“Never Quit” Is Bad Advice

I want to talk about why it's good to be a quitter. A lot of times as parents, we're pushing our teens that they shouldn't give up, they should keep trying, that we don't want them to give up on things that might be great for them. We don't want them to think they're not capable of something or they're not good enough at something.

But I want to talk about why quitting is really good. Because most people are much better at starting something than they are at quitting, which is interesting because you think people are quitters all the time. That's what you hear on the news, that they're so lazy. They're so, but in reality, it can be really hard to quit something, even if it's not the right fit for you.

It ends up being kind of like the food situation. I don't know if you've heard before that it's bad to make your kids belong to the Clean Plate Club and force them to eat everything because then they don't learn to trust themselves and they don't learn to trust that they're full and they have issues later. Their bodies belong to them, so we don't make them go hug people or sit on people's laps that makes them uncomfortable because then when they're older, if somebody wants to do something inappropriate, they won't be able to trust their own sense of that doesn't feel right because they're so used to pushing through and just doing what they're told to do, even if it doesn't feel right.

So this is another one of those areas where we need to teach our kids to trust themselves enough that they know when it's time to quit. Lots of adults don't know when it's time to quit, and I think it might go back to not being allowed to quit when they were kids.

I want to tell you about how one of my kids quit. One of my kids was in Scouts for a very long time, and this was like an important part of their identity. They really loved what they were doing, very active.

And then over time, I saw this shift where they just didn't seem happy. They didn't want to go. They'd be dragging their feet. And instead of cajoling them, I mean, I tried a few times. "Hey, you're having a bad day?" "No, I'm fine. Let's go." Just kind of checking in.

But then over time, they were going later and later, they weren't ready, they were losing things. And I was like, "Do you not want to go anymore?" Like, "I don't know. I mean, I do want to go. I don't know." And I was like, "Okay, let's just skip tonight. No need to go anywhere. Here, come curl up with me.

Let's have some hot chocolate, and let's figure out how you really feel about it." Because this is my child, they weren't at all surprised that we just like skipped Scouts that night, but they were worried about skipping Scouts. And I was like, eh, we'll let dad take care of that. Dad can like let them know or whatever, it's fine.

My kid and I sat down and I drew out a decision grid. And I have done this myself for many, many, many years. I mean, I can't remember not doing it. I've also done it with my friends, my family, my students who I've mentored, but also my patients I talk to all the time. Because so often they'd come in upset about something. I'm like, "Well, that sounds like a hard decision.

Do you mind if I start jotting this down?" So I'd draw out my decision grid and start jotting down what they were saying. And that's what I did with my kid.

I'm like, "So tell me all about what you love about Scouts." And so I kind of jotted it down in my decision grid. And then I said, "Okay, well, what do you not like about Scouts?" And so we started jotting that down in the decision grid.

In that grid, what I put are four areas. So I divided into two sides, like doing Scouts, quitting Scouts, or living in this city or living in that city. So it has to be a dichotomy for this to work. And then for each one, you do the pro and the con of it.

And a lot of people think, well, the pro of one is the con of the other and the con of one is the pro of the other, but that's not actually true. Oftentimes good things about one are unrelated to bad things about the other. So it's really, really important to think through all of those.

I let people talk, write it all down. Then once I've written it all out, I say, "Okay, look at this. There's tons of stuff on here." Now let's go through and figure out which ones are cognitive distortions.

So a cognitive distortion is the way we talk to ourselves. We'd never talk to a friend or someone we loved. You know, there's should-ing: you should do this, you should do that. There is mind reading. Well, people will think this and people will think that. It's not reality.

It's our own kind of twisted thoughts and beliefs. And we can untwist those.

What I do is I go through with them and we draw a single line through all the distortions. You can still read them, but there's just a single line through them. We can say, "Those are distortions." We're going to have to deal with them, but that's like a therapy problem, not a decision problem. Put those to the side.

Then we look at what's left. And what's left, I group into like big problems and little problems or sometimes we'll do like green, yellow and red. Greens are, yes, this is a good decision. The yellows are, we have to consider it. And the reds are like, don't even consider this.

So once we've done all of that, then we take a look at it almost every time it's very clear what the decision is because you'll have a bunch of greens in one area. Other areas will be like crossed out or red or other things like that. Sometimes there's still two competing decisions, but almost all the time you're going to see that it's really clear what's actually a good decision and what's been clouded by your fears of what other people will think.

Blame is another one or labeling. Being a quitter—that's a label, right? So once we've crossed all those things out, that's a large amount of a decision and the same with living someplace.

A lot of times that comes down to what will other people say? When in reality, what we need to be thinking about is like, where will we be happy? Childcare, jobs, parks, whatever it is that's important to us. For me, living near a train station, living near transit was really important. But like for other people, not so much.

So when we're all done with all this, then we get to decide, even if it's different from what's on the paper, even if we go completely opposite. But now we know why we're doing it and what the best decision probably was actually. And there's a freedom in that of saying like, yeah, but I'm going to do this anyways, but I've almost never seen that.

So the only things standing in the way were things like telling people, or, what will they think? or like, you don't have to tell anyone, that's a grownup job. No worries about that.

I had them sit by me while I wrote the email so I could show them how I wrote the email so that once they have to do this themselves someday, it's not a big deal. You make the best decisions for yourself. And you know what? It turned out to be a wonderful decision. I saw my child's stress levels go way down. Some of their negative self perceptions improving.

There were a lot of things about the environment that were just not working well for my child.

And what actually made them realize that maybe this wasn't a good situation was going on a ski trip with our church that was, like, pure fun, everyone working together and helping each other and helping other skiers and just having a great time. And they're like, "Oh, you can do this stuff and not be competitive and mean." Knowing that it felt right and that there were these other opportunities with other people really helped with them making that decision.

Sometimes we make a decision where we're going to really lose something that we value and that can be really hard. But if we've made this whole chart and we see why it is we're making it because there's something else we value more, giving up the thing that we've also valued is a little bit easier and we're like, well, we have to make a decision here and this is where my decision's going to go.

I've made a lot of tough decisions in my life. I quit my job when I had multiple strokes because I could have stuck around and seen if I got better. But I was like, you know what? Based on everything I know, the best decision is to cut free and really focus myself on this. And I knew I wasn't burning a bridge. They would have hired me again.

I mean, that helps, right? And so I quit and they accepted that and they're super, super nice. And again, I felt bad. I felt bad about my patients. I felt bad about giving up the dreams I had about long-term career there. I was hoping to someday buy into the practice, but I had my own practice and I threw myself into that because I had only just started it.

Literally just started putting it together when I had my strokes. I threw myself into that.

And then when COVID happened, I gave up being a doctor and that was a really hard decision. I mean, since I was six, my whole life had been directed at being a doctor. I loved so many things about it. And at the same time, my kids were more important and my kids were not okay. And all I could focus on was what I needed to do for my kids.

Those are the kinds of decisions where it really helps to have a grid. Those are some big decisions. And sometimes they have to be made really quickly and in bad situations like, you know, a pandemic or like having multiple strokes, you know, things like that.

It's complicated, right? There's not a clear best decision there and we can't read the future. We can't know what's going to happen, but we can know what our values are. We can know what's important to us. We can know what our preferences are and we can eliminate the things that don't actually matter when we make those decisions.