I quit

Yesterday I informed my business partner that I need to stop doing the kind of work I’ve been doing as I’ve been unhappy for years and it’s affecting my health. I’m proud of how I managed this conversation – it could have gone in so many different ways.

Write a letter

My preparation work for my last coaching session was to write my business partner a letter. This was also, (like “brainwriting“), a surprisingly useful exercise. Writing things down, especially with an audience in mind – in this case, the audience was actually my coach – forces you to be logical, to stick to the facts, to be credible. And not just credible with your audience, but with yourself: getting things down in black and white gives you a chance to properly gauge what you are dealing with.

When bad things happen to me, I often find myself overwhelmed with a sense of unreality. I doubt myself, my thinking, my senses, my feelings. I think, automatically, “What did I do to provoke this?” I suspect I’m a bit mental, a bit inappropriate sometimes, that the cause is likely to be me.

Sometimes I think that normal people have some sort of internal behaviourometer that allows them to respond with the correct reaction at the right intensity to whatever situations they’re presented with, and when things are going badly for me, it’s because mine’s become defective. However, my behaviourometer functions very well on behalf of other people. I’m good at helping people judge how to react to situations, when they should calm down or when they should stand up for themselves. Perhaps I’m normal, and it’s normal to feel disoriented and disconnected when people treat you like crap.

I believe that my business partner is a good man, and believing otherwise is just too awful to consider. But now I’ve written things down I can see that I’ve got grounds for feeling mistreated.  And I feel less crazy.

The checklist

I am a great fan of the checklist, a staple of the management consultant’s toolbox, and one of my favourites is the problem-solver’s checklist, which describes the 4 options you have in any situation:

1. change the situation
2. change yourself
3. accept it
4. leave

So if this checklist is so great, why didn’t I have the conversation I had with my business partner yesterday a year ago? Perhaps because my default assumption is to assume I need to change myself, which isn’t useful when the problem isn’t actually me. Also, I loathe conflict, and option 1 often involves this, so it’s seldom an option even when it could be. And that makes me feel like I need to change myself, so I seem to spend a lot of time going around in circles between option 1 and option 2. I have only managed to break out of this a vicious cycle thanks to a friend who is giving me some coaching, who’s also helped me figure out that the prospect of option 3, accepting things and carrying on, is making me ill, so that leaves option 4.

Ask “why?”

In my last coaching session, my friend kept asking me “why” in response to anything I said. This is a technique that is used in many fields, from Total Quality Management, to psychotherapy, and when used correctly, delivers amazing results. When used incorrectly it makes you want to commit acts of violence towards the questioner, especially when the questioner doesn’t give you the time to think and answer and starts sounding like the Spanish Inquisition. This was not the case with my coach.

Another reason I didn’t have this conversation with my business partner a year ago, is that option 4, leaving, isn’t easy, and in fact, makes me feel almost as ill as option 3. My coach kept asking “why”, and I suddenly had another vivid memory, this time from when I was 17, and in my last year of school. I had been seeing a psychotherapist, who recommended to my parents that I move out of the family home, as my relationship with them was so bad. I truly believe that my psychotherapist cared about me and had my best interests at heart. She told me, explicitly, that I needed to stay away from people who treated me badly, starting with my parents. If I did this I would have a chance of being happy, of leading a fulfilling life. I took her advice to heart – and come to think of it, it’s probably been a guiding principle throughout my life. I moved out, to a room in a nearby house, and my old bedroom was immediately occupied by one of my younger sisters.

Remembering this brought up feelings of grief and anger that I didn’t feel at the time: that my parents – my mother in particular, who immediately agreed to my psychotherapist’s proposal – would let me leave so easily. These are the same feelings I’m having about my current situation with my business partner.

What was helpful about recalling this memory is that it made me realise that moving out and getting away from my family was a) terrifying, painful, traumatic, and b) the right thing to do, given that staying was also terrifying, painful and traumatic, and by leaving I got to have some choice about the challenges I picked. I believe this has, on the whole, worked out well for me.

All this is what helped me decide to neatly and diplomatically sever my relationship with the company I helped create and have invested the last 8 years of my life in. Let’s see how this works out for me.