"This Doesn't Work for Me"

Using your paycheck to maximize your best shot at autonomy—creating options for finally launching your own pursuits and dreams.

At a recent networking event, I chatted with a physical therapist who had recently struck out on her own. Jordan didn’t say that it had been her lifelong dream to work for herself, but rather that she realized after a decade of traditional PT employment that she wanted way more autonomy. Now that is something we dreamers get.

Basically, she wanted to do her work in the way she saw fit to provide better care to her patients. In a traditional PT clinic setting, she was less and less able to do this, since management expected therapists to perform the therapies they could get paid the most for. According to her, manual modalities—the kind she finds most beneficial for her specialty—are compensated at the lowest rate (what?!) and so she had to do therapy modalities she didn’t believe to be best.

The birth of her son two years ago woke Jordan up to the possibility of going on her own, to the knowledge that what she was doing wasn’t working for her or her patients, and that she could do something about it. It took two years of counseling and mustering courage and planning and preparing, but she got there. We didn’t talk specifically about money, but I bet you several tacos her preparation included getting her money good to go. As in, she got her finances organized and proactive so she could go.

In January of this year, Jordan opened her own clinic where she gets to decide how to do her work and how best to help her patients. She’s cash-pay only so she doesn’t have to play by the traditional clinic and insurance rules anymore, and finds that she’s able to help people with fewer sessions since they’re getting the modality they need, and motivated since they’re paying out-of-pocket. She was finally able to say to a job that wasn’t working for her, “This doesn’t work for me anymore. And I’m doing something about it.”

Pushes out of the nest:

Here are some of the things that may not be working for you anymore, or things to which you’d like to say “Naw, not going to work for me.” Not that they ever worked for you, but sometimes you find yourself in proverbial boiling water wondering how a nice frog like you got there.

• Your deserved efforts to advance in your company are rebuffed, your contributions are consistently unappreciated, or you’re not being compensated fairly. As Jessica Chou wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

I found myself stuck in a role without a career trajectory or opportunities for growth, and I realized I had to walk away. I got some other gigs lined up, asked for a small raise, and when they said no, I also said no, getting out of that dead-end job.

• It’s no longer good for your soul to stay surrounded by bureaucracy and pretending and busyness leading nowhere. The phrase “death by a thousand paper cuts” comes to mind—nothing may be egregiously wrong, but very little is working well. [Random question: why do only “paper cuts” get so specifically named? You’d never tell someone you have a “knife cut” or a “stick cut.”]

• You are being asked to go along with things you disagree with, or the company’s culture starts to shift in a way that’s counter to your ethics.

• Work bleeds into every part of your life and you have to work nights and weekends to compensate for failures and dysfunction elsewhere on the team or in the company. Note: I am a very big fan of workplace boundaries, but it can feel scary to put these in place when you are dependent on the very next paycheck.

• Your complaints over things employees shouldn’t experience in the workplace are being ignored, invalidated, or swept under the rug.

• You’ve stopped growing, are going backward, you’re bored, and you simply know it isn’t good for you to stay any longer.