Learning to quit
“Quitters never win and
winners never quit”
As I kid I was taught that quitting is bad, that giving up is failing and that asking for help means you can’t do it yourself… which means you are weak or that you have failed. While I’m sure these messages were intended to help teach me that I can do hard things, that persistence pays off and that sometimes you have to put in the hard yards to get the reward, that wasn’t always the message I took from them. Add to that my time in the fitness industry where it’s all about pushing yourself beyond your limits. Where you literally role modelling strength, determination, power and speed in front of a class (you can read more about that here) and you get one competitive human who would rather suffer than ask for help and someone who would crawl across broken glass to get to the finish line rather than give up.
Whilst I’ve been working on the “asking for help” thing for a while now, I still struggle with the quitting thing. It’s the thought of saying that I can’t do something that triggers something deeper… a fear of being weak, of not being good enough, of being a failure.
Sure, being crap at quitting as had some benefits: It’s helped me stick it out through jobs I despised but really needed. It helped me run a marathon and to train for, and race, triathlon. It helped me to stick it out at school when I was bullied.
But being crap at quitting has lead me to hold onto relationships that were way past their best before date, it’s led me to repeatedly over commit myself (personally and professionally) – a couple of years ago, my steadfast refusal to give up saw me carrying a 42kilo box over 2 km’s. By myself. My digit flexors and forearms took a while to recover from that! Being crap at quitting also means I’ve sat through films that I didn’t enjoy and made myself read to the end of books that either bored me to tears or that I didn’t even understand, let alone enjoy!
So, given all that it may come as a surprise to hear that I quit something. It certainly caught me off guard when I realised it!
I quit offering HCD workshops.
Going back into full time employment, plus training AND nurturing my Breathwork offerings something had to give. So, I hear you wondering, how did I actually manage to quit something? Well, to be really honest, I cheated. Sort of. I re-framed it – I wasn’t quitting offering HCD workshops, I was just putting it down for a bit and leaving myself the option of picking it up again at some point in the future. In fact, I did this re-framing so well that I didn’t even realised I’d “quit” until the other day!
So what’s all this “re-framing” and how does it work?
I first learnt about re-framing when I was studying psychology or when I was learning about NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) I don’t honestly remember which & I could have learnt about it through both but that’s not the point. Re-framing is about looking at something in a different way. It’s means looking at something either in a bigger context or from a different perspective / vantage point.
“Wow that kid is being really annoying singing and dancing in the supermarket” might become “Oh, that kid is clearly having way more fun that I am – good for them!” or “I hate how my mum keeps nagging at me to do my homework” might be “Oh, my mum is trying to help me do well in school.” Re-framing isn’t about denying the situation or the perceived problem, nor is it about pretending that everyone is Just Peachy All The Time – that’s toxic positivity. Re-framing is about helping yourself see something from a different perspective. So, when I decided to stop offering HCD workshops, I didn’t frame it as “I’m quitting doing this!” It was more of a “I’m not going to do these anymore for a while.”
So, hurrah for me, I quit something! Sort of… ha!
What might you quit / what might you “temporarily stop doing for a short time so that you can focus on something else?” See what I did there? 🙂
