Quit Week: How to Take Care of Yourself in a Job Transition

When we quit a job or have a big change in our lives, we are often told to “take good care of ourselves.”

But the bigger question is: How? What does that actually look like?

I reached out to Shannon Sexton-Potter, the owner of Harmony on Hope Massage, who is also my client, friend, and go-to self-care expert, to ask for her thoughts on self-care in a job transition.

What she said completely shifted how I think about self-care:

I think it’s easy to categorize "self care" as somehow indulging in what many people consider to be “luxury services”. And as a massage therapist and practice owner, many may expect me to answer along those lines when they ask about best practices in self care. But over the years, I’ve discovered self care has very little to do with what you “do”.

If fact, I have grown to cringe a little bit at the term over the years. Not because I don’t value it, but because it has become commercialized to make us think about self care as eating the perfect healthy diet, receiving expensive spa services, exercising your butt off every day, and making sure you do all this while “being happy” in your full time job, and spending enough time with your kids and family.

That’s a lot of pressure. That doesn’t feel achievable to me. I know exactly zero people who do all this constantly and with intention.

So, I prefer the term “self tending”. When we hear the term “tending” we think of a garden. And that’s exactly how we should think of our lives. We are tending to the garden of our life. Sometimes that tending is active and full of daily talks that feel good to get done - Spring. Other times it's about reaping the harvest and enjoying the spoils of our labors - Autumn. But there is yet a more magical time to this cycle of tending that many people over look and often skip - Stillness, or our winters.

This season of stillness is what I find to be the most valuable kind of self tending to lean into in times of transition, such as in between career moves. Stillness can sound scary to many people, as if nothing is happening, but I beg to differ. In our life winters, we face prime opportunity to look inward, germinate, evolve, and gain a sense of confidence in what’s coming. Yes, it is a time of rest, but it’s also a time of expansion. Still, inward expansion is what fuels our choices. It allows us to step into our lives with strong roots in our core values and beliefs.

This stillness can look different to different people. Perhaps it's taking a job in between careers that asks only the basics of you. Perhaps it's wandering the mountains, or wandering Netflix. But whatever it looks like it shouldn’t be about what you fill your time with, it's about how you allow time to fill you.

Allow for this gift of stillness. Approach it with curiosity and an open heart. What will bloom out of this time in the coming spring will be all the more beautiful for it.

So, as you approach your major change, whether that be quitting a job or something else, make sure to leave room to tend to yourself.