Do You Have a Strong Desire to Quit? Read This First

We have officially entered what I call Quitting Season. Every year around this time, I hear from brilliant, successful women who feel a heavy desire to quit their roles. 

These corporate women, business owners, and self-employed professionals are all very tired. They are questioning whether they can continue down their current path, and many are quietly planning an exit.

The messages usually sound something like this:

• “I can’t do this anymore.”
• “I’m thinking of handing in my notice.”
• “I need a completely new job by January.”
• “I want to start a business so I can finally leave employment.”
• “I need to rethink things because I don’t see myself going another year like this.”

I started coaching in 2011 and this recurring pattern has never failed to show up. As the year draws to a close, women who have spent months pushing through, smashing targets, and holding everything together look at the calendar and ask themselves:

“Can I really handle another year like this?”

But before you hand in that notice or close your business, it’s crucial to understand what is driving this urge.

Is it a Desire to Quit, or Something Else?

The final quarter of the year is like a pressure cooker. Organisations scramble to close annual targets, business owners push frantically to finish strong, and every project suddenly becomes a must-complete before December 31st.

Then, the second shift begins with school holidays, family commitments, and the intense emotional and logistical expectations of the festive season.

For working women, these demands do not sit neatly in separate compartments. The workday ends, but the mental and physical load of managing a household, tracking appointments, organizing family activities, and anticipating everyone else’s needs never stops.

In Kenya, Q4 also comes with final exams for primary and secondary school students and the upcoming long school holidays. We also need to remember that Q4 is shorter, given that most people check out mentally once we hit mid-December.

These challenges are not due to a failure in personal time-management failure. The structural exhaustion women face at the intersection of career and home is globally.

The Stress Gap

A December 2024 Gallup study on women’s wellbeing revealed that 51% of working women reported experiencing high levels of stress the previous day, compared to 39% of men. Strikingly, these highly stressed women were 46% more likely to be actively hunting for a new job.

Blurred Lines

Gallup also found that women who frequently managed personal tasks during work hours, handled work outside of hours, or thought about work during family time reported drastically higher rates of burnout.

The Unpaid Burden

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), women perform 76.2% of all unpaid care work globally. Their 2024 data also reveals that 708 million women remain outside the global labor force due to unpaid care responsibilities.

The Attraction of the Side Hustle

Because the corporate job market slows down in November and December, applying for traditional corporate roles feels futile for some. Instead, they channel their remaining energy into starting side hustles, viewing this as their ticket to freedom and a controlled exit from employment.

These and other statistics tell a clear story. While Q4 might not be the official month women physically hand in notices, it’s the season where accumulated exhaustion forces a breaking point. Women look at the year ahead and wonder if they are willing to keep paying such a high price for success.

For many, the answer feels obvious: “I just need to leave.”

The Decision I Made in 2006

I know this feeling because I lived it.

In September 2006, I had a good job and was growing in my career as a social science researcher. But I found myself thinking, “Is this all there is?” and “Can I handle five more years of this?”

I was miserable, exhausted, and convinced that my only two options were to stay and be miserable, or quit employment. Quitting was on my mind all of Q4 that year, and I submitted my six-month notice in January 2007.

I didn’t tell my husband, family, and friends until the organisation formally accepted the resignation. My boss tried to offer a middle ground of working three days a week while spending two days building my business, but I declined.

I was done and too emotionally checked out to see a compromise. I viewed my choice in black-and-white terms: corporate misery or entrepreneurial freedom that would quickly build my wealth. Oh, how wrong I was about the money!

While the freedom, self-expression, and career that emerged from that leap have been worth the journey, looking back, I realise that I was blind to my own patterns. I didn’t know I could seek professional support to help me think clearly before making such a massive, chaotic life disruption, and that worked against me for years.

So I know the desperate urge to escape. But I also know the financial and relational chaos that ensues when you quit before you are ready.

What If You Don’t Actually Want to Quit?

My own journey and 15 years of coaching brilliant women have taught me a counter-intuitive truth: Sometimes, you don’t actually want to quit your job, career, or business. You want to quit the way you have been operating within it.

This includes wanting to stop:

• Saying Yes when you want to say No.
• Believing that everything will collapse if you stop holding it up.
• Giving 110% to everyone else while surviving on leftover energy.
• Operating in a permanent state of emergency and chronic stress.
• Acting like a one-person cleanup crew the moment things fall apart.
• Sacrificing your personal life and losing precious time with the people you love.
• Being the hyper-dependable heroine, regardless of what it costs your health, relationships, and well-being.

You don’t want to abandon the success you’ve worked so hard to build, and you still have goals and dreams. You simply want success to stop demanding such a high price from you.

I do acknowledge that sometimes, the environment or the business model is toxic, and leaving is the healthiest choice for you. But often, the problem is the way we have learned to show up, the unrealistic expectations we carry, and the boundaries we have failed to protect.

Why Running Away Won’t Fix a Leaky Boundary

I will never be the one to tell a woman she must stay in a miserable situation and just “fix her boundaries.” Staying or leaving is a tough decision and eventually, you have to make a choice.

But leaving, on its own, will not fix a leaky boundary.

Your habits and patterns follow you if you change your circumstances without changing how you relate to yourself. If you have spent a lifetime being the strong, dependable one who keeps the ship afloat, you will carry those exact same patterns straight into your next corporate job or your new business venture. 

And before long, the challenges you thought you had escaped from will arise in this new space.

Before You Decide What Comes Next

You don’t have to dismiss your exhaustion, talk yourself into being grateful, or convince yourself to keep going simply because you have invested so much in getting where you are today.

But you also do not have to make your next move when you are at the end of your tether.

What you need is to take a step away from the storm, sit quietly in the discomfort, evaluate the situation without the emotional energy, and map the way forward.

When you establish that internal space, you get the ability to examine what is actually happening:

• What exactly are you ready to leave behind?
• What do you still want to keep and protect?
• What needs to change internally and externally for your work and life to feel happier and more fulfilling?
• If leaving is the right decision, how can you prepare for that transition so it feels powerful and strategic, rather than stressed and rushed?
• If staying is the right decision, what can you do to ensure that you reduce the mental, emotional, and physical load?

These are not easy questions to answer on your own, especially when you have spent years being the strong one everyone else turns to. It’s easier when you have someone who will help create the space required for you to hear yourself, plug the leaky boundaries, and make an aligned choice rather than a panicked escape.

Your Turn

If you are standing at this crossroads and need help making sense of your next job, career, or business move, I invite you to step out of the panic and into clarity.

Before you hand in that resignation letter or shut down your business in frustration, let’s look at the bigger picture together in a 1-1 Clarity Coaching Session.

This 90-minute session is designed for women who are navigating major life, career, or business transitions. Together, we’ll explore where you are, identify what you really want, and create a simple, actionable 3-step action plan you can start implementing immediately.

Your next chapter deserves to be born out of clarity, strategy, and vision. You’ve worked too hard and sacrificed too much to let exhaustion or stress make your next major life decision for you. 

You don’t have to figure this out alone or wait until you’re at a breaking point to choose differently. 

→ Click here to book your Clarity Coaching Session 

(Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash)

---

A note about your health

This article is not intended to diagnose, treat or replace professional medical or mental health advice. Persistent, severe, unexplained, or worsening fatigue can have many causes. Consult a healthcare or mental health professional if you’re concerned about your mental, emotional, or physical health.