WSJ Your Money Briefing - What to Do if You Fall Out of Love With Your Job

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Leaving a job can be just as messy as leaving a romantic partner. New York University professor of psychology Tessa West joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss how relationship science can help you avoid common mistakes and guide you through the stages of falling out of love with your career. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ecolab Water for Climate. Less water, more growth. Results will vary. Learn more at Ecolab.com slash EWC. Ecolab Water for Climate. Transforming the way the world thinks about water. Here's your money briefing for Thursday, September 12th. I'm JR Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Getting out of a romantic relationship can be messy. There's soul searching, sadness, frustration, or maybe just the need for something new. Many workers experience the same feelings when they want to end their relationship with

their job. Are you really sensitive to patterns of intermittent reinforcement at work? Does it take almost nothing for you to get pulled back in and can you predict when your boss is going to be super nice to you or give you those kinds of benefits in much the same way that having your boyfriend show up and give you flowers after a fight probably isn't the best signal that things are going well? Wall Street Journal contributor and New York University professor of psychology Tessa West will join us to discuss how to break up with your career

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at cibc.com slash aventura business terms and conditions apply looking for a way out of your current job there are lessons to be learned from breakups in romantic relationships Wall Street Journal contributor Tessa West joins me. First of all, Tessa, how are our jobs similar to love and relationships? We have ups and downs, we have ambivalence. Some days we love it, some days we hate it. Often we love and hate things at the same time.

And our relationships with our careers have a life trajectory in much the same way as our marriages do, our relationships with our parents and our children. And so I like to think about a career like a relationship partner that you're constantly having to monitor, check in, making sure things are going well in order to make sure you're staying on the right track with your career. You know, sometimes when people have doubts, so they're going through rough times with a partner, they say, we're trying to make it work.

If someone starts to feel ambivalence about a job, how should they approach that? This is a natural experience. The main things are for you to look out for are a couple signs. One, are you really sensitive to patterns of intermittent reinforcement at work? Does it take almost nothing for you to get pulled back in? And can you predict when your boss is going

to be super nice to you or give you those kinds of benefits? Those kinds of moments can really pull someone back into a relationship with a career that isn't super healthy in much the same way that Having your boyfriend show up and give you flowers after a fight Probably isn't the best signal that things are going well But if you had feelings of reinvigoration By doing extra things at work, wouldn't that be a good thing? It can be a good thing But like any relationship you can't be the only one trying to make things work.

If you're the one making all the effort to have the date nights, to really get to know your partner, to reinvigorate that relationship, you need to see signs that that relationship is doing the same for you, that that partner is doing those things for you. So at work, if your boss promises to make changes, if the company promises to give you that promotion or raise, they should be putting their money where their mouth is. You need to see just as much signs of reinvigoration coming from your career as you're willing to give to it because no one person or no one partner can make that relationship get back on track. If we hear someone say the relationship they're in is comfortable, that might be seen as a negative.

Is it okay to be comfortable in a job? It's really critical to be comfortable in a job. We need to have these kinds of creature comforts. They contribute to low levels of stress at work. What ends up happening is when we have big problems at work, when we feel unappreciated, when we feel like we're a runner-up, for instance, we tend to underestimate how important those comforts are to tethering us to something that's maybe not so good for us. The metaphor is you have a partner,

you can just always eat the same takeout. They don't care, you don't care. Watch the same Netflix shows, have long patterns of silence, never wear real pants around the person, get a little bit comfortable. And at work, we have those comforts as well. And I think they're important to have, They're necessary conditions, but you need more. And so having a realistic conversation with yourself of how much those creature comforts could potentially

pull you back into a career that isn't working for you isn't a conversation I think a lot of us have that we should be having. But if people do decide to break up with their job, how can they avoid feelings of embarrassment? Like, what are people going to think? This is just a natural part of breaking up with your job. I talk a little bit about this process called grave dressing, which is this idea that when you break up with anyone, when you end a marriage or you break up with a career,

you need to actually spend some time coming up with your narrative of how you're going to explain it to people. And listeners might be thinking, well, it's not really my job to make other people comfortable with my breakup, but you're going to be feeling shame, feeling embarrassment. Maybe your family is going to look at you and say, but you put so much money towards this. How could you possibly do this?

Coming up with a description of why you did it, what that process looked like is really important. And then pulling in people from that career, from your family, to kind of help you figure out that narrative so you're ready with your speech when people ask you. Just being prepared so that you don't feel super ashamed or super embarrassed is something that we should all be doing for any kind of breakup.

We often hear about the risks that people face when they're on the rebound dating right after getting out of a relationship. Do those same risks apply to a career? Absolutely. One of the important things is to have break moments in your conversation with yourself and others about what you want next. I talk a little bit about this idea that we can slide into something instead of deciding

into something. In romantic relationships, this happens with cohabitation all the time. Most people never actually have a conversation about moving in together. They just slowly put their stuff in their other person's medicine cabinet and then before you know it, one day you live together. This can happen with jobs too. So you need to just take a moment, stop, think about what am I looking for, ask those tough questions so you don't slide into something that maybe is comfortable or that you have the skills for but will

have the same problems as the relationship that you just left. So what can people do to keep their work fresh and avoid going down the road that could be similar to a rocky relationship? Finding what makes your day-to-day activities, that low-level stuff enjoyable is really important. We have these conversations around purpose-driven work, about meaning-making work, that are so high-level that we're often chasing these things, but in reality, most of us don't feel that at work, our day-to-day is fairly mundane.

And love is really about finding those little small moments of joy at work that can help you get through those long stretches of boring, mundane stuff, of feeling underappreciated, seeing connections between the high level goals of your job and the low level stuff can really freshen up a job. And then I'd say the last piece of advice is understand your daily stress triggers, keep track of them.

They will absolutely kill your relationship with a person or with your career. And we have a lot more control over those things than we realize. And so that's something that I think people can have a better handle on to not fall in love with their jobs. That's WSJ contributor Tessa West. And that's it for your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Zoe Kulkin with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm JR Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. you