What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Devon ran a good team and prided himself on staying level-headed under pressure, but lately he arrived at one-on-ones distracted, replaying a conversation from the night before. His partner had spent the weekend telling him how lucky she felt to have him, then spent Monday morning listing everything he'd gotten wrong about their finances, in front of her sister. By Tuesday she was warm again, bringing him coffee, as if nothing had happened. He caught himself second-guessing a routine budget decision at work that he would normally have made without a thought. He wanted to trust his own judgment again, at home and in the office, and suspected the two were more connected than he'd been willing to admit.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Recognizing the cycle instead of managing each incident
Leaders are used to addressing performance issues one incident at a time, which is exactly the wrong lens for what this book calls a repeating cycle: idealization, then devaluation, then a return to warmth. Naming it as a pattern, rather than a series of separate problems to solve, is the shift the book asks for.
Not every disagreement is part of a larger pattern, and treating ordinary conflict as evidence of a cycle can itself become unfair.
Note the sequence of warmth and criticism over a month, not just the sting of the latest exchange.
Confidence erosion is not a leadership flaw
A leader's self-worth is often built on decisiveness, so the self-doubt this book describes can feel like a personal or professional failing rather than what it actually is: an expected effect of sustained inconsistency from someone close. Separating "I am doubting myself" from "I am a poor leader" protects both the relationship question and the job.
Leadership itself sometimes requires appropriate self-doubt, so not every uncertain moment traces back to the relationship.
When you catch yourself second-guessing a routine work decision, pause and ask where that doubt actually started.
Weighing the decision the way you'd weigh a hard call at work
Leaders already know how to make structured decisions under incomplete information, weighing real factors like risk, cost, and long-term consequence instead of gut feeling alone. The same discipline, applied to safety, finances, and personal values, can bring clarity to a relationship decision without forcing an answer before it's ready.
A relationship is not a project plan, and forcing a decision-matrix onto something this personal can flatten what actually needs to be felt through.
Write down the real factors separately from the feelings, then look at both lists side by side.
Leading yourself the way you lead your team
Good leaders build support systems for their teams and rarely extend the same permission to themselves. Whatever path a leader eventually chooses, rebuilding trust in one's own judgment happens through steady outside perspective, whether a therapist, a trusted peer, or both, not through solving it alone the way a leader might solve a staffing problem.
The professional instinct to resolve things quickly and move the team forward can conflict with the slower, less linear work of rebuilding self-trust; a leader can hold both by keeping the relationship decision separate from any deadline-driven mindset, and giving it the same patience they would want a struggling employee to receive.
Name one thing, honestly
- Have I been managing this relationship the way I would manage an underperforming project? - Where has my confidence at work quietly started depending on reassurance at home? - Who would I trust to hear about this without needing me to have already decided?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Write down the real factors separately from the feelings, then look at both lists side by side.