Should I Stay or Should I Go?

In this episode, we explore a question that most women face more than once in a lifetime: Should I stay or should I go?

From career decisions, to relationships, to volunteer commitments, when the situation is no longer a good fit, what happens next? 

We explore this question from different angles, to help you get unstuck. Consider your situation in a new light, weigh your options, and commit to a choice.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Get Yourself Together Chica Podcast, the show that helps you thrive, or, you know, sometimes just survive. I'm Rebecca Fernandez.

In each episode, we dive deep into something that has an impact on our lives as women, whether that's money or love, motherhood or friendship, our careers, or just making space for joy.

This is episode number 16, and it's all about a question that pretty much all of us have faced at some point in our lives, and we'll probably face again and again.

Should I stay or should I go?

It's a question that is probably one of the most common reasons why women sign up for the Get Yourself Together Chica program.

Sometimes we have that question about our job or other career transition decisions. Sometimes it's about our romantic relationship or our marriage.

Sometimes it's about a long-term friendship, or maybe even one with somebody we've just met.

Sometimes it's about some kind of volunteer or extra commitment or activity that we signed up for at some point in our lives, and now we're questioning our commitment to.

At its core, I really think "should I stay or should I go?" is a question about a relationship that's not meeting our expectations anymore.

Even when it's about a job, that's an employment relationship. Or a relationship with our manager or our peers, or whoever is creating the opportunities inside the company for us.

It's a feeling that whatever's going on, it shouldn't be like this.

So today, I'm gonna share with you some different ways that you can think through those decisions. Should I stay or should I go? And try to get yourself unstuck.

I'll give you some ways that you can consider the situation in a new light. Weigh your options and commit to a choice.

I hope you enjoy this episode. You can find the show notes at getyourselftogetherchica.com/podcast.

And as always, you can reach me at podcast @ getyourselftogetherchica.com.

But before we dive into today's topic, I want to share what's bringing me joy right now.

I spotted for the first time ever, a new winter visitor to the bird feeder, a Ruby Crowned Kinglet.

These are not uncommon birds, but I had never seen one. My partner saw one in the brush last winter, when we were out hiking, but I missed it.

They're teeny tiny and they usually hang out in the bushes, so you don't often get a chance to see them.

But I put a new kind of suet out that had some mealworms in it and I think that did the trick.

This little guy has been coming by every so often. He makes just one stop at the feeder, grabs a little something and then takes off again, but he is super, super cute.

I haven't seen him flash his little Ruby Crown yet, but hopefully that will happen any day now.

I'll put a link to the Audubon page and some pictures of him in the show notes so you can keep an eye out.

All right, let's talk about that question. Should I stay or should I go now?

Let's start with why we get so stuck when this question comes to our minds. First and foremost, I think it's a paralyzing question because it's never a straight downhill fall from amazing to awful.

Instead, day after day, week after week, things are up and down. A little bit more up, a whole lot more down.

Over time, we get the feeling that the trend is downward, but it can be hard when things look up again to know are they improving or is this just part of that overall curve?

And you know, even abusive relationships have a honeymoon cycle where right after things get really bad and the individual is afraid you're gonna leave them, things kick up into that honeymoon cycle, you make up things are better for a while, it seems like things are turning around, but it's just part of the cycle and the spiral continues to go downhill.

That can happen not just in abusive relationships like domestic partnerships that we think about, but I've seen that same kind of toxic abusive cycle play out in people's jobs, in their relationships with a volunteer group, in friendships, you know, these patterns exist for a reason.

They are sort of manifestations of the more negative aspects of human nature.

And so we often get stuck, whether it's a truly toxic or abusive situation or just one where we're not thriving, we get stuck because we don't know: Well, will it get better? Are the things I'm doing working? Things are a little better now, can I fix this? Can I wait it out?

How do I know if I walk away, that things weren't going to get better? Maybe I'll regret it.

And sometimes too, there's gaslighting that's happening. Somebody makes us feel like there is no problem. Things aren't like we see them, things aren't like we think. They make us really question our own perception of the situation.

Sometimes they convince us that the actual problem is us. Like, I'm the problem, not you, not the situation. You know, you're crazy, you're delusional, you want too much. 

And so one thing that can be really helpful there is actually to take a step back, plug your ears to whatever that sort of gaslighting voice or voices are telling you that you're wrong and not to trust yourself.

And even if that might be an institutional voice, a culture can also be a gaslighting force that tells you, no, no, no, everything's fine. It's not sexism. It's your imagination or maybe you're the problem.

But take a step back and make a timeline. Look at the big picture.

What have been the high points and what have been the low points?

How many times in the time that you've been in this situation, have you felt this way?

What are all the pieces of evidence that you can think of that point toward the view of the situation that you have?

And then what are the counterpoints?

What are those times and experiences where you haven't been at your best, or that might be thrown up in your face by this other individual who's telling you the way that you think things are isn't reality?

Look at that timeline. What does it tell you?

Often, if you're being gaslit, the timeline is very clarifying.

It becomes very clear to you that while someone can provide counter examples to your perspective, if you look at the big picture, guess what?

You're not crazy. The situation is messed up. You're not delusional and you're not the center of the problem.

And yet, even when you've got that clarity, folks often still hesitate.

They say, "I'm not ready. It's maybe I know I need to go, but it's not the right time to go."

So let's talk about the trouble with hesitance. First, you've got to recognize that hesitating to leave when you know it's the right answer, can put you in a really bad spot. Your body sometimes rebels and you get all kinds of pain and stress illnesses. You can be sort of taken out of commission physically.

You can get forced out. I see this happen a lot where suddenly the other person or the job or whatever the situation is, they make the decision that it's time for you to go.

And guess what? You're not usually in the best of circumstances when that occurs.

Sometimes you actually force your own hand out of desperation. You essentially throw a lit hand grenade on the situation to make yourself get out of it.

Maybe you email the head of your company and tell them what you really think about them.

Or maybe you start an affair. Or maybe you rant on Facebook about, you know, the group that you're involved with or how horrible this friend is.

One way or another out of impulse, sometimes you force your own hand.

I use the word "hesitance" when you know that you need to leave, but you just can't seem to put any criteria or timeline together on when that's gonna happen.

And so often you just drift for years in this situation.

I might see you one year and you're telling me, oh yeah, I gotta leave. It's time to go. I'm so miserable.

But there's no real plan for it. And then I run into you a year later and you tell me the same thing.

And I run into you a year later and you tell me the same thing.

And look, if this has been going on for years, it might be time to look in the mirror and look at your past.

When we get stuck for many years in an unpleasant, difficult situation, you have to ask yourself, is there something familiar about the role that I am playing here?

Even if you don't like it, even if it's dysfunctional, you seem to know a little too well how to function in this.

If you grew up in chaos, you gotta realize that deep down, you actually might be more comfortable with chaos than when times are calm.

So you might be staying because you know how to survive and navigate this situation, whereas a healthy, functional one might actually be far outside of your life experience or norm.

So if you have an inkling that that might be what's at play here? Go get yourself into a therapist chair because you don't wanna end up leaving and then find yourself in the same situation again and again, just with new faces and new names attached.

Another thing I think it helps to do if you are in that hesitant gray zone is to mark the time, find some way to mark the time so that it doesn't drag on indefinitely.

So for example, you might choose to write a letter to your future self, let's say six months or 12 months from now and describe how you feel right now and how long you think you felt this way.

You might describe what you hope will be different, six months or 12 months from now.

And then put that letter away and make a note to open it six or 12 months from now and read it.

You know, I did something a bit like that many years ago. I had a situation where year after year, just I was so unhappy and I kept trying to fix things and things would get a little better for a little while but then they just get back to where they were again or worse.

And I had that thought finally toward the end. I need to write a letter to myself and I need to give it to a friend and tell her to mail it to me one year from now on my birthday and all it needs to say is, if you're still this unhappy, it's time to get out.

I never actually did mail that letter, I wrote it and then I was so afraid I tore it up and threw it away. But I happened to be in the same place one year later on my birthday as the Charles Bridge in Prague, Czech Republic. And I remembered the letter and I was still that unhappy. And I made the choice then and there that it was time to go.

And you know, I never regretted it. It was the beginning of a whole new chapter of my life, of so much more happiness and absolutely I had to work through some things with a therapist but I did the work.

Another way that you can mark the time so it doesn't drag on indefinitely is to get one of those page a day journals that spans five years.

I'll link to one in the show notes. I'm currently on my second of these journals meaning I've had one for more than five years and the way that they're structured is every day on, let's say March 1st, you'll be able to see the five years of journal entries at one time.

So it's just a few lines a day that you can put in there but if you make a note of how you're feeling and what you're struggling with, sometimes that alone will mark the passing of time and show you: are things changing or am I exactly where I was when this started?

I had that happen one time with a relationship. I had somebody who was just really jerking me around a lot and it had been going on for a while. But I didn't realize how long it had been going on until I did that full year loop in the journal and came back around to one month after we first met and I was feeling and experiencing the exact same things 30 days after I first met this person.

That marked the time and I was able to say enough done.

One more tip of ways you can mark the time so it doesn't drag on indefinitely. My partner gave me this one when I was unhappy in a job.

He said, you know, it's not great to agonize all the time over the same situation. So what if you just put a note on your calendar and you do a monthly check-in or quarterly check-in?

You know, you can come up with what it looks like do you wanna do a scale of one to 10, how happy am I, how unhappy am I?

Do you wanna ask yourself the same questions or do you just wanna open up a document and write how you're feeling now?

But make that the time that you reconsider the situation and decide: am I in for another month or another quarter? Or is it time to start working my way out?

And that's helpful too because it gets you out of that space of constant rethinking and re-deliberating, (re-deliberating? is that even a word?).

Deliberating over and over again. And it gets you into a purposeful, okay, I know when I'm gonna think about this again and I know when I'm going to make a decision for the next period of time.

Okay, so let's talk about that choice to stay. First up, know why you are staying. And under what conditions, document it if you can, and test those out.

So if you're staying because, well, I have a kid to put through college.

Okay, well let's test that one. So let's say that it costs you, I don't know, 75 grand to get your kid through college.

If somebody wrote you a check tomorrow for 75 grand and put it in the bank and said, this is your kid's college fund, would you be ready to leave that job?

Nine times out of 10, I find the answer is no.

Or it might be a situation like, well, I need to have surgery next year and so I just don't feel like I can really leave this relationship or this job.

Okay, well if you lined up friends to take care of you and you had enough money in the bank to cover it and everything was covered, would you leave tomorrow?

Nope, probably not.

So know why you're staying and under what conditions and test those out.

Maybe the answer is I have a kid who has one semester left of college and at that point I'm going to start applying for a new position.

Reframe your choice in a way that gives you your power and agency back.

So instead of saying, oh, I'm so miserable in this job as soon as my kid graduates, I'm done. You might instead say, I am putting up with this person and this employment situation in service of my goal of getting my kid through college next year and when they're done, it's my turn to do something different.

It's a very different thing to reframe it as your choice and to be clear about why you're doing it and for how long then to be a martyr.

The question, should I stay or should I go? It actually begs a second question, which is, are there really only two choices? Stay and be miserable or go and hopefully be happy?

Every dance changes in some way when you change your steps. So can you experiment with dancing and stepping a little differently and see what happens?

What if you stay but you don't work until seven o'clock every night no matter how pressured you are?

What if you stay but you sign up for the class that you want to take that your family's pressuring you not to do?

What if you stay but you don't take responsibility for whether the organization fails?

What will happen? You don't really know until you try it.

You might force the go decision because, you know, when you change your steps the situation might become toxic around you and push you out or make it clear it's time to go.

That's okay, that's information. It might become dangerous and so if you're afraid of that, well, the answer is you need to get some help and go, right?

You don't need to stay in a situation that is going to become dangerous if you stand up for yourself.

But you know, fundamentally, you have to believe deep down that this is not as good as it gets.

If you don't believe that, you're going to feel stuck indefinitely. You're going to feel unsure, but when you know, I deserve something better than this.

It becomes easier to make plans and or change the way that you dance in that relationship.

I also think people often wait for perfect information. Well, when I know this, then I'll know what to do. Or if I just knew what would come next or if I just knew what the right answer was, then I would do it.

But Chica, clarity doesn't usually come when we're standing still waiting for answers.

Clarity comes when we are in motion.

Even if you move in the wrong direction, even if you later realize that you were a part of the problem. That's not a bad thing. You're growing, you're learning, you're improving yourself.

Even on the other side of that, you probably will have grown too big for this situation to fit you anymore anyway.

So ask yourself, when I'm hesitant or when I'm making the choice to stay but not really owning it, is it because I'm playing it safe?

Usually when we're playing it safe, we're playing small.

We're settling for less than we're capable of, less than we deserve.

It's not a winning strategy in life, playing it safe all the time, being miserable rather than taking a chance.

You gotta ask yourself, am I sacrificing my own happiness or my well-being or my opportunities for growth, because I believe that's what a good parent would do, that's what a good daughter would do, that's what a good wife would do, whatever, feeling the role that fits.

But are you playing the martyr here?

Are you the one who's lighting yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm, as that horrible expression goes?

If the answer is, well, yeah, of course that's what a good person would do. Well, okay, let's reverse that role.

What would you want to expect someone else to do for you? If you're the parent, would you expect your adult daughter to sacrifice her happiness to care for you?

Would you expect your partner to stay in a position that makes them miserable because you like being able to buy whatever you want and they're the breadwinner and so this is their job to be miserable?

Would you expect your child to stay in a career that makes them unhappy because you have a vision that they should have been a doctor or they should have been a lawyer?

Of course not.

You understand when it's not you at the center, that that's nuts. It's nuts with you at the center, too.

All right, so let's talk how to know it's time to go.

Staying until you are 100% sure that it is time to go is often a mistake because staying until you're certain, it often means that you're subjecting yourself to way too much mistreatment or trauma or abuse or if it's not a situation like that, it might mean that you're missing out on lots of great opportunities because you're playing it safe.

If the best that you can say is, well, it's not all bad... it's time to go.

And look, there's never a good time to make hard changes. Hard changes are hard. There are maybe worse times to make tough changes, but you'll figure it out.

The hardest moment is actually always right before you leap. From that point forward, once you've made that decision and set it in motion, things tend to get easier.

I do want to put a little footnote here that if we're talking about a domestic violence situation, get help because the moment that you are considering leaving, making plans to leave or right after you have left, those are the riskiest times for you.

Those are the times when your partner or ex-partner is going to feel most threatened at their core and they've already proven they're not great at managing their emotions or their impulses.

So even if they've never been that violent before, this is the moment when those kind of things tend to happen. So you need to speak to somebody who has experience getting women out of these situations safely.

Don't underestimate the possibility that things could get much worse very rapidly.

All right, enough on that topic. The last thing I would encourage you to think about, if you're in this, should I stay, should I go, how do I know when it's time to go spot is, what would you do if the decision was made for you?

If the other person or the situation you're in just pushed you out, you'd figure it out.

You'd probably feel sad and maybe a little rejected, but ultimately most people when they're in this, should I stay or should I go conundrum?

They're relieved when somebody else makes the decision for them.

They wonder later on, why did I stay in this for so long?

You can be the one who makes the decision for you.

And no matter what you decide, you've got this.

Well, I've been meaning to tell you what I've been reading lately. It's a book called The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. It's an older book, but a friend of mine who I met for coffee, he just happened to bring me a copy at exactly the right moment. I told him later, it's like you were my muse. It's like you knew I was staring at a blank page of my novel just agonizing this morning before we had coffee over, can I do this? Resisting the desire to write.

And so it's a book about the war that our bodies put on us when we endeavor to do something big and creative and important to our own development.

So if you're a writer, an artist, an entrepreneur, somebody who's leading a spiritual movement, somebody who's got big dreams and a big vision that you resist it when you try to do the work, but somehow your soul calls you back to it over and over again.

It's a good read, pick up a copy. I'll put a link in the show notes.

And I wanted to tell you what I've been cooking up in the kitchen this week. My daughter, she wanted to make these cute little buckeyes, so it's like a peanut butter ball that's dipped in chocolate, but she found a way to make them so that they look like little hedgehogs.

I will put a link in the show notes to the recipe, but super cute. We've been making a few of those and eating entirely too many of them.