[A client today--at the apex of her very hard workout--told me only half-jokingly that she wanted to quit. In honor of the fact that she did not, I am re-posting a piece I wrote about quitting a few months ago].
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Would you like to know how many times quitting whatever I am doing crosses my mind each day? I can tell you because as of this morning at 9 a.m., I have some semi-scientific stats, thanks to the fact that I actually kept count during the hour-long spin class I took. In that hour, I contemplated quitting–getting off my bike in the middle of class, walking out the door and heading home to make breakfast–exactly eight times.
If we extrapolate, that means I contemplate quitting any given task roughly around 192 times a day. I probably DREAM about quitting!
Most of the time, I find some superhuman sliver of strength deep inside me, nearly buried, and I excavate it and use it as my Quitting Kryptonite. For me, going through the non-quitting of, say, a spin class is like braving all of the elements at once, while naked: being tired, bored, sore, in pain; having low energy; worrying about a deadline that I should be attempting to meet instead of spinning; hating the music; getting mad when a droplet of sweat from the guy next to me lands on my knee. I know these are not major, life-threatening problems but with Quitting looming temptingly just outside the door of the humid little spin studio, they seem nearly insurmountable.
And sometimes I do quit. For example, last fall, I was doing a regular freelance gig for an online marketing guru of sorts: he took full advantage of me, working me to the bone, not paying me very well, and treating me and all of the rest of his employees not very well at all. I could go on and on but the point is that though I needed the money very much, I decided that I needed to balance income with a content professional life. So I quit. In this case, I like what Psychology Today blogger Tina Seelig has to say: “Quitting is actually incredibly empowering. It’s a reminder that you control the situation. Sometimes it’s the bravest option because it requires you to face your failures.”
But more often than not, I carry on. With every bit of willpower I can muster, I stay in that seat. And when I keep my butt planted, and get over that hump, sometimes I find that the spin class, or part of my thesis I complete, or the blog I write, is better than I expected. And that’s what keeps me going.
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