When I was considering leaving my last job, I agonized over the decision. First, I told myself I’d only leave if the right job came along. And although it took me a little while, I did end up finding another job I’d consider leaving for. But even then, once I found it, I felt paralyzed. I worried I’d make a mistake by leaving. In my typical fashion, I made a pros and cons list. Even though I felt really good about the pros and cons list, that I’d thought of everything, it still didn’t seem to help me actually make a decision. So, I agonized some more.
Does this sound familiar? Do you have trouble making big decisions? Today on the blog, I’m sharing how I let go after making big decisions, and why I think it’s so important to make decisions and move on.
The two people who know me the best, the two people with whom I share all my thoughts and feelings about work and life, are Mr. Dink and my accountability partner. They both know me. They both know my goals. They both know what I want from work.
And they both encouraged me to take this new job that I was agonizing over.
But ultimately, I knew I wouldn’t really be happy, wouldn’t really be content, unless I wanted that new job, too. Which is why I was so paralyzed by the decision. I knew I’d only have myself to blame if it turned out I’d made a mistake.
At the end of the day, I did take the new job, for reasons I’ve laid out in this post.
And once I took the new job, I somehow let all that agonizing go. When I made the decision, gave notice at my job, and signed the offer letter at the new company, it was like a switch flipped. I accepted my decision and moved on. It wasn’t necessarily easy, but I found acceptance much less hard than actually making the decision in the first place. And this acceptance served me incredibly well during my last 2 weeks of work and my 3-week sabbatical in-between jobs.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever get better at actually making the big life choices. I hope I do! Or maybe I’ll be destined to agonize over big decisions for the rest of my life. But I do know I’ve gotten better at letting things go, and it was evident after this last big decision.
So what helped me with the letting go part? There are a few key things. Let’s dive in.
Knowing I have options
Ultimately, what most helped me sleep at night instead of tossing and turning with my mind racing, was knowing that I have options.
I write a lot on the blog about how money gives you options, and I’ve never felt that more in a situation like this. Because I’m Coast FI (meaning I have enough saved in investments that it will eventually grow to fund my retirement, even if I didn’t save any more), I’m not dependent on a big fancy job that pays incredibly well. I only need enough to cover my expenses currently, which provides some extra peace of mind.
Even having a healthy F-You fund, meaning extra money in the bank (whatever that number is for you to feel secure, or that you could walk away from a bad work situation), can be super comforting in these situations.
It helped immensely to remind myself that I have options. That nothing (usually) is permanent. If this job didn’t work out, I could always find a new job, I could freelance, I could look for part time work.
I could also go back to my previous role. Not a super ideal situation, but it was nice knowing it was an option. I left my last company on relatively good terms, and they told me they’d hire me back anytime if I changed my mind. Although who really knows if that’s true, it could still be a possible avenue to consider.
Another option.
Not striving for perfection
Knowing you have options is only the first step. It only takes you so far.
Having all these options could back fire if you’re constantly wondering if you picked the right option.
In my adult life, I’ve gotten a lot better at letting go of perfection, and I no longer believe there’s a perfect option. A perfect right next move.
All we can do is pick the one that feels right, the one we think is the best option at the time, and try it out. If it wasn’t what we thought, we can move to another option.
Not striving for perfection allows us to give the option we pick a fair chance. Knowing it’s not going to be perfect helps us analyze the outcome on a different level.
For me, I know any job won’t be perfect because it’s just that – a job. I’ve learned that I like what I do enough, but my ultimate goal is not to work for the rest of my life at a 9-5 job. I’m working now and saving money at a job I don’t hate and that brings me some fulfillment as a means toward my financial goals. Right now, that is the choice I’m choosing. And I have no expectations that it will be perfect.
Getting comfortable with failure
Another big factor at play in my ability to let go after making a decision is that I am now more comfortable with failure.
At this point in my life, I have failed numerous time.
When we’re growing up, failure seems like such a negative word. But I no longer think of failure as bad. Because what failure actually does is give us information, and it teaches us to be resilient.
When I was in high school, I happened to be naturally good at tennis. I had never really played in an organized way before, but many of my family members played tennis (thank you, genetics). When I tried out for the tennis team on a whim, not only did I make it, but I made it into the top 6 singles players as a freshman, and I was the #1 singles player as a sophomore.
Sure, I was pretty decent, but I also just happened to be good compared to the other players on my team. I wasn’t that good, and I was very inexperienced.
So when our team played other schools, I lost. I lost a lot. I lost so much, and by such insane amounts, it could have easily been completely demoralizing. And sometimes, it was.
But all this relentless losing also taught me how to get really good at failure.
Part of what really helped me turn failure into resilience was that I had an incredibly supportive coach, and teammates who didn’t make fun of me but instead cheered me on anyway. I had a support system, which I think is an important component of any big decision-making process. Not so that your support people will make the decision for you, because that’s never going to turn out well, but so they can be there for you when you make it, to be a sounding board, to listen when all you need is someone who cares to hear you.
But, sadly, a good support system isn’t the end-all be-all. Your support system can only take you so far. To really become resistant to failure, it has to also come from within you. You have to shift your mindset.
After that first brutal sophomore year, where I lost every singles match of tennis I played, I could see what was ahead of me. It was going to be a long road.
If I stayed on the team (aka if I didn’t quit), I would likely stay the top player, and I may continue to lose. But my love for the sport and my teammates outweighed the cons. I chose to stick with it even if I lost. I chose to accept that fact, and move on. From there, I could focus on other things. Like improving my serve. Like being the best team captain I could be. Like supporting my teammates and considering their wins my wins.
Losing at tennis helped me become resilient. But failure doesn’t only bring resiliency. Failure also gives us information.
Growing up, I always wanted to play an instrument. I tried the saxophone, and I hated it. I can still remember exactly how that nasty reed tasted in my mouth and how exhausting I found it to play that instrument. I tried the piano next, and although things went well for awhile, I quit when I got to the more advanced skills.
You could say I failed at playing these instruments, and maybe by the definition of the word, I did. But I also gained really useful information along the way. Playing the piano and saxophone just didn’t do it for me the way other things did. I believe that had I really wanted to play those instruments, I would have stuck with it. After all, I stuck with tennis through all of high school even though you could argue I “failed” with every match I lost. I just learned that those things (saxophone and piano) weren’t for me. And I moved on to trying other things, to see how they would feel.
Failure is an integral part of life. Maybe that’s not a pretty statement, but it’s true. The more we use this fact to our advantage, to gain information and knowledge instead of shame and wallowing, the easier it will become to use it to design our lives. The easier it will become to make choices and not agonize over them. The easier it will be to let go and breathe a big sigh of relief, because we’re just trying something new.
This is how I plan to design my life. There are so many things I want to explore outside of my paying work. Right now, they are just things I think I want to do. “Creativity whispers,” as I call them.
And as I gain more financial freedom and thus time, I plan to try all these things out. I plan to experiment.
Sure, some of the activities I have high hopes for, but you can never really know how much you’ll like something until you try it. I’m sure I’ll still fail at many things. But I’ll be learning how to live my best life along the way.
And if you’re in a position where you have no idea what you’d do with more free time, but you hate your job and want out, start to keep a list of things that might interest you. Then, as you gain more free time, try them out. Don’t get so paralyzed by the choice. Try something, and if it fails, let it go and move on.
Embrace the choice
In their book Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans discuss the power of the choosing process in Chapter 9. They joke that for most people, the 4th step in the process, which comes after the choosing, is agonizing (lucky for me, apparently I only do the agonizing before the choosing). Instead, the authors encourage a different 4th step: let go and move on.
They argue that we should embrace our choices fully, so that we can get the most from them.
How cool is that concept? We’ve made the damn choice, so now we should embrace the choice. We owe it to ourselves, after all that agonizing and analysis paralysis, to actually give the choice a chance.
So that is what I’m doing with this new job. I’m giving it a chance. Sure, I already have my doubts. I’ve been thinking about freelancing more and more since starting my new job. I still wonder if I made the right decision. But ultimately, this was my choice, and I’m embracing it.
What helps me do this embracing is to have a plan. My current plan is to give this new job my all, my (almost) full attention, for 6 months. At 6 months, I will reevaluate this choice. See how I’m feeling about it all. And then I’ll go from there. One step, one plan, at a time.
Closing thoughts
More often than not, if we’re making a big (or even small) decision, I believe it’s because we need to. Because the regret we’d feel by not trying the new thing (taking the new job, switching careers, taking a pay cut to have more time freedom, etc etc) outweighs the safe, comfortable place we’ve been hanging out in.
So once when make the choice, we should embrace the choice.
Even though I agonized leading up to the decision to change jobs, once I made the choice, I let all that anxiety go. Once I was clear on the decision I was going to make, I accepted it and moved on. It’s not that the doubt and fears went away, it’s that I chose not to let them in. I’d already made the decision, so what good would it now do to continue agonizing? Plus, it would have interfered with my precious 3-week sabbatical that I created for myself in between jobs. And I had things to do! Which reminds me…
I’d like to end today with one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, called I Go Down to the Shore.
I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall- what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
What big choices have you had to make lately, or are going to have to make soon? Are you an agonizer like me? And can you let go and move on afterward? I’d love to hear from you!