Do I Quit or Go Again?
It starts with a feeling
Not a thought.
One day something feels NQR
Not aligned to what’s important to you.
How do you know when to quit?
How do you know when to go again?
It’s so easy
Move your hand from your forehead,
Put your hand on your gut.
Then your hand on your heart.
Your body will tell you…
Quit or go again.
Don’t overthink things
Don’t look to other people to say what you should or shouldn’t do.
It’s not about asking for permission
Or looking for approval.
They are not you.
If you need to quit and walk away.
Quit and walk away.
And do so with intention.
If you feel you need to iterate,
to change direction,
to do something bigger and better,
or smaller and smarter,
then do that very thing.
And do so with intention.
Quit or go again!
What’s it to be?
Are you all in no matter your decision?
Or only half the person you could be?
Why Quit or Go Again Isn’t a Head Decision
I wrote this poem after watching too many good salespeople and leaders talk themselves out of a decision their gut had already made. The quit or go again question rarely starts as a thought – it starts as a feeling, a tightness, a knowing, long before the mind catches up and starts building a case either way.
In sales and in leadership, we’re trained to overthink. We build spreadsheets to justify what we already sense. But quit or go again is not a spreadsheet decision – it’s a body decision, and the leaders I coach who make peace with that tend to move faster and with far less regret than the ones who wait for certainty that never comes.
What Quit or Go Again Looks Like in Practice
If you’re sitting with quit or go again right now – about a deal, a role, a team, a direction – here’s what I’d ask: have you actually asked your body, or only your calendar and your ego? Quit or go again is a question that deserves an honest answer, not a diplomatic one.
And whichever way you land, land there with intention. Half-quitting or half-going-again is the slowest, most exhausting place to live. If this resonates and you want to talk through where you’re stuck, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations dig into exactly this kind of decision-making under pressure.
The Cost of Never Deciding
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about quit or go again: staying stuck in the question is its own decision, and it’s usually the most expensive one. Every week you spend weighing quit or go again without choosing either is a week of half-effort – not quite committed to going again, not quite free to walk away.
I’ve sat across the table from sales leaders who’d been circling quit or go again for the better part of a year. Their pipeline knew before they did. Their team knew before they did. The market doesn’t wait for you to finish deliberating, and neither does your own energy – it drains a little more each week you stay in the in-between.
So if quit or go again has been rattling around in you for longer than a few weeks, that’s usually a sign the answer already arrived and you just haven’t let yourself hear it yet.
A Simple Way to Test Quit or Go Again
Try this the next time quit or go again shows up: sit quietly for two minutes and imagine you’ve already quit. Notice what your body does – relief, grief, both. Then imagine you’ve gone again, fully, no half measures. Notice that too.
Whichever image brought more ease alongside the fear is usually your answer. Quit or go again isn’t about eliminating fear either way – both paths have it. It’s about noticing which fear you’re actually willing to walk toward.
That’s the work. Not the spreadsheet, not the pros-and-cons list, not asking twelve people what they’d do. Just you, your gut, and the honest question: quit, or go again?
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
BOOK A NO-OBLIGATION 20-MINUTE CALL
And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
