actually disengaging from them, may also involve a true and sometimes painful shift in how we think of ourselves. Remember the story of Deidre, the young woman who was defined through her childhood, adolescence, and early young adulthood by her competitive swimming and who asked the question “Who am I if I'm not swimming?” Her question reflects the emotional and psychological cost of transition that may keep us from reevaluating our goals and disengaging from them.

That's the point William Bridges makes
in his classic book,
Transitions,
which was inspired by his abandonment of his career path as a professor of literature. Bridges describes this “disidentification process” as “the inner side of the disengagement process. . . . The impact of such losses can be much greater than one imagines it will be.” In his own experience, he was sure that he'd be fine with not being able to call himself a professor of literature anymore—the shorthand each of us uses as we sum ourselves up to strangers we meet as well as people we know—until his daughter came home one day and asked, “What are you, Daddy?” It turned out that the reason behind her question was benign—a discussion at school about what the children's fathers did for a living—but Bridges was utterly discomfited by not having a noun or two to describe himself, like “a college professor,” as he had in the past. Instead, he had what he calls a “participial” identity, defined only by words ending in
-ing
: He was a man who was writing, consulting, lecturing. His realization that what his daughter wanted to take back to school wasn't a bunch of participles but something normal and concrete was painful.

This potential loss is what stops many of us from cataloging our goals and deciding whether to keep moving forward. The potential pain of disengagement is averted, as is the loss of those everyday definitions of self—whether it's “real estate lawyer,” “Peter's wife or girlfriend,” “artist,” “stockbroker,” or something else. It's significantly harder to lose the comfort of that label when it happens
without volition—when we've been fired, laid off, or left by a lover or a spouse. The ability to disengage from the loss of self-definition is as much a part of the art of quitting as is managing regret.

Whenever we have to quit one goal and commit ourselves to something new, each of us moves from the safety of terra firma to the shaky and sometimes scary terra incognita. It's usually a bumpy ride.

Another Inventory

Because so much of human life is lived on automatic, taking an inventory of all of your conscious goals—figuratively going through your cupboard of aspirations—is a helpful first step toward becoming the best possible manager of your life. We recognize that the whole idea of these automatic processes is a bit unsettling—it's much more comforting to think that you're driving the car that's you. But acknowledging automatic processes will, in the end, give you more control. Your conscious goals will be thrown into high relief, and at the same time, help you see how your moods, emotions, and attitudes toward your goals are shaped by forces you're not even aware of.

Evidence of automatic processes is pretty much everywhere. One day, you'll consciously choose to drive a longer route to work so that you'll have more time to think about the upcoming day, but on another, you might not even know why you decided to take Main Street when St. Paul's is less clogged with traffic. What made you think that Jack was a nice guy and Philip a loser when you first met them? What makes you instantly comfortable in one environment, while being in another puts you in a lousy mood? Why is it that, on Tuesday, you're flying high and your goal looks good to go, but by Thursday, all you can think of is how totally doomed all your efforts are? Why can't you stop worrying about tomorrow some nights, no matter how hard you work at clearing your mind?

We already know that the answer to all of these questions is automatic process, and how the brain/mind is always “prospecting”
for ways of getting goals, even unconscious ones, moving along. How that might work was demonstrated in a study that took on the question of
why it's so hard to clear your mind
of intrusive thoughts when all you really want to do is sleep. The researchers' hypothesis was that while these thoughts seem random or out of the blue, in fact they're triggered by future tasks that could (in the mind's opinion, at least) benefit from forethought. In other words, the mind or brain is actually jostling you to think, when consciously all you want to do is sleep. The researchers devised an experiment that tested whether anticipating a future task in which performance would be boosted by forethought would actually trigger more automatic intrusive thoughts than a task that was unlikely to be improved by forethought. The task they chose for participants was a geography quiz.

One group of participants was told that following an exercise in concentration, they'd be given a quiz in which they'd have to name as many U.S. states as they could. In truth, the researchers had no intention of actually giving them this quiz. The concentration exercise involved listening to an eight-minute audiotape on meditation and breathing. Because of the ironic-processing effect described by Daniel Wegner—telling people not to think about white bears makes them think of them—the subjects weren't instructed to clear their minds or ignore distracting thoughts. They were asked to focus on the breathing exercises but were told to write down any intrusive thoughts they had. The audiotape, of course, mentioned only breathing, not geography.

There were two control groups. One was given the same instructions as the test group but then was told there wouldn't be a geography quiz, just the concentration exercise. The second control group, though, was told they'd be given a speed counting test of the names of states at some point (as in “New York has seven letters”). Since forethought wouldn't actually improve one's ability to speed count, the researchers hypothesized that this second control group, like those who knew that they wouldn't be tested on the states' names, wouldn't have intrusive thoughts.

And that's exactly what happened. Only the first group—the ones who thought they were going to have to name states—actually experienced intrusive thoughts, as many as six pertaining to geography during the playing of the tape. Moreover, the intrusions weren't deliberate rehearsals but had the same random nature of out-of-the-blue thoughts. What's really remarkable, as the researchers note, is that given the short length of the concentration test, during which they were reminded again and again to focus only on breathing, the participants experienced any intrusive thoughts at all, “let alone those that were predicted to intrude into consciousness.” (The audiotape was a scant eight minutes long!) The findings testify to the persistent nature of the mind's automatic processes.

You can't, of course, change how the mind functions, but by increasing your awareness of how and why you make the decisions to pursue one goal but not another, you can make yourself less vulnerable to automatic process. When your thoughts keep you up, you should look at whether they're really random or whether the mind is trying to plan for you. Substituting a conscious plan will help quiet your mind down, as will deliberately refocusing your thought process. Similarly, by becoming more conscious of not only what you're feeling but also why you're feeling it, you will also strengthen your command of your objectives. Research has shown that mood—separate and distinct from emotions—influences the goals you set for yourself and your pursuit of them.

To that end, before we catalogue our goals, we need to take a close look at “mystery” moods.

Moods and Emotions

We've already seen how the management of emotion and honing our ability to use our emotions to bolster our thought processes are key to both goal setting and goal disengagement. Examining how mood—another affective state—influences goal pursuit and appraisal adds another level of understanding.