Before you quit, ask the third question

Stay, leave, reshape. The middle one is the one nobody tells you to ask.

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

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Picture this. You are at your desk at ten past four on a Wednesday, doing nothing. Or sitting in the car outside your office, not going in yet. Staring at the time. 8.58am. Two minutes before work starts.

And the question arrives…not unfamiliar, but this time, just impossible to ignore.

Do I stay or do I go?

You have asked it about a job before. Maybe a city, a business, a version of your life that stopped fitting a while ago. It feels like the most honest question you can ask yourself. Stripped down, brave, binary. That is exactly the problem with it.

Why stay or leave is the wrong question

Stay or leave feels fast and the only approach during decision making and that’s probably why we reach for it. It takes something messy and unbearable and turns it into one clean decision you could make by Friday.

But there are only two options in that question.

If you have ever really sat with it about your own life, there is an unspoken option that we feel, that you already know there are three.