Can I Quit My Job Without Having Another Job? | NoBSJobSearchAdvice.com

I thought I would do a show today talking about whether or not . . . the question really came down to, "Can I quit my job without having another job?"

There is no rule that says you can't do this. I want to be clear, there's the potential impact from doing this that employers now have a lever over you. They have leverage over you because you out of work.

It may impact your salary negotiation. It may impact some of the choices that you have of the next firm because, whether it's good times and bad times, firms are looking for leverage in the negotiation and they think they have it when you are out of work. And I'm not trying to talk you out of it because certainly if you're in a situation that is unpleasant or worse . . . folks I am not going to define all of the "worst situations." I just leave it to you. You know what makes your life intolerable.

For myself, there was a time I was commuting more than 2 hours each way from our home in Northeastern Pennsylvania to New York. I did for 5 days a week for more than a year year and it was tough., I would get up at an ungodly hour of the morning and commute to New York. I did for my family, but it was hard and I needed to negotiate into a new situation where I didn't have to do it that often. Eventually, not all in order to make it temporarily work. And then when I started to notice my circumstances with my colleagues were awful. I decided to get out of it and move on to something else that suited me better. .

You will have your version of it--the work that is insufferable, the people that you work with who are intolerable … whatever it is, you'll make a decision as to what's right for you. As you make that decision, I want to cover couple of things that you ought to be thinking about .

1. As I said it, may be harder to find work because firms will question whether or not you will stay if things get a little tougher and
2. The impact on salary negotiation.
3. You really need to see if you have savings in place to pay your bills during the time that you are unemployed. You may think that you can get something very quickly. But what happens if you can't. Do you have the wherewithal to ride out the storm for longer than you anticipate? I get this at all the time. “I can find a job in 3 months,” and I can assure you that there are hundreds of thousands of people who say the same thing to themselves and found it's taking longer. Do you have the wherewithal that if it takes longer that you can wind up supporting yourself?
4. Does your decision affect other people? If you have a wife, husband, partner, kids . . . Are they on board with this because what you are doing is going to affect them. if they're not on board, it's can become harder for you to feel the energetic difference in your home. It's going to be your wife, husband, partner, kids in the role dealing with, “So has he found a job yet? So, is she working?” Dealing with the impact of the question. And it's hard on them to say, “no he hasn’t had any interviews for a while,” or “No, she's not working yet,” or “Mommy is still out of work.” “Daddy is still out of work.” It's hard. You need to make sure that everyone's on board with what your choices are.
5. Are you going to be going out there looking for something else right away or taking a little bit of time with the kind of sort things through, do a postmortem on your circumstances and figure out where the mistake was on your side and what it is that you want to be going to

Sometimes people have made the decision that the work that they have been doing is not what they want to be doing with the rest of their life. So they make a decision to go on to something else. Can you do the work proactively before the resignation in order to sort some of that out, so you're working for someone else but figuring out what you want to do? It's like people who start a business or want to move into their own business, I often will coach and tell them, “Can you do this on the side for a little while to start figuring out what you don't know yet so that you not watching your money disappear on you while you’re figuring things out?” Do it while you're working for someone else.