Sometimes we stay because we ask the wrong questions

​I resigned from my part-time job at the local college yesterday after ten years of service. I loved every minute of my time there. I leave knowing the college was a blessing to me the past decade, and it will continue to bless countless students and staff in the years to come.

I leave with nothing but love and respect for the institution.

In my resignation letter I wrote, "there is never a good time to leave, but there often comes a bad time to stay."

Because of my love for the students and many of the people I worked with at the college, coming up with the right time to leave was never going to happen. The position served my life well in many ways, and allowed me to serve in a way that was fulfilling.

Yet, some recent changes in my small part of that college world left me feeling a bit out of alignment with the direction my part of that world was going, and every part of me knew the time had come to move on. Every part of me, that is, except for the part that was having a hard time figuring out a good time to leave.

We frequently ask, is this a good time to leave? Sometimes, I've learned, it's healthier for us to ask is this a bad time to stay.

I've found myself reflecting on that this week. How I have not always been good at identifying bad times to stay. How I have lived a lot of my life fighting to stay in things that would have been healthier if I'd only given myself permission to leave.

I'm not suggesting that every time something feels a little out of alignment it's a bad time to stay. There are some things in life that get a little out of alignment that are certainly worth the fight to get back in alignment.

But not everything is. And if we spend all of our lives staying in those things because there's never a good time to leave, without ever considering how unhealthy it might be for you and others around you to stay, then we might just be missing a healthier angle to look at things through.

That certainly applies to relationships with people, but it also applies to relationships with jobs and with hobbies and projects and with destructive habits.

It's always hard to say yes to leaving. But this week I experienced a rare sense of freedom when pretty quickly deciding to say no to staying. Sometimes it's helpful to do something as simple as re-framing the question.

I struggled with my decision to leave. I struggled, that is, until I stopped focusing on the cost of leaving and started considering the price of staying. Sometimes the price of staying is destroying years of good memories of all the years that leaving was never even a question.

That can be a really big price to pay.

There are some really hard decisions in life. There's no escaping that. But some of them are made a lot more difficult when we are asking the wrong questions.