Should I Quit My Job? 7 Questions to Ask Before You Leave

Oct 6

Woman pausing where a wooded trail divides, representing the decision to stay in a job, leave, or choose a new direction.

If you're wondering whether you should quit your job, don't start by making a pros-and-cons list. Start by figuring out what's actually making you want to leave, what you've already tried changing, and what you hope will be different somewhere else.

Because sometimes the answer really is to leave. And sometimes the answer is to stay differently.

The tricky part is figuring out which is true for you.

When “I Need to Quit” Isn't Actually the Whole Answer

By the time someone says to me, “I think I need to quit my job,” they've usually been thinking about it for a while. They're exhausted, frustrated with their boss, bored, underappreciated, overworked, passed over, restless, or some combination of all of the above.

Or maybe nothing is terribly wrong.

That's often the most confusing version. The job is fine. The people are fine. The paycheck is good. You've worked hard to get here.

And yet some part of you keeps whispering:

I don't think I want to do this anymore.

That's when people often start looking for evidence. 10 Signs It's Time to Quit Your Job. How to Know When You've Outgrown Your Career. Should You Stay or Should You Go?

I understand the temptation. You want an answer.

But I've found the more useful work is usually figuring out what question you're actually trying to answer.

Maybe you're burned out. Maybe you've outgrown the role. Maybe the organization has changed. Maybe you've changed. Maybe your manager is making an otherwise good job miserable. Maybe the work still matters to you, but the way you're doing it no longer works.

Or maybe you've known for a long time that you're done and you're looking for permission to admit it.

Those are very different problems. And they don't necessarily have the same solution.

Before You Decide: Are You Depleted Enough That Everything Looks Bad?

This is the first thing I'd pay attention to.

When you're profoundly burned out, it can become difficult to distinguish:

I can't do this anymore.

from

I don't want to do this anymore.

Those sound similar, but they're not necessarily the same.

If you've become so depleted that you're numb, don't assume that numbness is telling you to quit. You may need to recover enough to understand what the numbness is actually telling you.

That doesn't mean you have to spend six months meditating on a mountaintop before you're allowed to make a career decision. Sometimes a workplace is genuinely unhealthy. Sometimes financial or personal circumstances mean you need to act quickly.

But if you have some room to create distance before making an irreversible decision, use it.

I've written much more about this in Burned Out and Numb? Why You Can't Figure Out What You Want Next.

Once you have enough bandwidth to think beyond GET ME OUT OF HERE, these are the seven questions I'd start asking.

1. Am I Depleted, or Am I Done?

Let's start here because burnout can make almost everything look unappealing.

Imagine you've been running hard for years. You've survived restructurings, leadership changes, impossible deadlines, understaffing, and the gradual accumulation of responsibilities that somehow never seem to go away.

Now someone asks, What would you like to do next?

And your answer is: Nothing. I would like to do nothing.

That's information. But it may not be career information. It may be exhaustion.

Ask yourself: When I'm rested and away from work, does some of my energy come back? Have I lost interest in this particular job, or does almost everything feel like effort right now? Can I remember a relatively recent time when I still enjoyed parts of this work? Am I fantasizing about another career, or mostly fantasizing about not having to work?

That last one is particularly useful.

If every alternative sounds equally terrible, you may need recovery before reinvention. If certain possibilities still produce a little spark of curiosity, pay attention to that too.

You're gathering information, not rendering a verdict.

2. What Specifically Do I Want to Get Away From?

“I hate my job” isn't specific enough. What do you actually hate?

Is it your manager? The politics? The commute? The workload? The lack of autonomy? The constant ambiguity? The subject matter? The company culture? The expectation that you're available all the time?

Maybe you're managing people when you'd rather be doing the work yourself. Or maybe you're still doing the work yourself when you desperately want to be leading at a higher level.

Pull the problem apart.

Because if you don't know what you're trying to get away from, it's remarkably easy to recreate it somewhere else.

I've seen people leave one job because they're overworked and take another job with a more impressive title, more money, and an even more ridiculous workload.

New logo on the laptop. Same problem.

Before you leave, finish this sentence as specifically as you can:

I no longer want ____________.

Then keep going. One answer probably isn't enough.

3. What Am I Actually Moving Toward?

This may be the most important question.

People can get incredibly clear about what they don't want. No more giant corporations. No more startups. No more managing people. No more toxic bosses. No more 80-hour weeks. No more travel. No more politics.

Great.

Now what?

Leaving something gives you an away from direction. It doesn't automatically give you a toward direction.

I know this one personally. Early in my own career, I became burned out enough that I decided to chuck my job and buy a ticket to Southeast Asia. I knew what I needed to get away from. I had absolutely no idea what I was moving toward.

The distance turned out to be incredibly valuable. But eventually I still had to figure out what I wanted to move toward.

That's a different question.

What do you want more of? What kind of problems do you want to solve? What kind of people do you want around you? What pace works for you now? How much responsibility do you want? What kind of challenge energizes you? What role do you want work to play in the rest of your life? What are you curious about?

And there's a very practical reason to figure this out before you start interviewing.

Believe me, having spent years as a recruiter, it's usually pretty easy to tell when someone is running away from something and wants your job mostly because they're desperate to get out of the one they have.

A hiring team isn't looking for the candidate who most urgently needs an escape hatch. They're looking for someone who genuinely wants this particular role, at this particular organization, for specific reasons and can communicate real excitement about what they're moving toward.

That doesn't mean you have to pretend your current job is wonderful or manufacture enthusiasm you don't feel. It means you need to be able to answer a much better question than “Why do I want out?”

Why do I want in?

You don't need perfect answers. But I'd want something pulling you forward rather than only something pushing you out the door.

4. What Still Gives Me Energy Here?

When you're unhappy, your brain gets very good at compiling evidence for why everything is terrible. So try looking for exceptions.

What parts of your current work do you still enjoy?

Maybe you hate the bureaucracy but love mentoring your team. Maybe you dread your staff meetings but light up when you're solving a complicated customer problem. Maybe you no longer care about the product, but you still love building something from scratch.

Maybe the senior leadership meetings drain you, but a strategic project makes three hours disappear. Maybe you don't want your boss's job, but you love being the person everyone calls when something complicated needs to get figured out.

These are clues.

You don't have to love your current job to learn from it. In fact, one of the most useful things an unsatisfying job can do is teach you what you want more of and what you want less of.

Pay attention to both.

5. Have I Outgrown the Work, or Just the Conditions Under Which I'm Doing It?

Sometimes people conclude, I need a completely different career.

But when we start pulling things apart, they discover they don't actually hate the work. They hate doing the work here. Under this manager. At this pace. With this level of bureaucracy. With no autonomy or opportunity to learn. Or while trying to do the jobs of three people.

That's different from outgrowing the work itself.

Try this thought experiment:

If I could do essentially this same work with a manager I respected, a reasonable workload, more autonomy, people I enjoyed, and enough room to have a life, would I want it?

Notice your immediate reaction.

Maybe it's, Oh. Actually...yes.

That's useful information.

Or maybe it's, Absolutely not. You could give me the world's greatest boss and Fridays off and I still don't want to do this anymore.

Also useful information.

You may also want to read Stuck or Just Tired? 5 Signs You've Outgrown Your Career if you're struggling to tell whether the problem is exhaustion or a deeper mismatch.

6. What Have I Already Tried Changing?

Before you blow up the whole thing, it's worth asking whether you've experimented with changing any of the pieces.

Not because you owe your employer endless attempts to make an untenable situation work. You don't. But because small experiments can give you incredibly useful information.

Have you asked for a different scope, delegated something you shouldn't still be doing, had the conversation with your manager you've been avoiding, explored another team, set a boundary, stopped volunteering for everything, or asked for help?

Have you taken an actual vacation where you didn't secretly answer email from the pool? Pursued a stretch assignment? Changed your schedule? Investigated a leave or sabbatical? Started exploring an interest outside work?

You may discover that changing one or two variables changes the entire experience.

Or you may change those variables and realize:

Nope. It's still the work.

That's valuable too.

In You Don't Need to Start Over: How to Redesign Your Career Instead, I talk more about the possibilities between “stay exactly where I am” and “burn the whole thing down.”

There are usually more options than we see when we're miserable.

7. What Do I Believe Another Job Will Solve?

This question can be uncomfortable because the fantasy job is wonderful. It has a brilliant manager, fascinating work, lovely colleagues, excellent compensation, no politics, plenty of flexibility, deep meaning, and apparently nobody schedules meetings after 3 p.m.

Unfortunately, you aren't deciding between your current job and the fantasy job.

You're deciding whether to leave a known situation and eventually choose among real alternatives, with their own tradeoffs.

So ask yourself: What exactly do I expect another job to fix?

If your answer is “I need a manager who trusts me,” that's something you can evaluate when you interview. If it's “I want more strategic work and less execution,” you can investigate that. If it's “I want to work fewer hours,” you can ask questions and look for evidence about culture and expectations.

If it's “I want to feel excited about my life again,” that's more complicated.

A new job might contribute to that. But that's a lot to ask a job to solve by itself.

The same is true if what you're struggling with follows you from role to role: perfectionism, difficulty setting boundaries, the need to prove yourself, saying yes to everything, tying your identity to achievement.

Those patterns can board the plane with you.

I've written about that in The Hidden Costs of Being an Overachiever and I Don't Know Who I Am Outside of Work: Why Career Transitions Are Particularly Hard for Overachievers.

A new job can change your circumstances. It doesn't automatically change you.

Sometimes the Answer Is to Leave. And Sometimes the Answer Is to Stay Differently.

One of the reasons career decisions feel so overwhelming is that we tend to reduce them to two choices: stay or quit.

But there are often options in between.

You might redesign your role, change teams or managers, reduce your workload, take a leave or sabbatical, stop pursuing the promotion you thought you were supposed to want, explore a side project, start networking while you stay employed, build a financial runway, try something new outside work, or stay for six months while deliberately creating what's next.

Or leave.

Sometimes leaving really is the right move.

The point isn't to talk yourself into staying. It's to understand what problem you're actually trying to solve before you choose the solution.

You Don't Need Certainty. You Need Better Information.

This is where I think many accomplished people get stuck. They're accustomed to making good decisions. They've built careers by being prepared, analyzing risks, and figuring things out.

So they approach a career crossroads the same way. They think harder. Research more. Make another spreadsheet. Ask six more people what they think.

And wait for certainty.

Unfortunately, career decisions rarely come with that kind of certainty.

That's one reason I created The Learning Space for What's Next.

The Learning Space contains six practices: decompression, identity separation, curiosity, experimentation, discernment, and recommitment. They're practices, not stages.

When you're asking Should I quit my job?, you may be moving among several of them. You might need Decompression so you can hear yourself think. You might need Discernment to separate what isn't working from what still matters. You might need Curiosity to notice possibilities you haven't considered. And you might need Experimentation so you can gather real information instead of trying to think your way to certainty.

You don't have to know exactly what's next before you make any move. But before you make a big move, it helps to know more about why you're moving.

A Simple Exercise Before You Decide

Take a blank page and divide it into four sections:

I want less of...
I want more of...
I've already tried...
I'm curious about...

Don't turn it into a five-year plan. Don't worry about whether your answers are practical yet. And don't write what you think you're supposed to want.

Just collect information.

You may notice that most of your answers fall into one category. Maybe you're overwhelmingly focused on what you want less of. That may mean you haven't spent enough time exploring what could pull you toward something new.

Maybe you discover that the things you want more of could actually exist in your current organization.

Or maybe the page makes something you've been avoiding surprisingly obvious:

This doesn't fit me anymore.

The goal of the exercise isn't to produce the answer. It's to make the question more precise.

What If I Know I Want to Leave but Don't Know What I Want Next?

That's incredibly common. You don't need to have your next ten years mapped out before you're allowed to acknowledge that something isn't working.

But there's a difference between knowing you need a change and immediately grabbing the first available alternative.

This is where curiosity and experimentation become particularly valuable. Talk to people doing interesting work. Take a class. Volunteer for something. Test a side project. Shadow someone. Explore a different industry. Pay attention to what you're reading when nobody is making you read it. Notice which conversations leave you energized.

Look at jobs without immediately asking, Could I get this?

Instead ask:

What about this interests me?

Those little experiments can help you build a picture of what you're moving toward. You don't need one giant revelation. You need information, and then more information, until eventually something starts to take shape.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if I should quit my job?

There isn't one universal sign that tells you it's time to leave. Start by identifying what's specifically making you unhappy, whether the problem is the work itself or the conditions around it, what you've already tried changing, and what you want to be different in your next role.

Should I quit my job if I'm burned out?

Burnout can be a reason to change jobs, but profound exhaustion can also make it difficult to evaluate what you actually want. If possible, create enough space to distinguish “I can't do this anymore because I'm depleted” from “I don't want to do this anymore because it no longer fits.” I explore this distinction more deeply in Burned Out and Numb? Why You Can't Figure Out What You Want Next.

Is it normal to want to quit even if I have a good job?

Yes. A job can look good on paper and still no longer fit your interests, priorities, values, desired lifestyle, or stage of life. The absence of a crisis doesn't mean you're required to stay indefinitely.

Should I find another job before quitting?

That depends on your financial situation, health, workplace conditions, responsibilities, and tolerance for uncertainty. Staying employed while exploring can give you financial stability and time to gather information. In other situations, leaving sooner may be necessary or appropriate. The important thing is to understand the tradeoffs rather than assuming there's one correct sequence.

What if I don't know what career I want next?

You don't have to identify the perfect next career before you start exploring. Instead, get curious about what gives you energy, what kinds of problems interest you, what you want more and less of, and what experiments could give you useful information. Career clarity often develops through exploration rather than appearing fully formed before you begin.

About Tracy Foltz

Tracy Foltz, PCC, is an executive and leadership coach who helps accomplished women navigate career and life transitions with greater clarity, courage, and self-trust.

Before launching her coaching practice, Tracy spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, where she coached and worked with executives, managers, and emerging leaders. Today, she works with accomplished women who look successful on paper but find themselves asking questions like Is this still what I want? Who am I outside of work? And what comes next?

Her work combines practical career exploration with attention to burnout, overachievement, identity, and the patterns that can keep successful people pushing long after something needs to change.

Learn more about working with Tracy or explore The Learning Space for What's Next.

Still trying to figure out whether it's time to leave?

This is exactly the kind of question I work through with clients. Not by telling you whether to quit, but by helping you get clear on what's no longer working, what you actually want, and what you can do next to find out.

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