Don’t give up!
Never give up!
Don’t quit!
We constantly hear this in our lives. That you should never give up on anything, that you should keep fighting, keep working hard, keep pushing if you want to get ahead in life, if you want to be happy, if you want the outcome that you desire you CAN’T QUIT!
You see the memes out there always telling you to keep working and never give up – and for many situations that is in fact true. If you have a dream of being a dancer you won’t achieve it if you quit. If you want to become an artist you will never achieve that dream if you give up. For all intents and purposes never giving up is a good thing. It shows a certain amount of tenacity and dedication and it keeps you motivated to achieve your goals in life.
But there are some times in life when the best thing that you can do is give up.
I know, I know… that is very contradictory to what I just wrote, but it’s true. There are many times in life where it is better for you to give up and walk away. In fact sometimes it is vital to your happiness. Sometimes in life we soldier on through situations and experiences that make us absolutely miserable simply because we have been told to never give up. We feel like if we give up we are failing – and that simply isn’t true. There are times in life where we will stick with something out of a fear of failure or loss even if it is toxic for us. I know that I stayed with my daughter’s father for a hell of a lot longer than I should have simply because I thought if I just tried harder, worked more at it, changed this or that about who I was or what I did that things would get better. I talked myself into believing that if I could just get him to change this one thing about himself that everything would work out. I was deluding myself and trying to justify staying in a relationship that was doomed to fail.
Many times we will stay in relationships that will never work because we think if we just keep working at it then it will all get better; all the while ignoring the glaring evidence that it never will. My ex and I are two very different people and the only way that we were ever going to work was if I fundamentally changed who I was or if he changed who he was. And that is not a healthy relationship for either party. Sometimes we have to weigh the pros and cons of a situation to see if it is really working for us. Is the struggle that we are going through worth it in the end because the pros have outweighed the cons?
A few years back I had a client whom I was working for as a Virtual Assistantand he was the most difficult man to work for. He was a decent enough guy but very demanding, very self involved and unaware at how poorly he treated people at times. He created a very poor working environment for those who worked for him. I thought many times about quitting and no longer working for him but because he was my largest source of income I was afraid to. So for many years I worked for him, becoming more and more stressed out as time went by. It got so bad that when I saw his number come up on my caller ID I would instantly feel my shoulders tense and my stomach would tie in knots – and it started effecting my job performance. When I finally stopped working for him it was the best possible thing that could have happened.
It was scary losing that much potential income but the possibilities that were now available to me were far outweighing the fear. Instead of staying with something that was making me miserable just to earn some money I was now able to find new clients with whom I worked well with, people who paid me more than my old client and I was much much happier.
It is not always true, and may not always work for all situations but sometimes when you find that the cons of a situation outweigh the pros maybe the best thing to do is give up. Why would you continue to stay in an unhappy situation if there was no positive results coming from it. Bad relationships, toxic friendships, poor job conditions…. the list goes on and on.
Sometimes when you let go or give up on something that has been causing you so much stress and unhappiness it allows you to be open to new experiences, more positive and happy experiences. Staying in a situation that continues to cause you misery simply because you don’t want to give up, or feel like you failed is not good for you.
In this weeks podcast I go into this a little more in depth.
