Wanting to Quit: The Secrets of Changing Jobs Without Stress

Changing jobs is a very important subject that affects many of us. I share my thoughts and advice: I talk about the reasons that may push you toward leaving your current workplace — dissatisfaction with your pay, with your relationships with colleagues and your manager, a sense of being stuck in your professional development.

Why is it important to understand your true desires and goals for the next few years, and how does that understanding help you make the right decision: stay in your current job and find new opportunities for growth in it, or boldly set out to look for new work that will bring satisfaction and joy? It is important to find harmony between personal ambitions and the company’s goals, so that work does not turn into routine but becomes a source of inspiration and professional growth. I share my personal experience: how changing my inner attitude and my goals helped me find balance and satisfaction at work.

Quit your job?

In today’s world, one in two people is dissatisfied with their job and the place where they are. Every day they come to work, sit there — and something is wrong. They think: “Maybe I need to change it,” or “I definitely need to change it.” There is an inner state of irritation, stress and anger toward the workplace.

Today we will look at the reasons why you want to leave your job and the reasons why you don’t leave it. And we will find precise actions so that you can form a decision for yourself — the right decision about what you need to do right now: stay in your current job or leave it after all. And at the end I will give you a bonus secret — what you need to do so that this works out with an even greater likelihood.

The different “qualities” of reasons for changing jobs

I think that today there are tens of millions of people on Earth who dream of changing jobs — they have an inner state in which their current job doesn’t suit them. In essence, a person wants to change a great many things in life. Some want to change their family, some their place of residence, some their clothes, to change their appearance, and some want to change their job.

All of this comes from a starting point — from a state in which a person is in their own mode of not accepting their life.

There is a fundamental cause embedded inside: they are not satisfied with what is happening around them. And we will look in great detail at what I, as a person, should do when for a long time — months, for some perhaps years, for some it is a recurring story — I have understood that my current job is not for me. And it can be not for me for completely different reasons. Today we will consider all these reasons. I will examine their quality in great detail.

And most importantly, step by step, I will give you specific recommendations on how to act — not simply to minimize this state or make it disappear. But so that, on the one hand, it does not recur — not in a new place, not in five or ten years, because we think: we’ll change jobs and it will disappear. And on the other hand, so that you feel harmony within yourself regardless of where you are. But today is very precisely about your feeling and its quality when you want to change jobs and something doesn’t suit you.

Someone may say: “On the whole, everything suits me,” or “Some things suit me partly.” This is also about making sure that such a state does not arise in a person.

A great many reasons

So, let’s look at the reasons why the state of wanting to change jobs may arise. Having looked at the reasons, we will be able to arrive at specific, precise decisions — we will definitely go through them using all sorts of different examples. The reasons can vary.

• The person is not satisfied with their pay — this is reason number one.
• They are not satisfied with the colleagues around them.
• They are not satisfied with their direct manager.
• They are not satisfied with the actions they perform every day.
• There is too much work, and they are ruining their health.
• The conditions created at work for being there are very poor.
• The person works offline but wants to work online. Or works online but wants to work offline.
• They have heard that the company’s shareholders are strange people, or have seen them and don’t like the way they talk.
• At home, their husband, wife, acquaintances, friends or parents say that this job is bad.
• There is a feeling that the current job brings no benefit for the future. Doing it, you seem to be wasting precious time now, and in the future you will never be able to make up for it.
• You are missing some other moment, because other people around you are succeeding.

We live in a world with an enormous number of cases, of success stories, and today absolutely every person can survey an incredible number of them. If twenty years ago, in order to read some success story, you had to buy a book — and there were tens of thousands of times fewer such books — today this content streams endlessly through social networks, books, television, YouTube, anywhere. There is an enormous amount of success-story content.

All these external success stories often cause, on the one hand, a desire to do something: you get the urge to go and take some actions. On the other hand, a success story causes fear, depression, discomfort and doubt inside, and also, in a third layer, aggression toward these people, judgment, justifications of why they succeeded while you personally might not have. The range of reasons is quite wide.

What to do about a job you dislike?

And the first thing you need to do when this thought has already arisen is to record the list of reasons: sit down and write them out, write them out as fully as possible, make the effort — regardless of which of them is a higher priority and which a lower one. The most important thing is to bring a whole series of these reasons into view. Because having and knowing these reasons will allow you to then find that very right decision which you personally need to make now.

And the main right decision will, on the whole, look like this: either you keep working at your current job, transform and find a new space for a solution, or you need to run away from there urgently and not put it off until later.

Why aren’t you quitting?

Now let’s look at the reasons why a person doesn’t leave and stays, even though they have a whole series of big reasons — or at least some — why their current job doesn’t suit them or why they would like to change it. Why don’t they leave?

• They may not leave because they have a steady income, and this income is critically necessary for them to live, to provide for themselves and their family.
• They have contracts or contractual obligations, and they cannot leave because they would have problems from a legal standpoint.
• They have made a promise to the people they joined and came to an agreement with. They say: “I can’t leave because I agreed with these people; we have a particular agreement.”

These are the simple reasons why they don’t leave. There are more complex, fundamental ones. They may not leave because the current job is stable for them, and they are afraid that they will go to a new place and it won’t work out for them there. They may not leave because they don’t understand at all how to carry out this procedure — how to resign and start a new job at the same time.

That is why a very large number of people first leave somewhere and only then start looking for a new job. But there are many possibilities. You can resign and find a new job; you can find a new job and then resign. Or you can find a new job, start working there and resign while already working two jobs. There are different possibilities.

A person may not leave because they are afraid that someone will judge them. Because their colleagues will misunderstand them. Because they won’t feel support for this step in their family. And in general, support for the action is one of the fundamental, important points for you. Take it and write it down on a sheet of paper right now.

I will try to give you many directions and many details so that, with a little reflection, you can then make a decision or choose a direction for it — a calm, quick direction for making a decision. What exactly should you do now?

A person may not want to leave because they are waiting for a bonus — a quarterly one, and sometimes an annual one. They may not leave because they have been promised that they might be paid some bonus. Or they are promised that conditions at this job may change: they will get a new position, role, a new area of responsibility. Or they are told that a time will soon come when they will work four times less: it’s just that they are working a lot now, but it will become much easier.

Why is it hard to leave a job you dislike?

So, on the one hand, we have looked at the list of reasons why a person wants to leave: why you yourself want to leave, or why the thought even occurs to you. On the other hand, we have looked at a short list of reasons — you may have others — why a person doesn’t make this decision.

If a person wants a drink of water, they simply go and drink water: they have a very clear reason that has arisen, and there is an action. But here there are reasons why a person has the urge to change jobs, and there are reasons why they don’t do it.

Note down the examples and reasons I am describing. Then sit down and be sure to write down the reasons why you don’t leave. Write them down for yourself, record them and, if possible, come up with additional ones of your own — there can be very many different ones.

Once you have written the list of reasons on both sides, it’s important for you to take a fairly simple action which, again, will let you decide today what to do. You need to formulate the goal you want to achieve in the next year, two or three. A very simple, very near one. What do you really need?

For example, you want to reach a steady level of income within a few years: you now earn five hundred dollars a month and want to start earning a thousand. Or you want to work at a steady job that brings a steady income but doesn’t involve endless overtime. Or you want to find a good workplace where managers don’t swear at you. Or a place where you will form a new circle of people — new colleagues with whom you can be friends and acquaintances.

Or a new job is, for you, a point of strong professional growth. Many people, explaining why they want to leave, say: “We aren’t growing professionally here, we are deteriorating badly, we want to develop professionally and move forward.” Or: “I want to leave my job so that in three years I can earn a certain sum of money in one go.”

You need to fix this simple goal for yourself — do a simple exercise: write down a goal for a year, two or three. Once you know this goal, the first thing you do is ask yourself: “Can I achieve this goal within my current workplace? Or, to achieve it, do I need to change jobs?”

The thing is that when you change jobs — as I said at the very beginning — you may develop a list of reasons and desires for why you want to leave, and a list of reasons why you don’t do it. You may move into exactly the same space. It will be slightly different, with other aspects and factors, but those reasons will arise there again. Because a person who chooses a job often makes the decision without understanding the goal — why they came there.

A real-life example

For example, when I was a student studying programming, it was important for me to find a job while still a student. I was looking for this job and set myself a criterion: what matters to me is not the money I will earn — what matters is simply to start working. And honestly, it didn’t even particularly matter where I worked. I remember I went to an interview to get a job as a merchandiser and to an interview to start working as a programmer. A strange action, seemingly a wrong one in the long run, but in the short term my goal was simply to start working. It is this short-term goal that you need to live with a little and see what it is for you — for a year, two, three.

Back then this goal mattered to me on the scale of a few months. I was lucky: I started working not as a merchandiser but as a programmer. Why do I say I was lucky? Because I wasn’t looking a little further ahead, over the long distance, and over the long distance it did matter to me who exactly I worked as, what exactly I did, in what team, with what managers and how much money I earned. It mattered quite a lot to me. And of course, for all those years, the right goal for a year, two or three would have been to gain professional experience.

If I now had an acquaintance studying programming, the first thing I would tell them is to choose the right place, to form for themselves a clear picture of the company they need to join in order to take the next step in a year, two or three. This picture of the company is needed to set the next goal — further ahead, already understanding the movement over five, ten or fifteen years.

This is a slightly complicated subject. So let’s go back and stop at least at this understanding: if I were a programmer, or if I had an acquaintance who is a programmer now studying at university, I would recommend that they set a goal of professional achievement, of professional experience in a particular place, rather than of earning money.

If money is absolutely critical and it is simply impossible without it — you need to feed your family, parents, husband, wife, children, some relatives, or pay off debts — then of course the goal can be money too. I was simply giving an example. You need to formulate the goal for yourself, but over a slightly longer distance.

How to break the cycle of bad jobs

Every person often makes decisions in their current reality out of their own fear.

For example, imagine that you have decided after all to change jobs because the atmosphere at work is truly unbearable. You leave and want to find a new job. And at the moment you left, you hadn’t fully identified the right reason why you were leaving. You searched for a long time and didn’t find a new job. You become afraid that you won’t find one for a long time, and you start making decisions in your job search not on the basis of your goal — what you really want in two, in three years — but on the basis of a simple task: “I just need to find a new job again.” And in essence you recreate the same events that happened before. You will recreate them in any case, because you ran away from one place and moved to another — because you ran away.

Don’t run away. If you know your goal and tell yourself: “In a year, two, three I want to reach such a figure or such a task,” then you look at your current job and ask yourself: “Can I, in my current place, arrange things so that in two years I earn such-and-such an amount of money every month? Or earn, save and put aside such-and-such a sum? Or pay back all my debts? Or grow professionally, gain a new body of knowledge and get a particular position — for example, I want to be a director? Or will I be able to find new friends or acquaintances at my current job?”

First you look at your current job in relation to this goal neutrally — as if you perceived it as a new job rather than an old one. Because it is important not to run away.

The most important advice

After many years of my life — and I have twenty years of professional experience, actually more by now: twenty-one, twenty-two or twenty-three years — I can say this.

Looking for new conditions is often an escape, and it may simply lead to repetitions.

I have had this in my life: I ran away — and there was a repetition; I ran away — and there was a repetition; I ran away — and again there was a repetition. At some point I said: “Right, stop, this time I won’t run away.” I didn’t run away, and there was no more repetition.

You have calmly sat down and examined your current job. As a rule, half of people will find a solution in their current job. And if you see any solution there at all, I recommend this: try to keep working for three, four, five months — some period, but at least not a day, not two and not a week — and switch on this mode inside yourself: “I understand that I have a reason why I want to leave. I understand that I have a reason why I am not leaving. But now I have a precise goal that I have formed, and perhaps this goal can be achieved in the current company. I’ll try working at my current job with the thought that I don’t want to leave it. I’ll go through it in a new way, walk around there in a new way, based on the goal I have.”

Step-by-step instructions: what to do if you want to quit

A little later I will definitely give you an important secret: what else you need to do so that these three, four, five or six months go very successfully and properly for you.

If you have formed a goal and stated it to yourself — a normal, simple human goal that makes sense to you — and it definitely cannot be achieved at your current workplace in a year, or two, or three, then you can make a decision and move on to the next procedure. The next actions consist of forming an understanding for yourself of what kind of job it could be, what company, where it should be located and how quickly I can get closer to it — and starting to move toward this company, launching this for yourself, but under no circumstances leaving your current company.

When you write all these things down — one set of reasons, the other set of reasons, the goal, the understanding of whether you can do it at your current job or not — a process of your own change is set in motion, and you need to spend a little time with it too. There is no need to make this decision on the spur of the moment.

Give yourself at least two weeks — even if things are already simply critical, you wanted to run away and finally heard for yourself: “Damn, that’s right, I agree with Alexander, I’m definitely changing jobs.” Wait a little and then form your decision — it will come to you. One set of reasons, the other set of reasons, a formed goal — you will begin to see the picture much more clearly and distinctly.

Now let’s return to the secret that lets you be in your current company in an incredibly good way — both with the understanding that you can achieve your goal in it, and even with the understanding that the goal is unattainable in this company.

Suppose you work in this company, you have reasons why you wanted to leave and reasons why you aren’t leaving. You have formed a goal for a year and understand that it is unattainable in this company. At the same time, you see that the next, say, six months in this company could help you achieve this goal in a year, a year and a half or two — within the time frame you have set yourself. This often happens. For example, getting better references from this company, or getting more relevant experience in it, or trying to do something there that will help you later on. Or continuing to work in this company for now and earning money so as to study in parallel — to get a new education or a new profession, to pump up some skills and find another, new job. Or, for example, to start your own business. You say: “I no longer want to work as an employee, I want to start my own new business. My goal is to launch it.”

And here it is important to take an action that will create a balance: you will deceive neither yourself nor the company. And then this company will really help you.

It is important for you to look at what the company’s current goal is for the next year, what your boss’s goal is, for example. Or, if you are the main person in the company, to understand in general what the goal of its shareholders is. And to try to align the goal of this company with the actions that will help you take your next step. For example, simply staying in this company for six months, or trying to do new tasks over six months together with the company’s goal. That is, in essence, to help this company achieve its goal, while understanding very clearly that you are helping the company, but the company is also helping you achieve your goal.

If you keep helping the company along the road that your managers or shareholders see, but it has nothing to do with your goal, then nothing will work. You need to align the two.

Recently in my videos — I talked about working with a team, about incentive systems, you can find them on my channel — I gave an interesting example. It is very apt and good here.

I once managed a company, and my incentives were very strongly integrated with the company’s goal. From the very beginning, when I joined this company to manage it, the company needed to get a high valuation and a high value. And my incentives were very strongly, directly tied to that: if the company gets a high valuation and value, I immediately earn a lot of money. That is precisely why I joined this company — it was my main goal.

At some point the company’s goal changed: it shifted from the company being worth a lot to the company earning a large net profit. Not even so much earning it, and not so much the shareholders receiving that net profit — but having that net profit drawn on a sheet of paper. There were also various other goals that I didn’t even understand. But I saw and heard that the most important thing was for the company to have a profit.

I understood that my goal had nothing to do with this profit: if the company made a profit, I myself received and earned nothing from it. And I understood that in the long term, over several years, my goals no longer coincided with the company’s goal. Whether I would change companies and move to a new place, start a new business or businesses, or take a job — that made no difference at all. At the same time, I understood that at that moment, while I continued to work in this company, it was important for me to align my own goal with its direction. I did everything possible to change my incentives toward this profit — I changed them and went through this stage very properly. And after that, of course, it was clear anyway that my focus would shift, because my next goal was different, just as the company’s goal was different.

Take these simple actions.

• Write down for yourself the reasons why you want to leave and the reasons why you aren’t leaving.
• Write down the goal you have for one, two or three years — the period you can be aware of.
• See whether this goal is achievable in this company or in something else.
• Within this company, align your own goal with what the company actually needs.

Your goal may simply be not to get fired over the next six months. Fine. Look at what the company needs done, and work in the company every day not so that you don’t get fired, but so that the company achieves a particular result.

If you do this, in a year or two you will see the most important thing: the events will stop repeating in which you are constantly under stress and in a difficult inner state — when you want to change jobs, when you are doing the wrong thing.

And when you feel at work that you are doing the wrong thing, you feel overall that something is wrong in your life. And this “something is wrong” spreads to everything: to what you eat, where you sleep, where you live, to your friends, your parents, your family, your husband, your wife, your children. To everything around. You begin to feel that something is wrong everywhere. And in the future this can lead to enormous, incredible problems.

Perhaps today you have heard for yourself a very simple immediate solution, a next step. You are not thinking long-term — ten or twenty years ahead. Perhaps after some time, when this has passed, you will have repeated problems, some losses or, on the contrary, gains.

You will remember and realize that what really matters is not what will happen in two years, but what is happening right now — and at the same time what will happen in thirty or forty years.

I recently had a video on my channel about exactly this: what matters — planning forty years ahead or living right now?

It would be great if you wrote down the reasons why you want to leave your job, the reasons why you stay, and the goal you have. Even if you do it briefly, just note it down for yourself — you will show your responsibility toward yourself.

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