How to Know when walking away is worth it

At some point, most of us have sat with a version of the same question. You are not miserable enough to feel justified in leaving. You are not fulfilled enough to stop thinking about it. And so you stay, and you wait, telling yourself that when things get bad enough, you will know.

But here is what I have come to understand, through my own experience and through the women I work with who are rebuilding fulfillment in their careers and lives: bad enough is not usually what tells you. Most women don’t leave when things hit rock bottom. They leave, if they leave at all, when something inside them finally gets honest about what staying has been costing them all along.

That is a harder question to sit with. And it is the one worth asking.

I came across the story of Kevin Guskiewicz in May this year, and I have been thinking about it ever since.

Guskiewicz walked away from a $2 million salary as president of Michigan State University. Before he even accepted the role in 2024, he had formally asked the board not to interfere with his leadership. He knew what dysfunction looked like, and he tried to get ahead of it. It was not enough. Over the next 2 years, 3 board members made his environment toxic. They published op-eds criticizing him publicly, appeared on podcasts to undercut his decisions, and leaked privileged information to push personal agendas. The board chair himself said the dysfunction was affecting his own health.

The university offered Guskiewicz a $1 million raise to stay, bringing his total compensation to $2 million annually. He also stood to lose $950,000 in deferred compensation and a lifetime faculty position at 50% salary by leaving.

He turned it all down and accepted a role at Clemson University for $1.2 million, hundreds of thousands less than what MSU was offering.

What struck me about his story is not the salary figure, though the numbers are striking. What struck me is that he had a clear answer to the question that most people spend years trying to avoid: how do you know when walking away is worth it?

He knew because he was paying with something a raise could not replenish.

Most women I work with will never have $2 million on the table. Some are in senior leadership roles. Others are senior individual contributors who have spent years building deep expertise in work that no longer feels connected to who they are. The dollar amounts are different. But the question is often the same.

And so many of them stay. Not because they are thriving, but because they have not given themselves permission to count the full cost of staying.

The cost does not usually announce itself. It shows up gradually, in the body first. The exhaustion that a full weekend of rest does not touch. The low-grade tension that has become so familiar, you have stopped noticing it. The growing sense that you are going through the motions in a life that looks fine from the outside but feels hollow somewhere underneath.

Women have described it to me as floating. As realizing one day that they feel nothing about work they used to care about, and that the nothing is somehow more frightening than the frustration ever was.

This is not a small thing. And it is not something that resolves itself by waiting a little longer.

So how do you actually know?

In my experience, it is rarely a single dramatic moment. It is more often a quiet accumulation. A series of times you talked yourself back from the edge. A pattern of absorbing and adjusting and minimizing that has quietly become your full-time job on top of your actual job.

A few questions that I find useful to sit with honestly:

What would you need to believe about yourself to feel that what you’re carrying is good enough reason to want something different? So many women are waiting for external permission that is never coming.

What has staying already cost you, not in salary or title, but in you? In your health. In your capacity to feel genuinely present. In the version of yourself you bring home at the end of the day.

And perhaps most importantly: what are you afraid walking away would mean about you? Because underneath most decisions to stay is a fear that leaving is somehow a failure. That it means the years you invested were wrong, or that you are being ungrateful, or that you are not strong enough to handle what is in front of you.

Walking away from something that is slowly draining you is not a failure. In most cases, it is the most honest thing you can do for yourself.

What Michigan State is now left with is a search for its 7th president since 2018. What Kevin Guskiewicz walked toward is something no salary package could have purchased for him: an environment where his health and his work could coexist.

Most of us will make this decision without the spotlight. Without the dramatic numbers. Without anyone writing about it afterward.

But the question underneath is the same.

If you have been sitting with this quietly for a while, I want to gently invite you to stop waiting for things to get worse before you take what you are feeling seriously. The discomfort you are carrying already matters. It is already information worth listening to.