By Steve Moran

Have you thought about quitting your job, your company, or even senior living? We know more than two hundred thousand frontline workers have quit. Making the already terrible labor market even worse. I have talked to a number of senior living leaders who have quit, are thinking about quitting, or would like to quit.

It may very well be that you need to quit, or at least take a break. But before you do, ask yourselves these 10 questions:

  1. Why did you first get into senior living? What was the drive, the passion, the commitment? What would it take to revive that?
  2. What has changed since you got into the industry?  
  3. What would your job need to be like to make it better?
  4. Who are the last 5 people whose lives you impacted? Write down what you did for them and how it made their lives better.
  5. What’s wrong with your job? Make a list of everything wrong with your job, your community, your company. Now ask yourself what else needs to be on that list. Get crazy creative with it. Now ask how bad that list really is.
  6. Make a list of what is great in your job and your career right now? Go tell three people about these things?
  7. Do you want to quit because of the time and place we are in at present, or because it will never change; meaning you are experiencing circumstantial frustration?
  8. What impact will your quitting have on others; kids, spouse, partner?
  9. If you quit, what is your plan for what is next?
  10. Are you trying to lead without a support network?

Willy Wonka World

Right now we live in a world that is full of tension, strife, and conflict. It is really a bizarre kind of Willy Wonka world, because regardless of how stressed out, angry, and frustrated people are, most of us are doing just fine with material things. We make decent wages, we have homes, food on the table, clothing for ourselves and our kids.

We have access to healthcare; we have enough money to go on vacations. We live better than 90% of the world. And yet we are likely more miserable than we ever have been. When we get miserable it becomes easy to choose to do something dramatic. But, too often, those drastic actions become the proverbial “out of the frying pan into the fire” experiences.

The problem is that most often the problem is me, and that does not go away when I quit.