You already know what you want to do. Leave the role, say no to the project, stop showing up to the thing that drains you. The decision isn't the hard part. What's hard is picturing the conversation that comes after it, the disappointed look from a boss, a parent, a teammate who expected something different from you.
You are not your past
That fear has a name in Adlerian psychology, the school of thought behind the book The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. The core claim is quite blunt. You are not shaped by what happened to you but by the meaning you keep assigning to it, and that meaning gets chosen again every day (whether you notice it or not).
This runs against a far more comfortable story, the one where your past explains your limits. Grew up without much money, so you chase security over anything else. Got benched once at a key moment, so you play safe for good. Kishimi and Koga call this searching for a cause instead of owning a decision made today, in the present, with the freedom you actually have right now.
The freedom to be disliked
Freedom, in their framing, includes something uncomfortable: the freedom to be disliked. It isn't something you go chasing. It's the cost of making an honest choice instead of a popular one.
If you need everyone's approval before you act, you've handed your life over to whoever might disapprove, and in practice that's everyone at once.
Separating your task from theirs
The tool that makes this workable is what they call separation of tasks. Your career move is your task (your personal project). How your old boss feels about it is theirs. You can be thoughtful about how you deliver the news, you can explain yourself once, you can be kind. What you can't do is manage someone else's reaction and call it your job, because it was never yours to manage in the first place.
None of this is about ignoring people or pretending consequences disappear. It's about noticing where a real decision quietly turned into a performance aimed at avoiding disapproval, and asking whether that trade still makes sense.
One thing to try this week
Pick one decision you've been sitting on because of how it might land with someone else. Write down what you'd choose if their reaction weren't part of the equation at all. Then look at the gap between that answer and what you're actually doing.
That gap is the price of the approval you've been paying for.
