“Should I stay or leave?” sounds like a straightforward question. It is often the wrong place to start.
Dissatisfaction at work rarely has a single cause. A role may have stopped offering room to grow. Expectations may be incompatible. Leadership may keep decisions tightly controlled. Or an organisation may have become dependent on people being permanently available. Reducing all of this to a choice between staying and leaving risks acting on a symptom rather than understanding the system behind it.
The first problem may be the diagnosis, not the decision.
It is tempting to read dissatisfaction as a personal loss of motivation. Yet there is a difference between losing interest in work and refusing to keep compensating for conditions that no longer make sense. There is also a difference between one difficult week and a pattern that has endured for months. Better judgement begins by distinguishing those situations and identifying which factors are genuinely within our control.
Three questions sharpen that judgement: what has actually changed, what still works, and which conditions would need to change for staying to become a deliberate choice? These are not instructions to stay. They are a defence against reacting to the exhaustion of a single moment.
Staying is not always resignation. Leaving is not always liberation.
Remaining can be responsible when there is genuine scope to renegotiate expectations, reshape priorities or establish boundaries. But staying becomes an active choice only when something observable changes; a sympathetic conversation is not the same as a different system. Leaving may also be necessary, but it deserves preparation — financial, professional and personal. Speed is not the same thing as courage.
The question is not which option sounds more heroic. It is which decision reduces ambiguity, preserves the capacity to act and responds to the actual conditions of the person's life.
Movement can begin before a final answer arrives.
Not every dilemma needs to be settled in one dramatic move. Asking for explicit criteria, setting a workable limit, documenting an inconsistency or preparing an alternative can all reveal how much the context is willing to change. The response from the system is often more informative than another month of silent frustration.
There are also limits that should not be romanticised. Where health, safety or financial security are at risk, the first step may be to restore some capacity and seek appropriate support rather than make an irreversible decision under pressure. Explore the book’s three movements ↗
Sound decisions need not begin with certainty. They begin with a more accurate reading of what matters.
O Teu Próximo Passo explores these distinctions through three movements — See Clearly, Decide and Move Forward — alongside tools for reflecting on work, leadership and organisations. The book is available in Portuguese.