Hello everyone, it’s Ben here and in this video I wanted to discuss why I feel like so many people may be quitting their jobs and also talk about why I quit one of mine.  

So I actually work a lot. Currently I have a night job at a Walmart working as a Merchandising Team Lead (in training). So I help organize the other merchandisers to remove products from shelves and place them back following the re-assembly of the new shelves and fixtures. I often feel like a natural leader so I like the position but it’s not necessarily what I want to do long term-but more on that later.

My second job is a dancer with a Toronto Based Afro-Caribbean Dance Company that “presents dances that give voice to the realities of African Diasporic experiences.”

Thirdly, I am a dance teacher at a studio in North York. There I mainly teach Hip Hip to kids but I got my start there by actually being a student who was learning Chinese Dance.

I work about 40 hours at my first job, 12 at the second and close to 7 hours at the studio. That’s about 59 hours of in person work. As a dancer a lot of work is done outside of the studio, practices, review, learning and creating and that takes up quite a bit of time. On top of that it’s quite tiring.

The job I quit now was as a Sales Associate at a GUESS Factory clothing store and for me although the experience wasn’t bad, I felt like I was there longer than I planned and things were happening in my life that made it difficult to make myself available for work. It essentially got to the point where I couldn’t even work full weekends and was ready to ask my managers if I could work only evenings on Fridays, all day Saturdays and only 5 hours in the mornings on Sundays. However even if they told me that this was ok I had a feeling it wouldn’t be in the future because as a dancer, a lot of events take place on weekends and I knew I’d need to request time off my already low availability at that store.  So, once I got to the point when I only had this availability in my schedule I decided that it’d probably be best for me to resign rather than risk developing an ill relationship with the company.

So, I left and it was probably for the better because although I still don’t have a lot of time, I do have more time to do things like, buy groceries, rest a bit on weekends, plan for the following week or work on personal projects, like my long term career interests.

For some people, they quit simply because they don’t like the work or maybe they aren’t being treated well. For me, it was the lack of commitment I knew I wouldn’t be able to have to the company since I was busy doing other things that not only took more of my time but were either paying better or were more beneficial to my long term career goals.

Which brings me to what those are! I want to be a performing artist long term. That will take many forms like being a singer, dancer, actor, voice actor or more things I don’t even know about yet. But recently I’ve been focused on my dance training. From now on however I’m going to put a little more emphasis on my career as a singer. But more on that in a future post.