Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (24 page)

As Saffrey and her colleagues note,
believing that regret is positive may well be just a coping mechanism
, part of what Daniel Gilbert calls the
psychological immune system
. Still, it's worth looking at counterfactual thinking—the very basis for regret—and how it can advance or deter our efforts in mastering the art of quitting.

About Counterfactual Thinking

Just as we've seen that using mental contrasting—holding the desired future in mind at the same time as the present reality that impedes it—initiates action and the implementation of a goal, so too it's been suggested that counterfactual thinking may play an important part in goal seeking and setting.
Counterfactual thinking is different
in that it uses a revision of past events to inform the future. These thoughts can focus on better alternatives to what happened (
upward counterfactual thinking
, which fosters regret) or worse alternatives (
downward counterfactual thinking
, which may help people manage moods).

For example, you are up for a promotion and pay raise at work but are disappointed when you are passed over. Upward counterfactual thinking has you feeling regret, but you begin thinking about what you might have done differently to get another outcome. That, in turn, spurs you on to frame new ideas, which lead to new behavior, which might, in the future, lead to success. On the other hand, you also know that two people in your department were let go. With downward counterfactual thinking, you reflect on being passed over but observe that it could have been worse—you might have been one of the people fired.

Kai Epstude and Neal J. Roese posit that counterfactual thinking can be a useful part of regulating behavior since it's activated by a failed goal and has the person focus on what might have been done to achieve that goal (“If I'd done X, then Y would have happened”), which in turn yields a directive (“Next time, I will do X so that Y will happen”) and changed behavior. Counterfactual thinking opens the door to modifying future behavior by focusing on a revision of the past. As the passed-over worker, you might come to realize that you didn't do enough to make your superiors aware of your contributions to the department and might focus on bringing the quality of your work to their attention in the future. Alternatively, you might conclude that your mistakes were getting in the
way of promotion and you might focus on making fewer of them.

Optimally, counterfactual thinking permits you to formulate new strategies by envisioning what actions you might have taken to secure the goal in the first place. To be successful, this demands a certain amount of realism—a steering away from wishful thinking. In the example of being passed over, if your counterfactual thinking only focused on the shortcomings of your superiors and you imagined a scenario where their collective stupidity didn't get in the way of your promotion, the counterfactual thinking would generate no productive or useful action. Of course, not all counterfactual thinking is productive; focusing on an action that can't be changed (“If only I hadn't married him,” “If only I had gone to dental school when I was in my twenties,” “If only my bosses were different and smarter”) is likely to put you in a dead-end loop. Combined with a ruminative style, counterfactual thinking is probably not the way to go.

You and Regret

Only you can answer how regret has worked in your life. Do you see your regret as part of a genuine learning experience, or do you tend to think that looking for the silver lining (“What doesn't kill you makes you stronger”) is just a form of self-massage and rationalization? Is the way you handle regret working for you or against you, keeping you focused on ways to succeed next time or keeping you focused just on avoidance? Has regret enhanced your ability to use counterfactual thinking to push yourself forward into action?

In an interesting meta-analysis
reported in “What We Regret Most . . . And Why,” Neal J. Roese and Amy Summerville (the same folks who offered up the positive vision of regret) came up with a ranked list of the top things Americans regretted the most. You may want to think about where you fit in as you read.

The six biggest regrets fell into the following domains, in descending order: education, career, romance, parenting, self-improvement, and leisure. (If you're curious, the next six were finance,
family, health, friends, spirituality, and community.) It's a bit surprising that education was the number one regret, but the authors argue this point:
“Opportunity breeds regret
. Feelings of dissatisfaction and disappointment are strongest where the chances for corrective reaction are clearest.” Seen from that point of view—with the broad expanse of educational opportunities at many levels across the United States—it's not surprising that regretting educational choices (not finishing high school or not going to college, dropping out, not acquiring a skill that might have helped you in other avenues) is at the very top of the list. These observations, of course, bolster the notion that the deepest sources of regret are those roads not taken.

Think about your own regrets, the life domains they fit into, and how they relate to the goals you want to pursue and those you wish to drop.
Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters
have cataloged coping strategies pertaining to regret—some beneficial and others not—that individuals use to manage and regulate regret. See if you can locate your own strategies among them. Since some regret seems to be built into the human condition (we're all going to make some bad choices or mistakes), the first strategy is to hone your ability to make decisions and to factor the possibility of regret into your risk taking. Less suitable strategies for managing regret, while common, are increasing your justification of your decision, delaying or avoiding decisions, or transferring responsibility for your decision. (“My investment advisors were lousy. It wasn't my fault.”)

Focus on alternatives, either by enlarging or restricting the number of your choices or by ensuring that you can, if you need to, reverse your decision. Similarly, you can consciously avoid feedback about the road you didn't take; it may not be helpful to continue discussing what you didn't do with friends, loved ones, and even acquaintances. In this sense, the old adage is true: There's no use in crying over spilled milk. Remember the story of Tim, the lawyer who wanted to shift careers but kept referring to how he'd screwed up by going to law school in the first place when he went on interviews? That's regret and self-blame—the undigested variety—doing
the talking. That was true too of Roberta who, ten years after her divorce, still visited the same regrets daily, as if thinking about them would give her a do-over. Instead, her habit of ruminating on her regrets stopped her from remaking her life in myriad ways.

If you are prone to getting mired in feelings of regret, perhaps the best strategy is to anticipate them. Recognize that some of the choices you're making may entail regrets in the future, and prepare yourself for managing those feelings as best as you can.

Dealing with Stalled Quitting

There's no question that quitting sometimes requires a huge leap of faith—imagining an as-yet unrealized future—and a willingness to take on the possibility of failure, along with the emotional fallout that accompanies it. Since persistence and staying put are the default settings for human behavior, successful goal disengagement can stall on the affective, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral fronts. Some of the strategies we've suggested throughout this book are worth reviewing.

Managing Rumination

Dwelling on what has or hasn't happened—actions or inactions—isn't just the wellspring of regret but is the basis for rumination. Rumination stymies action, using the same capacities of the mind you need to implement new goals; it keeps you tied to your unmet goals and stops you from imagining future ones. (Yes, that's the Zeigarnik effect again.) You can assign yourself a worry time, as we've suggested before, or confront your thoughts by writing them down and bringing them into consciousness. You can also train yourself to focus on distractors. Leslie, for example, manages her worries by bringing to mind images of flowers. She focuses on each detail in the flower—the stem, the petal, the stamen, the pistil—for as long as it takes to control her thoughts.

A study on rumination
conducted by Annette van Randenborgh and others found that participants who were given random distractors that bore no relation to themselves (“Think about the outlines of a cello,” “Think about the parts that make up a car”) were better able to disengage from unsolvable anagrams than participants who were asked to ruminate before the task (“Think about why you turned out this way,” “Think about the expectations your family and friends have for you”).

Focusing on Task Implementation

Breaking down the things you need to do into smaller steps, or setting interim goals for yourself, may be helpful. Remember that the common wisdom about a hard-to-reach goal being inspirational simply isn't true. As we've seen, concrete plans are key to most achievement. Writing steps down will allow you to judge whether your strategies are realistic. Since strong mental representations of a desired future provide an impetus for goal setting, visualizing what your life will be like in detail will also spur you on.

Inculcating Realism

Is the new goal you're setting for yourself realistic? Are your talents and abilities sufficient to bring it to fruition? Remember that humans are overly optimistic by nature (and tend to overestimate their abilities and skill sets), so try to assess your goal as objectively as you can. Use mental contrasting to evaluate your abilities, the goal, and the strategies you've set. If you've fallen into patterns of counterfactual thinking, make sure they are reality based. If you're not sure that the goal you've set is actually attainable, set some interim deadlines for yourself so that you can monitor your progress.

Keeping Flow in Mind

Motivate yourself by taking stock of those instances where you've experienced flow, and imagine how achieving your goals will enhance flow in your life. Be your own cheerleader by asking
yourself questions (“Will I do X?”) as opposed to making plain statements (“I will do X”). Keep in mind that both letting go of a goal and setting a new one are essentially creative activities that demand that you be flexible in your approach.

Getting Support

If you need help disengaging from a goal, managing your thoughts or emotions, or finding a new direction, you should seek advice. There's no virtue in going it alone—no matter what the cultural mythology says. This is especially true if you've struggled because you have been fired from your job or had a reversal of fortune in either your personal life or your career.

Knowing You Have to Put Down the Duckie

The reference here is to the song from
Sesame Street
, which, if you grew up in the 1980s or later or if you had children who watched, you'll doubtless remember. Ernie is trying to play the saxophone and complains to Hoot the Owl that all he gets as music is a squeak. The squeak, in fact, is coming from the rubber duck Ernie is holding on to, which prevents him from playing the sax. Metaphorically,
we've all got to put down the duckie
—the habits of the past, the comfort zones, the goals that are unmet, the efforts that have failed—if we're going to move into the future.

Mastering the art of quitting requires that you put that duckie down.

 

Chapter Nine

Resetting Your Inner Compass

Real-world compasses can't be reset, of course—the directional points are fixed—but since our “inner compass” is a metaphor for the complex interaction between cognition, motivation, behavior, and the self, this compass can be. The goals we set for ourselves are reflections of both who we are and who we want to be. While earlier chapters have focused on the impediments to true goal disengagement, the process of disengagement isn't complete until there is engagement with a new goal. The forward movement of choosing a new goal spurs renewed motivation that, in turn, leads to new behavior. Reengagement, combined with the lessons learned from quitting, makes us grow psychologically and behaviorally and allows us to re-create aspects of ourselves in the process. The new goal we set reflects both our current self and the future self we envision.

As Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier note
, while one key life skill is knowing when to persist and when to quit, they add that “another important skill would be the ability to give up completely—
really
let go—on occasions when giving up proves necessary. The combination of these two skills yields flexibility, permitting the person to recognize and step out of intractable situations while maximizing efforts in situations that are amenable to change.”

Directing your energies to your new goal is the first step.

Thinking About What's Next

How do people move from a stymied path to an open road full of possibility? It's a question psychology has asked and answered in various ways. We've already seen how intrinsic goals—motivated from the inside out—yield a greater sense of well-being and satisfaction than extrinsic goals, which are either externally imposed or depend on external validation, such as the admiration of others. Similarly, approach goals, objectives that are positive in and of themselves, deliver more satisfaction than those based on avoiding bad outcomes.

While humans are by nature goal-oriented, how happy we feel—what psychologists call
subjective well-being
—very much depends on our goals' having coherence so that they represent the true self as we each understand it. What does this mean precisely?
As Robert A. Emmons explains, human beings don't experience
a subjective sense of well-being simply because they are setting and progressing toward important life goals; that's one of the things that distinguishes us from other goal-oriented creatures like earthworms, squirrels, or the dog or cat that might be lying at your feet.

The answer to whether you feel happy at this moment isn't just answered by your goals or the progress you've made toward achieving them but is answered by something else. If reaching our goals doesn't make us happy, what does? It's whether our goals reflect the self. As Emmons writes,
“people are more than just collections
of personal goals. What's missing is an overall organizing principle that brings together and integrates separate goal strivings into a coherent structure. . . . This is the job of identity or the self, creating an overall life purpose. This organizing principle—be it identity, the self, or a similar structure—is that which links individual goals together and to future states and desired outcomes.” He concludes that the principle ultimately is
“the search for meaningfulness
in one's life. Meaning comes from personally fulfilling goals, the integration of these goals into a broader self-system, and the integration of these goals into a broader social system.”

Some of the stories we've told about quitting make it clear that sometimes the search for coherence, for meaning, is paramount and that for each of us, the self isn't static but a work in progress. Robert, the environmentalist whose story we told, wanted work that reflected and integrated what he cared about and that would contribute to a greater good. Deidre the swimmer faced the challenge of giving up a goal that had been her primary definition of self and finding other domains that would define her.

The story of Jill is a good example since she was a skilled lawyer who was extremely well-compensated and had, by many people's lights, an enviable career. Her unhappiness and dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that her work didn't give her life meaning and actually conflicted with her deepest definitions of self. Teaching children, as she now does, offers her the sense of connectedness and purposefulness she understood as central to herself. When Marie the artist outgrew the definitions of self that had sustained her through more than twenty years, she had to redefine her goals accordingly.

Seeking coherence and meaning isn't just limited to the 1 percent of Americans who have the luxury of thinking about more than a paycheck. Flow can be achieved in almost any activity or line of work, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has shown.
In his book
Flow
, Csikszentmihalyi cites one study he conducted that relied on the self-reports of over one hundred men and women who worked full-time in a variety of occupations. When prompted by a pager, the people recorded how they felt generally, how challenged they were, and how many skills they were using at that exact time. They were beeped eight times a day at random intervals. Of the forty-eight hundred responses the researchers collected, one-third were determined to be “in flow.” That percentage was even higher—a full 54 percent—when people were actually working and concentrating (as opposed to daydreaming, gossiping, or attending to personal business during work hours). Csikszentmihalyi notes that this percentage of flow experience is much higher than what people report when they're engaged in leisure activities like reading, watching television,
having friends over, or going out to eat; in those situations, only 18 percent reported being in flow.

Not unexpectedly, he also found that people who had higher-level jobs—managers and supervisors—were in flow 64 percent of the time, as opposed to clerical workers (57 percent) and blue-collar workers (47 percent). But perhaps surprisingly, while the differences are significant, they're not overwhelming. Flow, or connection, may not be as rare as people think. Remarkably, Csikszentmihalyi found that for leisure activities, blue-collar workers reported being in flow 20 percent of the time, compared with 16 percent for clerical workers and 15 percent for managers. But as he notes, even assembly-line workers reported being in flow twice as much during work time than leisure, 44 percent to 20 percent.

Flow results from coherence, the alignment of the self with action or activity. There's no one-size-fits-all strategy for getting in flow since we define ourselves in singular ways; how we think about and define ourselves is closely connected to how easily we'll be able to reengage after quitting.

The Self and Resilience

Certain cognitive and affective strengths and weaknesses make some of us better at knowing when and how to quit; similarly, some of us will be better equipped at starting over, setting and pursuing a new goal in place of a failed or unattainable one. It's been suggested that this advantage has much to do with the basic conception of the self and whether it is “simple” or “complex” in nature. Why is a setback—a divorce, for example—a life-defining moment from which one person never fully recovers, yet for another person, the setback, while bruising and painful, yields new paths and experiences over time?
Psychologist Patricia Linville
has posited that the complexity of our mental representations of self directly affects our ability to cope with not just the day-to-day stresses of life but also the major emotional shifts when we fail to attain a goal or stop pursuing an
important one. The more complex our self-representation, the more buffered we are from negative affect and emotional fallout; conversely, the simpler the self-representation, the more vulnerable we are to emotional spillover. The subtitle of her article, by the way, is “Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Cognitive Basket.”

According to Linville, our self-representation includes specific events and behaviors (“Picked up the kids from school on time,” “Worked on a new case for six hours”) as well as generalizations about traits (shy, outgoing, enthusiastic), roles (lawyer, husband, father, brother), category membership (male, Jewish, Libertarian), physical features (fit, tall, myopic), behavior (card player, sailor, jazz enthusiast), preferences (urban living), goals (financial success), autobiographical recollections (summers at grandparents' cottage), and relationships (colleague, friend, supporter).

Linville hypothesizes
that each of these domains is associated with specific feelings about the self as well as appraisals; each ­self-representation may evoke either a positive or a negative feeling. We may be proud of ourselves in one domain (e.g., work or athletics), but not in another (e.g., social graces, language ability). Most important, Linville assumes that some people's self-representations are more complex than others'. The fewer domains the self-representation relies on and the more linked the domains, the greater the emotional impact of a failed or thwarted goal. Conversely, when the representations are numerous and independent of each other, the more buffered the individual will be. Imagine a man who defines himself primarily in terms of his career success, his role as the family breadwinner, his luxurious standard of living, and the admiration of others. Say he is passed over very publically for a promotion or is let go. His disappointment will spill over into his definitions of self as a husband, a father, a friend, and an acquaintance; he'll likely lack a domain in which he can feel good about himself to counter the negative affect.

In contrast, imagine a man with the same prestigious and high-paying job but who defines himself in broader ways—by his intimate relationships, his work in the community, by his love of playing guitar. This person can suffer the same setbacks but can
continue to feel good about himself in other domains. It's this second person who will be able to reengage with a new goal with greater ease. How many aspects of the self are directly tied into the loss or failure of a goal will also determine the emotional impact.

In another study, which looks at
self-complexity as a cognitive buffer
, Linville uses the example of two women going through a divorce and offers an answer to the question we posed earlier—why is a setback a momentary blip in one person's life and a catastrophe from which there's no recovery in another's? The first woman has a relatively simple self-representation as a wife and a lawyer. In her case, these two aspects of self are closely intertwined since her about-to-be ex-husband is also an attorney and they worked together often. Linville writes that
“the negative affect and self-­appraisal
associated with her divorce will be massive because it will spill over to affect her thoughts and feelings about both important aspects of self.” Another woman going through a divorce defines herself with greater complexity—as a wife, a lawyer, a tennis player, and a friend. Because her husband isn't a lawyer, her professional self-definition is safe from negative fallout, as are her other defining roles. She'll weather the storm of the divorce more easily.

The narrowly defined self may have trouble reengaging after disengagement from a goal, whether it is willingly given up or not. That was true for Lacie, who followed her husband Steven to France when his company transferred him. In the process, she gave up her job and her circle of friends, but she took on the challenge of living abroad, learned to speak French fluently, and, after their children were born, learned to embrace both the culture and the society as an American expatriate. Then Steven fell in love with a colleague and filed for divorce. Lacie went back to the United States, her two children in tow, emotionally devastated. She applied for jobs with little success, even though she was more than qualified; despondent, she consulted a therapist. It soon became clear that since she'd defined herself primarily as a wife for all of those years, her negative thoughts were spilling over into every domain. Prospective employers were put off by her lack of self-confidence, her self-deprecating
tone when she talked about her skills, and her hesitancy. It took work, but eventually she was able to recover some of the good feelings she had about herself and began to formulate new goals that were aligned with her own needs and wants. In time, she started her own consulting company to work with and advise American families who were moving abroad for extended periods.

Lacie's story demonstrates that you can, with effort, reframe your self-representations to make them more complex and that it's sage advice not “to put all your eggs in one cognitive basket.” If you're still bruised and ruminating after a setback, spend some time thinking about your other definitions of self, and make it an interim goal to take pride and pleasure in them.

In their classic book on self-regulation
, Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier note that the ability to pursue an attainable goal after quitting an unreachable one engages the individual in forward movement. This is especially important when what they call the “blocked path” concerns a central value of the self or, to use Linville's term, a central self-representation. They point out the advantage of being able to see the goal in relatively abstract terms, looking beyond the specifics of the goal lost and appreciating its meaningfulness. So, someone who has lost a spouse but prized the closeness of connection, “who understands that the core desire is to
experience closeness
can more readily recognize that there are many ways to do this than can someone who's less clear about the nature of the higher-level goal.”

Both complex self-representation and the ability to think abstractly about a goal endow the individual with the flexibility he or she needs to move forward to pursue a new goal creatively through different pathways. If you are having trouble moving forward—reengaging—troubleshoot your efforts by thinking about the domains of the self that endow your life with meaning and that make you feel good about yourself, instead of focusing on the goal that has eluded you. Try thinking about your goal in abstract terms so that you can figure out whether there are different ways of approaching it or otherwise getting what you need in your life.