How to Quit Quitting Right Now

Part of being an entrepreneur means that you have goals. Big hairy ones that other people can’t even wrap their heads around. It’s hard to even have a discussion about the future with people that are living for the weekend.

But baby, you’ve got the vision. You know about possibilities. And you’re right where you need to be.

So let’s talk about where you get stuck. Being able to quit quitting is one of the most invaluable skill sets for an entrepreneur, but it’s not one that comes naturally. Especially when you see how it’s supposed to come together perfectly, but the execution feels clunky.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the difference between Little quits and Big quits, how I decided to quit quitting, and how to execute each day even if you’re lacking in energy or time. 

Waiting it Out

I’m going to kick things off with what used to work for me and what’s working for me now. 

In the past, if we were all the way through the first half of the year (or let’s be honest, inconvenienced by March)…. I would just wait it out until the New Year. It’s not that I “quit” per se, I just wanted to feel that magical New Year energy. At least at that time of year, you’re coming off the high of the holidays and you can have your pick of aaaaaalllll the idealistic goals you can shake a stick at. It was an energy I could latch onto and when I couldn’t manufacture my own.

What’s working for me now is creating and working a quarterly plan. It’s like a mini-New Year four times a year. I use the last weekend in each quarter to plan my next. My brain doesn’t have to hold the full vision all year long. It’s full of so many other things and gets even more cluttered as I go. But I can hold a vision for three months. I bet yours can too. 

I call it Zooming In. My entire life has been tracked and organized with linear time. It’s what we’ve been taught. We normally don’t stray… so the idea to zoom in or out on this timeline just never occurred to me. This is a 3D space so of course we could go forward and backward, but I never thought about it as up and down.

Big Quits

There are two types of quits.

The one we’re MOST familiar with are the Big Quits. 

We dramatically declare, “Nope! I’ve had enough. I can’t do this shit anymore!!!” 

• The course you’ve been creating is taking FOR-EH-VER. You can’t figure out which way you want to capture the material. Overhead? Face to camera? You only have today when your kids are out of the house and maybe you took a day off of work to actually get this done. But you’re frustrated that you are wasting your precious time. You keep finding mistakes. You have to keep going back to the drawing board. You just can’t seem to get it right! How is this ever going to work?

• Or perhaps you can’t finish your website. You know what you want it to look like. You want it to look professionally done. It should be exciting. It should show a bit of your rebel nature and instantly magnetize your audience to your offer. But when you see it, it comes across as lackluster. The copy doesn’t fit. It feels disjointed. You hate the photos. Sure you could have someone else create your website for 5k or more. But you don’t trust that you’ll make your money back in a quick enough time frame and you would still have to communicate your ideas to them anyway! 

• You’re tired. You’re tired of trying to fit this creative business into your life. You can only do so many things. Your kids are important. Your husband is important. The DOG is important. But you? Thinking you’re going to create a business that will result in freedom when you’re tied down to your desk every morning, evening, and weekend trying to move it forward? Yeah right. 

So you give it up and go back to the status quo.

Thankfully, the Big Quit (where you want to burn it all down), doesn’t come very often. 

But I’m going to tell you where the magic lies…

Little Quits

This is where our brain says we should honor our urge for momentary relief at the expense of our long-term goals. They are INTOXICATING little excuses for not doing what you want to do. Such a slippery, easy way to reason your way out of a promise you made to yourself.  And when they pile up? Thaaaat’s what creates the Big Quit.

Tell me if any of these sound familiar:

I’m too tired right now

It’s hard

I don’t have the energy 

I’m too busy

I don’t know what to do next

I’m confused

I don’t have the bandwidth 

I just don’t feel like it

I can do it tomorrow

I’m overwhelmed

I’m overstimulated

I’m over IT.

The pile of little quits adds up quickly. It’s like the overhead bucket at the splash pad that keeps getting filled up until it begins to wobble and dumps every ounce of that recycled, (and let’s be honest) probably urine filled but overly chlorinated water onto your head. 

So before you even got the Big Quit, these little guys were piling up.

That course example up top there under “Big Quits”? That’s mine from two years ago. 

My goal was to write out the curriculum. Record the videos. Upload them to Kajabi. Promote the shit out of them. It doesn’t sound that difficult right?

Writing the curriculum took an incredibly long time. And it was still never done, but I felt the time pressure so I quit that and moved into creating the slides for the modules. But I got stuck because I didn’t see the final outcome. This part took several months, and I had already blown through my free trial with Kajabi and was spending money monthly without anything to launch on it, so I canceled that. However, surely I’ll be inspired if I start recording the videos. The ones I know I can finish and check off as complete. There were two to three small videos I completed where I felt a bit of satisfaction. So I uploaded them to Teachable (but they would only allow me to upload a certain amount without paying for it). In between all of these moves, were weeks of second guessing myself. Days of not doing anything but wallowing in doubt.

I still planned on having this done in my head so deciding not to do something when I said I’m going to do it doesn’t feel like a quit. I was just recalibrating. Moving to another part of the project didn’t feel like it was going to make that much of a difference. But it certainly was easy to skip or pivot again next time I felt like I wasn’t getting a result. Until there was nothing left to pivot to.

So I quit making the course.

Now that’s a Big Quit. 

That Big Quit seems like I’m just making a decision based on my current situation but it really started months ago when I decided in a moment of frustration, that I didn’t feel like it or I didn’t like a feeling that was coming up. A mountain of Little Quits make the Big Quit inevitable when I’m not finishing.

How to Quit Quitting

1. Expect That You Will Want to Quit

You know it’s coming. Your brain is going to want to Little Quit. It runs this process every time you come up against a bit of adversity. Write down all the challenges, obstacles and excuses you usually use. They are going to be the same ones your brain offers you when you have tried to do something in the past. Look at the little ones especially, “I don’t feel like it”. What will you do when you don’t “feel like it”?

Come up with a list of strategies that you will use when your brain offers you the option to quit.

When I would rather listen to a podcast at lunch instead of writing a blog, what strategy will I offer my brain? For me, I schedule to listen to my podcast on the way home. 

2. Be Curious

Ask yourself why you’re wanting to quit right now. Be specific. Be curious.

Curiosity feels more investigative. You know those murder shows you binge watch on Netflix? Do that with your brain. Watch it methodically work. 

It’s also interesting to explore if you’re quitting before you even sit down to work on it, if you’re quitting in the middle, or if you quit after you have a result. Know when it’s coming and you can be better prepared.

Your primitive brain is offering you a way to feel better. But again, it’s temporary and it’s at the expense of your long-term goal satisfaction. Your prefrontal cortex knows what’s up. That’s the You that decides what you’re going to do in the future and plans to get there. Your primitive brain can act like a toddler and throw a fit but it does not have any control over your prefrontal cortex. It can’t do anything until your prefrontal cortex agrees with it. It’s looking for instant gratification and to get there as easily as possible. 

3. Know What Counts

Sometimes your brain will offer the thought that you haven’t done anything toward your project. And if you’re in a low place energetically,  you’re inclined to believe it.  Stop that shit in its tracks by tracking what you’re doing. I like to use Toggl to track how much I’ve done. (not an ad, just truly love it). I easily forget things I have accomplished. Thankfully, I receive a round up summary on the following Mondays of what I’ve tracked. Whenever I think I need to get a part time job, I see that I worked 15 hours in my own business and exactly what I have worked on. It’s hard not to be proud of yourself when you actually see your results with data.  

4. You don’t have to finish it all right now. 

You’re allowed to finish a task over multiple days. Especially when you have a full time life already. Sometimes, there is no other way. When your perfectionist tendencies are flaring up and you can’t even sit down to get started, it’s most likely a thought error. You think that because you can’t get it all done at one time, that you can’t do it at all. You might have barely made yourself sit for this. 

So here’s my best advice: Finish the session. You don’t have to finish the task. 

 That’s right. Change your finishing criteria. As you get used to that feeling of starting and finishing a session, learning to show up for yourself and your creativity, and the ritual of pulling out your creative items and setting the scene, you will learn to drop into flow more quickly. You will also learn to exit creative flow without resentment. Because you always know you’ll be coming back.

That’s the practice.

5. Don’t wait until the next cycle to Quit Quitting. 

Mondays are a hot day to start something new. If you’re in that mindset, it’s an indicator that you’re in an all or nothing mindset. So it’s one more lazy weekend before you shore yourself up to do what you need to do on Monday. It’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself and it always makes Monday that much harder. 

You can quit quitting something today. 

You can quit quitting something in the next hour. 

Conclusion

It sounds so freaking simple right? Simple, but not easy. You’re training your brain. Your brain offers you the option to quit and you know it’s coming. You’re prepared with a specific set of strategies to apply to your brain. Be curious about what it offers you. Know that what you’re doing counts and find a way to track that. Spread out the task over the amount of energy you have and quit quitting right now.

Every time you do, that neural pathway gets stronger. It sucks at first. It always does. But allowing that urge from your primitive brain to be there and doing what you decided to do anyway feels waaaaaaaaaay better when you’ve accomplished what you decided to do.

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