When do I quit? You know, I don’t like my job; it’s soul-sucking. But when do I quit, when do I leave, and when do I take that leap and look for something else? We need criteria to know how to make our decisions. This applies to all of our life: it applies to work, home, relationships, health, and even our day-to-day lives. Whatever is draining you and bringing you down, imagine not having that in your life anymore. Not having that partner, not having that boss, not having that commute, not having that lack of appreciation for your work—whatever it is. Imagine not having it anymore. How do you feel? That right there is your answer to stay or to go. You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out Podcast. This episode is titled “When It’s Out with the Old and in with the New in Life.” You know, I often get asked, “Jim, when do I stop doing X, Y, Z?” “I’m sick of my job; it’s soul-sucking.” “My marriage isn’t working anymore. I’ve been married a lot of years. It doesn’t work.” “I want to move somewhere; I want to do something different in life. But when, when do I do it?” So in this episode, I want to talk about relationships. When it comes to work, people are often wondering, “When do I quit?” You know, “I don’t like my job; it’s soul-sucking, but when do I quit? When do I leave? And when do I take that leap and look for something else?” I see this overwhelmingly in personal relationships: “When do I quit?” Now, I could do a much longer episode on the personal relationship category in this episode, but I won’t for right now because there’s something else that also prompted this particular episode, which I’ll talk about in just a bit. Because in my own life, I’ve looked before at different times—”When do I quit something? When do I quit relationships?” meaning people that I have in my life, or even my personal relationship at one point in the past, many years ago. And what I recognized is I didn’t have any criteria. I didn’t have any criteria for knowing, “Okay, when you get to this threshold, this is when you quit.” And that’s what I want to talk about today. So when I talk about that word threshold, I’m also talking about criteria. And we need criteria to know how to make our decisions. But this applies to all of our life. It applies to work and home and relationships and health and even our day-to-day lives and things that we do. Speaking of that word criteria, many years ago, I had a friend of mine, his name was Harry, and I’ve told this story before, but we’re on—I don’t know how many episodes now—and he said, “You know, Jim, my marriage isn’t working; I’m not happy.” And I said, “How long have you been married?” And he said, “Seven years.” And he said, “My wife is bipolar, and what will happen is she will get on medication, and she’ll be great for three months, and then she goes back…” “I want to leave, but…” and he came up with different excuses. And that’s what many people do with their personal lives and their professional lives—they want to leave, they want to change, but… And I said, “Well, how long has this been going on?” And he said, “It’s been the same pattern for seven years.” And I said, “How come you stay?” And he said—which is, you know, most of us do this—he goes, “Well, I’m hoping that it gets better.” And I said, “Hoping is one thing, but how will you know? What criteria do you have in place to let you know that if by X, Y, Z criteria, it’s not better, it’s time to go?” And he said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, you’ve done this for seven years. Three months good, three months bad. Three months good, three months bad. Repeat that times seven. When do you know to get off the merry-go-round?” And he said, “I don’t know. That’s why I’m talking to you.” And I said, “You need criteria, meaning what does she have to look like in the relationship? What criteria have you established for her in the relationship?” And then I went a lot deeper: “Does she know about it, counseling, all this kind of thing?” But that’s not where I want to go in this episode. And his big criteria was time. He’s like, “I am so tired of doing this.” When we hope things are going to get better, rarely do they ever get better. And I said, “Okay, you know, what’s your criteria to know,” because he’s working by time, “what’s your criteria to know when to leave the relationship?” And he said, “I don’t know,” meaning he did not know. He didn’t say, “I don’t know,” as in, “Well, I don’t know, it’s open-ended.” He said, “I don’t know,” as in, “I don’t have any criteria.” And I said, “Well, you need criteria.” And that criteria is that at a certain amount of time—you’re going to determine that time—but at a certain amount of time, you’re going to invest yourself fully into the relationship, helping her heal, and trying to help her get to a place where it can be a healthy relationship for both of you. And he goes, “Okay, I will roll up my sleeves, I’ll bite the bullet, and I will give it one year.” And I said, “So what you’re saying is at the end of…” The criteria that he gave it one year: nothing changed significantly. Patterns were still repeating themselves. He didn’t want to do it anymore. So at that one-year point, he said, “Okay, I’m not hoping anymore. I’m done. It’s time to leave.” And he did. And today he’s very, very, very happy because he moved through a relationship that nurtured him and wasn’t pulling him down. It wasn’t just completely emotionally draining and emotionally taxing. Peggy’s criteria was very simple criteria: “Is my life better with this person, and/or is my life better without this person in my life?” Now, what I do want to share here, Peggy was very good at understanding relationships and skills and knowing that, you know, it takes two to tango and they have to grow. So basically what she was saying, if she’s exhausted her capacity to be supportive in the relationship, and it’s not working, and she’s not seeing any change on the other side, even after being fully nurturing, she’s decided her life is better off without this person, and it’s time to go. I’ll talk more about that in just a bit. I often hear people saying, “But what about people in my life, my family?” And many times we feel obligated to our family, even when they’re not good for us. And generally, it’s out of guilt. People would say, “I’m going to feel bad. I mean, it’s my mother. It’s my father. They are extraordinarily toxic. But what can I do? It’s my mom and my dad.” A former student of mine said something many years ago, and I love the quote. Her name was Nicole, and I worked with her eight years ago, and actually she just came back recently to start working with me again on different things. And she said—which I think is a very profound, very simple statement—she said, “Just because we share DNA doesn’t mean we need to share time and space together.” Think about that. Just because we share DNA doesn’t mean we need to spend time and space together. But many people think, because they share DNA, they are then obligated to share time, space, holidays, and all these kind of things, and that is not true. So the way that I look at it, and this might not work for everyone, but the way that I look at it is like Peggy: Am I better off with X, Y, Z people in my life, or am I better off with them not in my life? You know, I mentioned before my dad, I’ve mentioned it many times: my dad was an alcoholic. And when I was 22, I graduated from college. My dad was very toxic by that point, and I’d recognized—without the guidance, I didn’t know Peggy back then—but I’d recognized that my life would be better without my father in it. He had such a toxic influence that it’s not healthy to keep this extraordinarily unhealthy man in my life. And I decided to create space. I didn’t want him in my life anymore. And that’s when we parted. But I had to look out for—which I’ll talk about in a moment—I had to look out for my own well-being, my own mental health. And I knew that being in a relationship with my father was not conducive to a good level of a healthy mental health. So even though I used personal lives as an example, I see many people that are professionally questioning whether or not they want to do what they do any longer. Maybe it’s the industry, maybe it’s the company, maybe it’s the people in the company, which is what I want to look at. So, time to leave a job. What you want to look at: is there fulfillment? Or is there a lack of fulfillment? Is there constant mental stress? Or am I constantly distressed at work? And here’s a big one, maybe not as emotionally impactful as the mental distress or the lack of fulfillment: something like this job is soul-sucking. “It is sucking the life out of me. I hate my job.” I think back to when I lived in New York City back in 1998 through 2001, or 2002, almost, about four years. And when I went to New York, I took a very high-paying corporate job on Madison Avenue. I was recruited. I didn’t want to live in New York. And I took a job for the money, which would be equivalent of about $700,000 today with inflation. And I was chasing the money. I took a job for the money. And I did think that I would enjoy it, I thought, because I didn’t do enough exploration about it, but I thought I would enjoy it. And I hated it. I hated it. I remember one Sunday night thinking, “Shit, I’ve got to go to work tomorrow morning, and I’ve got to be in the office at 8 a.m.” And I was dreading the night before, I was dreading going to my job the next morning. And I only had the job like two weeks, three weeks maybe. And in that moment, I said, “It’s… I’m distressed in this job. It’s not fulfilling. It’s just… I don’t… I wasn’t in burnout because I was new. I wasn’t overwhelmed. It was just not fulfilling.” Candidly, I don’t use this word a lot, but I, air quote, hated the job when I got inside. I couldn’t see on the outside what happened on the inside until I got on the inside. And I’m like, “I just don’t… it’s not me. It doesn’t fit me and who I am.” And at the 30-day mark, I quit. I felt bad about it because this company’s specific… and overwhelmed. If you’re in any of those scenarios, hello, that’s a signal that, you know what, something has to change. And if something doesn’t change, you are not in the right place. And candidly, I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: you’re wasting your life. Next, and these are big ones to me personally, is we have to look at, what about growth? What about alignment? Now, when I speak about growth, I look at, okay, because this is what people want: they want the opportunity for advancement. We as human beings are always looking to go to higher emotional states. A baby when it’s crying in the crib, it wants to go to a higher emotional state. And that could be that they’re wanting to be held or wanting to be fed, they’re wanting your diaper changed, but make no mistake, they want to grow and they want to go to a higher emotional state. So we all want that. And what I look at in jobs is, is there a lack of growth? Is the opportunity of the job, is that align with my own values and my own goals? And what I look at here is the growth. We want, all of us want the opportunity to contribute. And there’s been a lot of research on this. After a certain point, money is not a value to people. Once they hit a certain level of what they would call security, comfort, whatever it might be, then more money is not going to make them more productive. And again, a great deal of research has been on this. People want to belong. They want commonality. They want to feel like they’re part of something and they want to feel like they’re contributing. My entire team. I love my tech manager, Tom. Tom has been with me since day one. And Tom has always said, “As long as you do this, and as long as I’m welcome, I’ll be by your side.” And candidly, we’ve had a lot of business ups and downs. We’ve done extraordinarily well. And we’ve had years like this past year that’s very challenging. There’s a lot of changes happening in the world. And Tom is very dedicated and very committed, and he’s always said, “What we do, people need.” And, you know, Tom doesn’t see it like I do, but the amount of messages that I get from people that listen to the podcast saying, like, for example, Chris Griffin a while back, he’s got the second most downloaded podcast in Australia. I’ve coached Chris. And actually, I’m at number four, I think, in the health category in Australia. He’s number two. Mel Robbins is number one. Chris is like, “I’ve been listening to you since I was seven…” The next point is the values. Many years ago, when I waited tables out of college, I waited tables in a very high-end restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia, called Chops. And when you’re a young person waiting tables, quite often, your guests, people there, they will start chatting with you. If they’re not having a business dinner, often they will chat with you. Or if they’re a really good sales manager, they’re always going to look out for really good sales potential, potentially aligned talent. I’ve sold for many years, by the way. And so I was constantly getting job offers when I worked at Chops. And in that place, by the way, for any of you that are really young, and you’re like, “Okay, I can’t find a job that I want. I can’t get a callback. I can’t get my phone in the door.” A great place to meet people that do hire and make hiring decisions is working in a restaurant. Because in a really good restaurant, you will get access to people that you probably couldn’t even get through their front door otherwise professionally. And I worked at Chops in Atlanta, a very high-end restaurant, and I cannot tell you the amount of CEOs that I waited on, EVPs, executive vice presidents. And I was constantly given business cards: “Jim, you know, we do X, Y, Z at this company, we’d like to visit with you. You have great communication skills or great presence or this skill or that skill.” And when you work in a high-end restaurant, you have to learn how to upsell food and upsell wine. It’s part of what you do to raise your ticket level, to raise, obviously, revenue for the house, more money for the restaurant, and your tips for yourself. So the better salesperson you are, the more you’re rewarded financially. And that’s pretty damn good at it, to be honest. But anyway, my values are what I do on this podcast and in the transformational coaching program and the Insiders Group and the Becoming Unstoppable program. What I do is 100% aligned with my values and who I am and what I feel and what I believe and how I live. Now, about values: I didn’t want to go sell cell phones. I didn’t want to go sell Nordic Track. I didn’t want to go sell all these things where it’s constantly offered opportunities. I didn’t want to do it because it didn’t light me up because it didn’t represent my values. Now, when I took this job in New York, it didn’t represent my values. It represented a shit ton of money for me at that point in my life, and I acted outside of my values, and I paid the price for that because I quit within 30 days. You’ve got to act within your values, or you’re going to be very unhappy. So I look at professionally, are there growth opportunities? Is there an alignment with my values and my goals? Whatever tapping, whatever it is, acupuncture, we know that we have to live by our values because this is who and what we are. And professionally, if you’re unfulfilled and you’re not happy, guess what? You’re not getting your goals and your values met where you are currently, and it’s time to leave. The relationship, if you’re not getting your goals and your values met, we’ll talk more about that, it’s time to leave. Now a final one here, also at work, might be feeling undervalued. And this can apply to work and it can even apply to your marriage. Are you valued where you are? I want to say, owning a company and just complete transparency is, I’ve always told the team that the most important thing on this team for me is that we have quality of life. Because without great quality of life, nothing else matters to me. And that’s always been a principle for people in the company. I’m not perfect. And there are times that I’ve gotten super busy and I’ve taken my eye off the ball. There might have been times in the past where I didn’t have the right team member and the right slot on the team. And I eventually recognized we’ve got to shuffle some things around here. But I’ve always made it, I’ve always been consciously aware of hiring and bringing people on to the team that are aligned with the values of what we do here in the podcast and our other programs, and that is serving people. So ask yourself, though, about value: do you feel valued where you work? And if you don’t, I’m not advocating quitting, but what I am advocating is talk to your direct management and let them know you feel undervalued. And sometimes you can talk to management, and they don’t care. For me to leave. So ask yourself professionally: Are you feeling valued? Do you have the growth, the alignment? Are you achieving your goals? And are you valued? And if you’re not, well, then it may be time for you to go. So what are some warning signs that you want to look for? And the first one, that applies to me personally. It doesn’t right now, but it did many years ago in my own personal relationship. But the warning signs are: after you’ve talked to the other parties involved, you want to look at the situation and, “Okay, I brought things to their attention,” meaning your boss, your partner. “I brought things to their attention. We both agreed that we both want improvement, but I’m not seeing it from their side.” Well, that right there is a warning sign. And by the way, in personal relationships, that happens quite frequently. That might be a warning sign that it’s time to move on. And I’ll talk in a moment about, you know, things you want to, which, you know, things you want to look at. But I’ll just say it now. Like in my personal life, we were at a point many years ago where it just was not working. We’d already been together probably, I don’t know, we’d been together 22 years, maybe 10 years. I don’t recall, 10 years or whatever. And we were in a place where we just wasn’t clicking anymore, and it wasn’t fulfilling for both of us. And we were starting to just eventually live, even though we lived in this same house, living independent lives in this same house. And we were more like roommates than anything else. We tried a particular therapist, didn’t see any improvement. And things kind of malingered for a bit. We tried a different therapist and didn’t see any improvement. And I was starting to think, “Okay, for how I want to live and from my values, this is not going to work for me.” And then we finally… You want to bring them to the attention of your partner or your employer. And then you want to, you know, you want to agree to solutions. You want to commit from your end to the solution. And if you don’t see changes happening, that right there is a sign that things are probably not going to change. And when it comes to other people, first thing I look at is, “Okay, what do I have to do to change me? How do I have to change?” Whether it be work—which I own my own company—but whether it be personal life: what shit… looking to grow and improve. Now, whether or not you do, it’s a whole different ball of wax. That’s up to you. But many times, we are in relationships with people that don’t want to grow. They like things the way that they are. If you find yourself in that place, you’ve made attempts to improve it, and the other person doesn’t, your handwriting is on the wall. Now, this one here never applied to me, but that’s warning sign number one: is you talk about it, and you agree that improvement needs to happen with your partner, your employer, whatever, whether it be improvements in your workplace or safety or whatever it might be, or your personal life, and nothing changes, that’s a warning sign. It’s a red flag. And your environment: is that a toxic environment? Are you speaking up? Now, that’s never been one that’s been literally, it’s never applied to me. I’ve never been in my personal relationships other than my father at a toxic environment. Now, when I was 22… in time with you? Do you have more a partner who’d rather drink and drug and gamble, even though it’s not a conscious choice? It’s brain-based and it’s become habituated and subconscious, but are you living with that partner? So look at the environment. After it’s all been addressed, meaning your personal or professional, after it’s all been addressed, is it changing or does it remain toxic? If it remains toxic, there’s a clue and a warning sign right there. And then if you looked at, are there better alternatives available to you? Be careful here because what we often get into is the “grass is greener on the other side.” Well, the only reason the grass is greener on the other side is because they take better care of the grass. And that’s why I said I’ve got to work on me. But what I look at, though, is other, are there other alternatives, other jobs, better kinds of relationships that I can be in. Better and more supported people to have around me. When I say better people, more supportive, loving, and nurturing people around me. Now, making the decision. Number one is check your gut. How do you feel? How do you feel about the person, the relationship, the job, career, whatever it might be? When I worked in New York City, and I mentioned that night before, I’d go to work, how did I feel? I felt just worn out. I felt… here’s what I felt: I felt dread. I felt gloomy. I felt dread and I felt gloomy. That right there sort of told me, and I was a kid. Again, I was probably, I don’t know, I wasn’t again, I was 32, 33. And that right there, but I was tied to the money. And out of fear, I wanted to stay for the money. I’ll address that in just a moment. But how I felt, my gut was, “This is gloomy. I don’t like this.” And if you’re in that kind of place, whether it be professionally or personally, that right there, that gut check is big. Next, evaluate your efforts. And I just mentioned the part of that. Have you done everything you can to improve your situation, whether it be your personal or your employer or your business or your team or whatever, have you done everything you can? Most of the time we play the blame game. “Oh, it’s not me. It’s you.” But I’m bringing the ball back to you. Have you done everything that you can to improve to the highest possible degree to bring the best you into the work environment or the relationship? If you can say yes to that and it still doesn’t feel right, well… The other person, meaning that they’re doing it because they don’t want to hurt their partner, so they stay in a relationship that’s suffocating. That is the wrong reason to be into a relationship. If you’re doing it for other people and you’re sacrificing yourself, wrong, wrong reason to be in a relationship. And then finally, make sure that if you’re unhappy at work or at home, make sure the problem is about the situation itself and not personnel or individuals. So just create that distinction in your mind. Is my problem with the career in X, Y, Z industry or is my problem with people in my company? Is my problem with my partner or is it my environment or my life or how they live their life or where I want to go with my life, which is different than where they want to go with their life? So you have to distinguish. Is the problem in the situation or is it a person? Okay, so I told you a bit ago, we’re going to start wrapping up here about a litmus test. And I told you I had a question for you or an approach for you. And here it is. Whatever is bothering you, whatever is draining you, whether it be work, your relationship, whatever it is. People, whatever is draining you and bringing you down, imagine not having that in your life anymore. Take a second and do that. Exhale, and imagine not having that partner, not having that boss, not having that commute, not having that lack of appreciation for your work, whatever it is. Imagine not having it anymore. Now, how do you feel? Because that right there is your answer. That right there is your area. The president of the company, he was rooting for me in his meetings with the president of the company. And partly, I felt like I let him down. But again, I don’t worry about it. Now, it’s just business. Everyone’s got to do what’s good for them. Even companies do that. But I remember the subway right home, how light I felt. And in that moment, I knew that I made the right decision. So your litmus test is, “Okay, if I didn’t have that situation of my life, how do I feel?” A better or more fulfilling, more empowered life, whether it be personal or whether it be professional. Okay. Now, I’m going to wrap up here, but stay with me. This is important, please. So for me, I’ve been doing this podcast now for about seven years. And I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring what I bring to people in this podcast. We literally have impacted people. If I look at where the podcast is downloaded, it’s been downloaded in 37 different countries. We are over six million downloads, and that’s with me not having guests for the most part. That’s not with other people coming on and they have their own tribes and I interview them and they share, I mean, that’s just me for the most part of the work that I do. We’ve done some extraordinary things, but it’s time for something a little different. Now, I’m going to continue to do the podcast, and I’m grateful and I love doing it. But a direction that I want to go is a fulfilling direction to me. And I may lose some people, and that’s fine. I understand that and I respect that. But a direction that I want to go—and I’m probably going to fumble a little bit as I do—but that direction would be working with either spiritual entrepreneurs or people that are evolutionary oriented, meaning they are all about self-evolvement. Candidly, I get sick and freaking tired of having to talk about money and 3D things that are so primal so often that I’m going to stop doing it, and to a medium degree, probably. And what I want to start doing is bringing you guys and marrying it with science, but ancient wisdom, and specifically, because it’s been my path for 30 years, the ancient wisdom of shamanism as it applies today. Creating things in the external 3D world. So anyway, I’m going to take a week or two off. We’re still going to have the throwback episodes, but I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. You might miss me for a week or two with a regular scheduled podcast, but starting the first week in November is when we’re going to be rolling out new episodes, new music for the podcast. It’s going to be the same name, but it’s going to have a different look and feel to it to some degree, I think. We’ll see what happens. Okay, on the secret podcast, I want to talk about something I touched on here, which is the concept of fear, and fear is what stops most people. Here, I just very quickly said, “You’ve got to have courage,” but I want to talk about that more on the secret podcast. You can listen to that by going to jimfortin.com/insiders, jimfortin.com/insiders. And your transformational takeaway here is your big litmus test: is whether it be your personal life or your relationship, ask yourself how you would feel if you were not. in this situation anymore. That right there will be your litmus test. Do I stay or do I go?