By Gabriella Didio – Ladders

The next time you feel like quitting your job, ask yourself what you need to work on to become truly unbothered by your environment.

It’s Wednesday and the week isn’t over yet. You woke up and felt the pressure to make the long, sickening commute to your day job. In short, you’re annoyed. It’s not just that you have a day job. It’s the fact that the long hours spent doing something you don’t love are chipping into the energy that you do have working on your passion project that you are trying to make a reality.

To top it all off there’s the human element. You’ve had years of tense moments with the coworkers of your past. And at this point in your life if you have one more person attempt a verbal beatdown or make you question yourself you’re going to lose it.

But, it doesn’t have to be a frustrating experience.

There’s something else that’s deeper. It isn’t just that you’re too much of your own person at the office, which in that type of environment, can make you feel like a permanent outsider. It’s the fact that you don’t know how to stand up for yourself. No one gave you a guide book when you entered the corporate world. No one prepared you for the different personalities you’d have to be around almost 24/7.

Yes, you don’t find the work interesting, but you could have more enthusiasm toward it if you had the confidence to always know what to say to other people who tried to make you feel small.

Here are a few things you can do to help you make the decision if you should quit or not.

1. Determine how quitting will alter your life

Actions have consequences. And it today’s digital age of short term gratification you may not really care about the long term consequences. But if you’re at point A, you need to get to point B. And there are a lot of steps so that you can finally rest easy and be in a career full time that you LOVE. You have heard this statement many times in your life. But do you actually understand its meaning?

If you quit because of one, two or three bad interactions you will spend the next two to three months having to get acquainted with another job. You will have an income gap, and you will ultimately delay your dream even more.

2. Stay assertive instead of wavering

Communication skills are critical to your success whether in the workplace or in your personal life. But it’s alarming when you are caught out of the blue by someone who challenges you or questions a statement you make. Externally you need to show strength but inside you feel rattled and shaken.

Suddenly just going out there and being yourself can become a minefield. Especially by people who you deem as intelligent. Instead of being nice one day because you’re feeling happy and throwing all your assertive behavior out of the window because you’re feeling happy, remember this. Stay assertive! Assertive skills are defined as being able to stand up for your own or other people’s rights in a calm, positive, nice and strong way. In the past women have been told to be quiet, so our assertive skills are still a work in process.

Don’t shy away from being assertive. In a positive, empowering way it can take you from a wallflower to a trusted voice. Asking in a nice way “Could you please review my essay?” instead of “Do you think you could review my essay?”

3. Have someone to talk about the negative situations with

When I worked in an office there were so many times, even multiple times per day where I had to walk outside the building to call a life coach to talk about a negative interaction I just had with a coworker. She would listen closely as I just needed to talk.

It’s like if you got bitten by a snake and you needed to extract the poison out of your body. That’s what this person was like for me. A remedy for the poison I just experienced. Having that person as a rock to lean on during years of getting ping-ponged around at the office prolonged any quick decisions to quit my job. It kept me on course when I wanted to throw in the towel multiple times.

Some final thoughts when you still want to quit

Don’t just quit your job because it seems like it is cutting in your time for your passion project and because on top of that there are negative interpersonal actions that you are unsure of how to handle. Instead of letting these interactions knock you off of your career path keep these tips in mind to keep you on your course for success.

Don’t fall off the course. Take action. The next time you feel like quitting your job, ask yourself what you need to work on to become truly unbothered by your environment. Test your strength.