How to Walk Away from Anything that Doesn’t Serve You

And why it is so damn hard…

Photo by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash

One of the hardest decisions in life is to figure out whether you should stay or leave and move on. Finding the perfect timing for walking away… From a job, a relationship, a habit, a party. It is not always obvious; it isn’t crystal clear — even in cases when the situation in question is clearly hurting you or holding you back. We stay in bad relationships, soul-crushing jobs, and friendships that don’t serve us. We stay because walking away is tough.

It’s oh-so-easy to tell someone to just let go, to move on, to walk away. But in reality, walking away is hard. It’s a lot harder at times than it should be. But it is a skill to learn and perfect.

Mastering the skill of walking away gets easier once you understand some underlying motives. Why do we stay even when it hurts? How do we walk away in some cases and not in others? How can you get better at understanding what serves you? And how can you learn to walk away?

So why do we stay?

We are taught to hang on

From an early age, starting in kindergarten, we are taught to persist. We are expected to keep our focus, stick with our choices, to persist in action in order to achieve greatness. Practising the piano…