What Quitting Pottery Made Me Realize About the Job I Stayed in Too Long

I did NOT expect a 6-week pottery class to turn into a bigger conversation about quitting, intuition, and the things we stay stuck in for way too long. But that’s exactly what happened. 

What started as a small creative experiment on my career break ended up showing me how much resistance I was feeling and what kinds of creative experiences actually light me up.

In This Episode:

• What resistance reveals about creative expansion vs. adding another open tab to your life
• My unexpected visit with a reiki healer a few months before I got laid off
• The complacency I felt in the final stretch of my tech career, even while still liking my job
• The internal tension between leaving a stable job for entrepreneurship, and sunk cost fallacy

Let's Connect:

Follow me on Instagram: @alisonkinsey or send me an email: alison@alisonkinsey.com. 

Connect with Alison on LinkedIn.

I also help entrepreneurs and thought leaders launch and grow their podcasts through my boutique podcast editing agency, Podcasting for Creatives. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I was still so scared of quitting. Three months before I got laid off, I saw a Reiki healer. The best things happen on the other side of quitting that we can't even imagine. Hi, friend. Today I want to talk about quitting because I unexpectedly quit my six-week pottery class, and it wasn't part of my original plan. A few years ago, I started this tradition, and it's kind of like a passion project at this point. So every single year around the holidays, I type up a two-page double-sided letter and I send it to all of my closest friends and family. And in the last letter that I sent, I wrote out that I wanted to hike 10 mountains, learn how to play pickleball, and try my hand at pottery. And all of these things stemmed out of my own curiosities. And I think it's worth noticing what we're actually curious about day to day. Curiosities can be so random. It can be like a marketing tactic you heard about that you want to try, or even a new reality TV show that just came out. Sometimes it's a book recommendation I get from a friend, and I immediately am going to the library to reserve that book. Sometimes it's people, people that I'm following on social media who have interesting lives that I want to get to know. And more often than not, I choose to act on my curiosities rather than just letting them fester. And one weekend, I went to this open house in an old brick mill building that's rented out to dozens and dozens of local artists and small businesses. So just imagine this like three or four-story building that's filled with abstract painters, tattoo studios, just all different, mostly solo practitioners, even pottery studios. And while I was there, I was reminded about my curiosity to try pottery. It's something that I've wanted to do. I'm on this career break. And if you listened to my week in the life episode a few weeks ago, you might remember that I did the thing. I signed up, I went to my first class, I built a few pinch pots, and I went on my way. But this was a six-week commitment. And here's what I didn't expect. Every week before the next class, I started feeling a ton of resistance. I started feeling stressed out about going. All the open tabs in my brain that I talked about last week, pottery just felt like another open tab rather than a juicy creative release that I was looking forward to. And so I skipped one class and then I skipped another. And I kept thinking, I'll go next week, I'll go next week. There's still a few more classes left. And finally, I just had to get really honest with myself. Do I even want to go back? And I eventually declared to myself that I was done. I wasn't going to go back. And it actually felt really good saying that out loud and just trusting that this was the right decision. It wasn't the right time. And the way that I'm wired, it feels really crappy for me to quit something that I've committed to. I want to always uphold myself to a specific standard. And I did feel guilty because it was a multi-week commitment. And I was also questioning to myself, what if I ended up really liking pottery after the third class or the fourth class, but I didn't give it enough of a chance? I have friends who do pottery and absolutely love it. So I was like, why am I not experiencing the same level of like craving for this art form? And even though I spent money on this and it was an expensive lesson learned, there were a few things I learned about myself in the process. So, number one, I love art, but I think I'm more of a casual artistic person. Like I would much rather do a low pressure, one-off workshop. Two, I also realized my learning style with art and how I work best. So this class that I signed up for had a very different approach where you go in and you kind of independently work on your own project. You help yourself to the clay, you decide what you want to make. And there was very little step-by-step instruction. And actually, most of the students were much more comfortable with the clay than I was because many of them were returning students that had already done a six-week session prior. So the learning style just didn't jive with me. I wasn't on the same page as the other students. And I just felt like I was flailing a little bit. I was texting my friend Kirsten about this because she actually asked me to show her pictures of some of my pottery creations. And I remember this wave came over me where I was like, oh my gosh, like I have nothing to show for this. Like I have no photos of anything to show Kirsten, not to mention, I'm not going anymore. So I told her why I quit. And she said something that really struck me. She said, I think it's really important to know when to quit something. And I was like, damn, she's so right. And there's also been times in my life where I've wanted to quit, but I didn't quit. And that brings me to almost a year ago. Leading up to my layoff from tech, I think the number one feeling that was running in the background of my life day to day was that I was feeling a little bit complacent. I would say 80 to 90% of the time that I was at my job, I enjoyed it. I loved selling, talking to interesting creators. I believed in the product. I loved my coworkers. But my intuition started getting louder and louder and arguing with me nonstop. And that complacency just started gnawing at me over time. And all I did was journal about these thoughts and try to push everything down and move beyond it. I wasn't doing anything about it other than just trying to express these feelings on a piece of paper. It's funny, when I look back on what I'm about to tell you, there were definitely things I was doing where I was readying myself for a change. And the first thing that I did four months before getting laid off was I had a session with a career coach. She gave me the space to brainstorm and think about what type of role would light me up next. Would I want to do something hybrid? Do I want to do sales still? Would I kind of pivot my direction? And it felt like going to a job therapist. I was telling her, this feels like therapy. And she was like, Yes, a lot of my sessions will feel like that. And then three months before I got laid off, I saw a Reiki healer. I know this might sound woo, but I'm gonna give you all the details briefly. Reiki is an ancient healing practice and it's designed to shift your energy, especially when you're feeling stuck and you just feel like nothing is changing. And that experience was quite an adventure. I remember getting lost finding the woman's house. It was in a very rural part of New Hampshire. And I was like, which house is her house? I don't know if this is it. But I finally made it. She's a much older woman with a super calming presence. And she had me settle into her space. I was sitting in a chair across from her. She had me do these stretches just to like open my body, open my mind. And we started by having a conversation. And I remember telling her about my job and how I had all these big dreams of stepping away to do my own thing, but I was afraid. Eventually, I laid down on a massage table and she had these giant crystals under the table, calming music in the background. And I closed my eyes and just relaxed into the moment while she practiced the Reiki energy and did all of that. And I remember at the end, she told me if I walked away from my job, it would be the biggest act of self-love. And I remember being like, oh my gosh, like that was the one thing I remember taking away from that session. Like her saying that just unlocked something in me. And a week later, I remember feeling like I was no longer spiraling. My energy felt lighter. I was walking on a cloud. I don't know if Reiki has this delayed effect, but I was feeling really good. Then I wrote out a sabbatical bucket list a month before getting laid off with all the things that I wanted to do: simple, crazy, life admin, you know, all of it. And little did I know, I was actually laying the groundwork for my next chapter, but I was still so scared of quitting. And I never ended up quitting. And I don't think I would have quit for a long time if I hadn't been laid off. I wasn't bored, but I didn't feel like I was growing anymore. And I wrote in my journal in February 2025, I'm craving conviction, fiery energy, joy, purpose, passion for something other than work. And it makes me think of any kind of risk or leap that we want to take in life. Because quitting pottery was super low stakes, like not a big deal at the end of the day that I quit. Quitting a job, though, that I had been in for almost six years as a breadwinner, that my entire identity was wrapped in is way, way higher stakes. So there was a lot of real fear there. And I remember when Steve quit his career. So he was a journeyman electrician for I think six years or seven years before he went full-time in our podcast editing business. And he struggled with that decision to choose our business for years after because of a phenomenon I've been reading up about called the sunk cost fallacy. He spent five years going to school, working in the field, learning how to bend conduit, install lighting systems, panels, fire alarm systems, all kinds of things, all to fulfill his dream of becoming an electrician. But when he switched gears to join our business full time, all of that investment of time and hard work that he had put in to learn the electrical trade felt like a sunk cost to him. Like he was throwing it all away, even though he wasn't. And I kept telling him he still has those skills. Like he's still an electrician. When we moved into our house, I remember getting all of these funky light fixtures because I didn't want boob lights in our house. You know, I wanted it to look fun and I wanted to put our own personality into the home. And he knew how to wire them up. Even last weekend, he was literally at his parents' house helping them fix some outlets and wire up a ceiling fan. So he still got it. He can still tap into it. And he now has the freedom to be his own boss and design his days however he wants to. So sometimes the best things happen on the other side of quitting that we can't even imagine. And if your intuition is screaming at you like mine was many months ago, it's about time that you listen to it. I hope you have a beautiful week. If you're enjoying the Real Time Creator podcast, please take five seconds and leave me a five star review. Your feedback, your messages, they always mean so much to me. There's a lot going on over here, so stay tuned for another episode next Tuesday. Bye.