How Do You Know It’s Time?

Do you remember the scene in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love when Felipe takes Liz by the hand and says, “Darling, it’s time.”

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Don’t you wish someone would tell you that too? 

• When you’re teetering back and forth on a decision to leave a job?
• Deciding to start a business?
• End a relationship?
• Stay or move?

Today, a tweet from @MelissaBreau caught my eye. I replied to her Tweet to find out what was going on in her world and she replied with this:

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@theinspiringbee thanks. I decided recently – I’m going freelance full time.

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Breau, a fellow writer announced on her blog that she decided to quit her 5 year full-time associate editor job and go full-time as a freelancer. Woohoo!! I was excited for her. It made me wonder what gave her the courage to make such a decision.

What does it take for someone to leave the comforts of their current situation and take a leap into the unknown?

Although every situation is different, I think I have a few ideas.
 

Signs It’s Time

 
Your reason to stay is just not good enough. A friend once said the best thing about her current beau was that he had a “warm body.” If you can’t come up with any good reasons to stay in a relationship, a job or even a state, it may be time to pack it up.

You’ve stopped growing. At the beginning of your journey you were getting tons of new ideas, your learning curve was more impressive than a professional baseball player’s curveball. But several months later you feel stagnant. You haven’t learned a thing and your forecast for future growth is looking bleak.

Fear is controlling your decision. Perhaps intuitively you know it’s time to move on, but when people ask you why you stay, the only answer that keeps coming up is fear. You’re afraid of the lost of security. You’re afraid that you may be making the wrong decision.You’re afraid of letting go so instead you hold on tight and keep waiting for the fear to subside.

You begin to see other people doing what you want to do. In college I was dreaming of leaving my small hometown and going to school on the mainland. But that leap seemed so huge. I couldn’t imagine it for myself. That is, until I heard a classmate had already done it. Knowing that someone else had already done it. Knowing that she already faced her fears and took that leap excited me and I stopped seeing limitation and started imagining what was possible for myself.

You just know. You know how Oprah always talks about getting a whisper and then a whisper becomes a shout? Maybe you know you were destined to be a writer or you know that the person you are with isn’t the right one. Maybe you already know the answer to the title of this post, you just need a push to make that decision.

If you’re still on the fence, give yourself time. Reflect on your choices. Go through a list of pros and cons and think about what your life would be like if you decided to stay where you are or make a leap. Imagine how you would feel 5 years from now if you were doing exactly what you are doing right now.

Is the risk to go through with it greater than the risk of doing nothing at all?