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I Wish I'd Quit Sooner: Practical Strategies for Navigating and Escaping a Toxic Boss
A must-have practical guide by a leading mind in the organizational psychology field for anyone suffering under a toxic boss to navigate, escape, recover, and take back control of their career.
Today’s workers are increasingly frustrated and disillusioned as toxic bosses are allowed to thrive across organizations and industries, from the boardroom to the Zoom room. I Wish I’d Quit Sooner is a fresh, informative, and practical guide for the millions of employees worldwide who endure unhealthy workplace dynamics. This insightful book helps readers recognize the signs of toxic leadership—and gives them strategies to better manage their situation, exit, and recover.
Based on Dr. Laura’s twenty-five years of applied experience in the field of organizational psychology and informed by her latest North American research on this topic, this is an engaging, relatable, and evidence-based handbook that provides a new language around the behaviors and impacts of a toxic boss, including a breakdown of eight common the Self-Serving Egomaniac, the Control Freak, the Dishonest Manipulator, the Great Divider, the Unethical Corrupter, the Abusive A-Hole, Disordered Personalities (Narcissist and Sociopath), and the Gaslighter.
With the help of I Wish I’d Quit Sooner, readers will learn practical tools to identify and start important conversations, to advocate for themselves, and to regain control of their career and well-being.
Today’s workers are increasingly frustrated and disillusioned as toxic bosses are allowed to thrive across organizations and industries, from the boardroom to the Zoom room. I Wish I’d Quit Sooner is a fresh, informative, and practical guide for the millions of employees worldwide who endure unhealthy workplace dynamics. This insightful book helps readers recognize the signs of toxic leadership—and gives them strategies to better manage their situation, exit, and recover.
Based on Dr. Laura’s twenty-five years of applied experience in the field of organizational psychology and informed by her latest North American research on this topic, this is an engaging, relatable, and evidence-based handbook that provides a new language around the behaviors and impacts of a toxic boss, including a breakdown of eight common the Self-Serving Egomaniac, the Control Freak, the Dishonest Manipulator, the Great Divider, the Unethical Corrupter, the Abusive A-Hole, Disordered Personalities (Narcissist and Sociopath), and the Gaslighter.
With the help of I Wish I’d Quit Sooner, readers will learn practical tools to identify and start important conversations, to advocate for themselves, and to regain control of their career and well-being.
- GenresNonfiction
264 pages, Paperback
Published January 13, 2026
8 people are currently reading
2281 people want to read
About the author
Laura Hambley Lovett
1 book10 followersThis author is also published under Laura Lovett.
Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett is an Organizational Psychologist, Keynote Speaker, Business Leader, Author, and Podcast Host of the highly acclaimed podcast Where Work Meets Life™. She is a sought-after thought leader on workplace psychology, the future of work, and career development with 25 years of experience. Dr. Laura is passionate about creating cultures that attract top talent and where people stay and thrive.
Dr. Laura has founded several psychology and consulting practices, including Canada Career Counselling in 2009, where registered psychologists have helped thousands of Canadians navigate their career and workplace challenges, while supporting organizations to develop thriving leaders and cultures. She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Calgary, where she is currently an Adjunct Professor. Dr. Laura received a Canadian Women of Inspiration Award as a Global Influencer in 2018.
Her upcoming book about toxic bosses, I Wish I’d Quit Sooner: Practical Strategies for Navigating and Escaping a Toxic Boss, releases January 13, 2026. Drawing from her research and decades of experience, the book offers insight, validation, and practical strategies for those navigating the damaging effects of toxic leadership in today’s workplaces.
She has published two psychological thrillers, Losing Cadence and Finding Sophie, which aim to captivate readers while raising awareness about mental health and domestic violence. These novels are currently being adapted into a television series and inspired her to co-found WITH HER, a movement to end violence against girls and women. In recognition of her impactful work, Dr. Laura received a Canadian Women of Inspiration Award as a Global Influencer in 2018.
Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett is an Organizational Psychologist, Keynote Speaker, Business Leader, Author, and Podcast Host of the highly acclaimed podcast Where Work Meets Life™. She is a sought-after thought leader on workplace psychology, the future of work, and career development with 25 years of experience. Dr. Laura is passionate about creating cultures that attract top talent and where people stay and thrive.
Dr. Laura has founded several psychology and consulting practices, including Canada Career Counselling in 2009, where registered psychologists have helped thousands of Canadians navigate their career and workplace challenges, while supporting organizations to develop thriving leaders and cultures. She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Calgary, where she is currently an Adjunct Professor. Dr. Laura received a Canadian Women of Inspiration Award as a Global Influencer in 2018.
Her upcoming book about toxic bosses, I Wish I’d Quit Sooner: Practical Strategies for Navigating and Escaping a Toxic Boss, releases January 13, 2026. Drawing from her research and decades of experience, the book offers insight, validation, and practical strategies for those navigating the damaging effects of toxic leadership in today’s workplaces.
She has published two psychological thrillers, Losing Cadence and Finding Sophie, which aim to captivate readers while raising awareness about mental health and domestic violence. These novels are currently being adapted into a television series and inspired her to co-found WITH HER, a movement to end violence against girls and women. In recognition of her impactful work, Dr. Laura received a Canadian Women of Inspiration Award as a Global Influencer in 2018.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 29, 2025
I’ll be honest…I wish I’d discovered this book years ago, before going through several toxic workplaces and doing my own deep dive into the subject. Having already read quite a lot on this topic, there wasn’t much new for me here. But that doesn’t take away from its value.
This is an excellent starter book for anyone beginning to recognize toxic patterns at work. It’s clear, validating, and easy to digest. Sometimes exactly what you need when you’re in the middle of the storm and looking for guidance.
Thank you to NetGalley and Susie Stangland for the ARC.
3.5
This is an excellent starter book for anyone beginning to recognize toxic patterns at work. It’s clear, validating, and easy to digest. Sometimes exactly what you need when you’re in the middle of the storm and looking for guidance.
Thank you to NetGalley and Susie Stangland for the ARC.
3.5
February 1, 2026
You, Inc. After Workplace Trauma: A Literary-Clinical Review of “I Wish I’d Quit Sooner” and the Quiet Rebuilding That Comes Next
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In the opening pages of “I Wish I’d Quit Sooner,” Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett offers a line that reads like both confession and handrail: you are not alone, and it is not your fault. It’s a simple sentence with a complicated shadow. The book’s wager is that what millions of workers have learned privately, in clenched stomachs and Sunday-night dread, can be named plainly without being flattened: toxicity is not just a bad fit, not merely a mismatch of personalities, but a pattern of power that remakes a person’s inner weather.
Hambley Lovett writes as an organizational psychologist, yes, but also as a practiced guide for people trying to find their way out of a dark building with no emergency lighting. The prose is direct, uncluttered, sturdy. It does not aim for fireworks. It aims for traction. Chapters arrive like rooms in a well-lit house: a clear purpose, a few carefully placed stories, a “coaching break” that asks you to stop reading and take stock, and then an exit sign that points you forward. In lesser hands, this structure can feel managerial, like a performance review wearing a cardigan. Here it feels like care, which is one of the book’s quiet theses: that clarity is not cruelty, and that guidance can be tender without becoming vague.
The early chapters establish the book’s central proposition: toxic bosses are a serious occupational hazard, and their damage is not limited to a bad day at work. Hambley Lovett catalogs the bodily signature of toxicity – pounding heart, clenched stomach, trembling, sleep disruption – alongside the secondary fallout: increased substance use, withdrawal from relationships, brain fog, self-doubt, the slow belief that your misery is evidence of your incompetence. She treats these reactions not as personal weakness but as sensible physiology in an unsafe environment. There is something almost radical in the plainness of that: your body is not betraying you; it is reporting.
Her taxonomy of toxic leaders is the book’s most efficient instrument. The labels are intentionally blunt: the self-serving egomaniac, the control freak, the great divider, the dishonest manipulator, the unethical corrupter, the abusive a-hole, the narcissist or sociopath, the gaslighter. Their bluntness is part of their mercy. People trapped in toxic systems often expend enormous energy trying to make cruelty coherent – locating the moment when things “changed,” interpreting humiliation as feedback, negotiating against reality as if it were a misunderstanding. Naming the pattern interrupts the spell. It also delivers a specific relief: you are not uniquely failing at being managed; you are experiencing a recognizable form of harm.
What gives “I Wish’d Quit Sooner” its bite is its refusal to indulge the fantasy of reform. Toxic bosses, Hambley Lovett argues, almost always worsen over time. If this sounds harsh, it is also freeing. In an era when “resilience” is too often used as a synonym for endurance, the book draws a firmer boundary: resilience is not tolerating harm. It is recognizing harm, protecting yourself, and rebuilding on the other side of it. The author is careful about what she promises. She does not sell catharsis. She does not sell revenge. She sells a path, which is a different kind of hope: procedural hope, the hope of steps.
Those steps are delivered through a braid of survivor accounts and pragmatic coaching. Hambley Lovett is at her best when she stages moments that feel minor to an outsider but are unmistakably catastrophic to the person living them: a boss who humiliates you in a meeting and then asks why you look upset; a leader who demands “transparency” and then weaponizes what you share; a manager who treats your time as an entitlement, scheduling chaos and calling it urgency. The scenes are not cinematic. They are mundane in the way true workplace harm often is: repeated, normalized, deniable. The book understands that this is precisely why toxic dynamics are so difficult to fight – not because they’re subtle, but because they’re plausible.
The strategies are correspondingly practical. Document patterns. Seek allies. Use HR with eyes open. Explore internal transfers if they offer a real change in reporting structure, not just a new desk. Negotiate when negotiation is possible. Build an exit plan, even if you are not ready to use it. None of this is revolutionary advice, and that is partly the point. Under chronic stress, executive function narrows. We forget what we already know. We lose access to options. A checklist can be a kind of cognitive prosthetic: it returns you to the existence of choices when your nervous system has convinced you there are none.
The book also understands a harder truth: toxic bosses do not thrive alone. They are enabled by organizational incentives and institutional cowardice. “High performer” becomes a loophole; “culture fit” becomes a cudgel; turnover becomes a line item, not a warning flare. Hambley Lovett is not writing a labor manifesto, but she repeatedly gestures toward the ecosystem that allows cruelty to masquerade as leadership. In that regard, her project sits comfortably beside workplace diagnoses like “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation,” and alongside a broader post-2020 public reckoning in which mental health at work has finally been discussed as something more than a wellness perk.
That systemic awareness is what keeps the book from collapsing into mere self-help. It also makes it feel relevant now, even without the author needing to chase headlines. The past few years have been a tutorial in precarity: rolling layoffs, reorganizations sold as “agility,” the whiplash of remote work to return-to-office mandates, the rise of algorithmic measurement and productivity surveillance. Even workers in “good” jobs have learned how quickly they can become numbers on a spreadsheet. In that climate, the toxic boss is not an outlier but a particularly vivid symptom – one more place where control is mistaken for competence, where fear is mistaken for intensity, where being “data-driven” becomes a cover for being human-blind. Hambley Lovett’s insistence that you must be the CEO of your own career lands, then, not as motivational fluff but as a description of reality.
Chapter 7, on warning signs before accepting a job, is an antidote to the naïveté that many ambitious workers are trained into: that a prestigious title or salary should silence inner alarms. Hambley Lovett encourages culture sleuthing the way people now actually do it: reading patterns in online reviews, talking to former employees, scrutinizing job descriptions for values coded as buzzwords, and – crucially – treating interview behavior as data. Does the interviewer interrupt? Do they boast in ways that crowd out curiosity? Do they respect your time? Do they answer questions about leadership and culture with concrete examples, or with vague slogans? The book’s most valuable instruction here is that you are allowed to evaluate them. You are allowed to let the interview be mutual.
Chapter 8 pivots into post-trauma career coaching, and the author’s tone becomes, if anything, more tender. She asks the reader to imagine themselves as the CEO of “You, Inc.” The phrase carries the faint whiff of LinkedIn, but she rescues it from cliché by treating it as a reality check. Companies merge, downsize, restructure; loyalty is rarely reciprocal; job security is, for many, a nostalgic story. To be the CEO of yourself is to accept that you will need a network of allies, a portfolio of skills, and a strategy that values your long-term health over short-term approval.
Her distinction between networking and ally building is especially well observed. Networking, she notes, is often transactional and activated in crisis. Ally building is reciprocal and continuous. The shift matters because it changes the emotional temperature of the act. Instead of “Who can help me?” the question becomes “How can we support each other over time?” The book includes stories of mentorship looping back decades later, of generosity compounding, of careers shaped as much by quiet advocates as by formal ladders. It’s a worldview that refuses cynicism without denying reality: yes, workplaces can be brutal, but people can still be decent.
The discussion of skill portfolios is familiar but well handled. Hambley Lovett separates job-specific skills from transferable ones and argues, persuasively, that the so-called soft skills are often the hardest to develop because they require self-awareness, empathy, and emotional regulation. This places her in the same neighborhood as “Radical Candor,” “Dare to Lead,” and “Crucial Conversations” – books that insist the interpersonal is operational. But she adds an important wrinkle: when you have been shaped by a toxic boss, your skill set includes not only what you can do, but what you now flinch from doing. Some readers will recognize this immediately: the way feedback becomes a threat; the way a calendar invite triggers dread; the way a neutral Slack message can send you spiraling into interpretation. The book’s strength is that it does not treat this as irrational. It treats it as conditioning – and therefore treatable.
Perhaps the most psychologically acute section is the one on rebuilding trust after a toxic boss. Hambley Lovett introduces a “trust meter” continuum, from highly distrusting to highly trusting, and then shows how a low-trust stance can warp onboarding: keeping your cards close to your chest, mistaking rigid boundaries for safety, sliding into perfectionism as a defense against being shamed. She describes how hypervigilance can become a new cage: you have left the toxic boss, but you are still organizing your life around their possible return. This is where the book quietly brushes up against trauma literature. Hambley Lovett never forgets she is writing about work, not war, but she understands that the body does not sort harm into tidy categories. Readers who have found illumination in “The Body Keeps the Score,” “Burnout,” or Lori Gottlieb’s “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” will recognize the emphasis on nervous system recovery and the slow rebuilding of self-trust.
The “Resources” section makes explicit what the rest of the book implies: recovery may require community and professional support. Hambley Lovett points readers toward mentorship tactics, online communities focused on workplace bullying, and a grounded overview of therapy modalities, from EMDR to CBT, ACT, and somatic approaches. The inclusion of crisis lines is sober and appropriate. It signals that the author takes seriously the ways work can become a mental health emergency, not merely a morale issue. And it quietly aligns the book with a current-world shift: mental health at work is no longer just an HR initiative, but a public health conversation.
There are, inevitably, limitations. The book’s voice is firmly North American and, at times, corporate in its assumptions about HR departments, benefits, and mobility. Readers in precarious employment, in the gig economy, or in sectors with weaker protections may find some prescriptions hard to enact. The taxonomy of toxic bosses, while useful, can also tempt the reader into diagnosis as a substitute for decision. Naming the persona is not the same as changing the conditions. Hambley Lovett largely resists the trap, but the reader may still feel the pull: if I just identify the type, maybe I can outsmart it. Sometimes you cannot. Sometimes the only winning move is leaving.
Yet the book’s modesty is also part of its integrity. Hambley Lovett is not writing “Work Won’t Love You Back” or “Bullshit Jobs,” books that widen the lens until the workplace becomes cultural critique. She is closer, in spirit, to “The Good Enough Job” and to Robert Sutton’s blunt pragmatism in “The No Asshole Rule” and “The Asshole Survival Guide.” The aim is not to provide a theory of capitalism. The aim is to help a reader survive Tuesday, and then to help them build a better life than Tuesday allowed.
The book’s timeliness is not only cultural but legal-adjacent. As more jurisdictions debate stronger protections against bullying and as unions, employee resource groups, and whistleblowers test the limits of corporate accountability, Hambley Lovett’s emphasis on documentation and patterns reads like layperson due diligence. Her insistence on boundaries also feels like a counterspell to the era’s ambient urgency – the Slack ping, the “quick call,” the crisis that is never quite a crisis but always insists it must be handled now. The book does not pretend you can control an institution with a checklist. It does insist you can control your next step.
And on its own terms, “I Wish I’d Quit Sooner” succeeds. It refuses to glamorize suffering. It will not flatter you with the idea that enduring cruelty makes you noble. It urges you to be practical, to build evidence, to consult your body, to track patterns and turnover, and to treat your own career as worth protecting. It offers permission to prefer dignity to drama, clarity to chaos, steadiness to the addictive roller coaster of approval and punishment. If “quiet quitting” was ever a cultural shorthand for what happens when people stop offering their full selves to systems that do not protect them, Hambley Lovett’s book is the adult version of that conversation: not “do less,” but “do not volunteer your life for harm.”
If you are looking for a book that will dismantle capitalism, this is not it. If you are looking for a book that will tell you to manifest your way out of workplace cruelty, it refuses that, too. Instead, it offers something rarer: a vocabulary for what happened, a set of steps for what to do next, and permission to believe that leaving was not a failure of character but an act of self-preservation. The final feeling is not a revenge fantasy. It is a clearer horizon. You can imagine yourself, again, as someone whose life is larger than their job.
For a work that is, at its core, an applied guide, Hambley Lovett manages an unexpectedly literary feat: she restores personhood to the reader. In today’s workplace vernacular, that may sound almost radical. My rating: 83 out of 100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In the opening pages of “I Wish I’d Quit Sooner,” Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett offers a line that reads like both confession and handrail: you are not alone, and it is not your fault. It’s a simple sentence with a complicated shadow. The book’s wager is that what millions of workers have learned privately, in clenched stomachs and Sunday-night dread, can be named plainly without being flattened: toxicity is not just a bad fit, not merely a mismatch of personalities, but a pattern of power that remakes a person’s inner weather.
Hambley Lovett writes as an organizational psychologist, yes, but also as a practiced guide for people trying to find their way out of a dark building with no emergency lighting. The prose is direct, uncluttered, sturdy. It does not aim for fireworks. It aims for traction. Chapters arrive like rooms in a well-lit house: a clear purpose, a few carefully placed stories, a “coaching break” that asks you to stop reading and take stock, and then an exit sign that points you forward. In lesser hands, this structure can feel managerial, like a performance review wearing a cardigan. Here it feels like care, which is one of the book’s quiet theses: that clarity is not cruelty, and that guidance can be tender without becoming vague.
The early chapters establish the book’s central proposition: toxic bosses are a serious occupational hazard, and their damage is not limited to a bad day at work. Hambley Lovett catalogs the bodily signature of toxicity – pounding heart, clenched stomach, trembling, sleep disruption – alongside the secondary fallout: increased substance use, withdrawal from relationships, brain fog, self-doubt, the slow belief that your misery is evidence of your incompetence. She treats these reactions not as personal weakness but as sensible physiology in an unsafe environment. There is something almost radical in the plainness of that: your body is not betraying you; it is reporting.
Her taxonomy of toxic leaders is the book’s most efficient instrument. The labels are intentionally blunt: the self-serving egomaniac, the control freak, the great divider, the dishonest manipulator, the unethical corrupter, the abusive a-hole, the narcissist or sociopath, the gaslighter. Their bluntness is part of their mercy. People trapped in toxic systems often expend enormous energy trying to make cruelty coherent – locating the moment when things “changed,” interpreting humiliation as feedback, negotiating against reality as if it were a misunderstanding. Naming the pattern interrupts the spell. It also delivers a specific relief: you are not uniquely failing at being managed; you are experiencing a recognizable form of harm.
What gives “I Wish’d Quit Sooner” its bite is its refusal to indulge the fantasy of reform. Toxic bosses, Hambley Lovett argues, almost always worsen over time. If this sounds harsh, it is also freeing. In an era when “resilience” is too often used as a synonym for endurance, the book draws a firmer boundary: resilience is not tolerating harm. It is recognizing harm, protecting yourself, and rebuilding on the other side of it. The author is careful about what she promises. She does not sell catharsis. She does not sell revenge. She sells a path, which is a different kind of hope: procedural hope, the hope of steps.
Those steps are delivered through a braid of survivor accounts and pragmatic coaching. Hambley Lovett is at her best when she stages moments that feel minor to an outsider but are unmistakably catastrophic to the person living them: a boss who humiliates you in a meeting and then asks why you look upset; a leader who demands “transparency” and then weaponizes what you share; a manager who treats your time as an entitlement, scheduling chaos and calling it urgency. The scenes are not cinematic. They are mundane in the way true workplace harm often is: repeated, normalized, deniable. The book understands that this is precisely why toxic dynamics are so difficult to fight – not because they’re subtle, but because they’re plausible.
The strategies are correspondingly practical. Document patterns. Seek allies. Use HR with eyes open. Explore internal transfers if they offer a real change in reporting structure, not just a new desk. Negotiate when negotiation is possible. Build an exit plan, even if you are not ready to use it. None of this is revolutionary advice, and that is partly the point. Under chronic stress, executive function narrows. We forget what we already know. We lose access to options. A checklist can be a kind of cognitive prosthetic: it returns you to the existence of choices when your nervous system has convinced you there are none.
The book also understands a harder truth: toxic bosses do not thrive alone. They are enabled by organizational incentives and institutional cowardice. “High performer” becomes a loophole; “culture fit” becomes a cudgel; turnover becomes a line item, not a warning flare. Hambley Lovett is not writing a labor manifesto, but she repeatedly gestures toward the ecosystem that allows cruelty to masquerade as leadership. In that regard, her project sits comfortably beside workplace diagnoses like “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation,” and alongside a broader post-2020 public reckoning in which mental health at work has finally been discussed as something more than a wellness perk.
That systemic awareness is what keeps the book from collapsing into mere self-help. It also makes it feel relevant now, even without the author needing to chase headlines. The past few years have been a tutorial in precarity: rolling layoffs, reorganizations sold as “agility,” the whiplash of remote work to return-to-office mandates, the rise of algorithmic measurement and productivity surveillance. Even workers in “good” jobs have learned how quickly they can become numbers on a spreadsheet. In that climate, the toxic boss is not an outlier but a particularly vivid symptom – one more place where control is mistaken for competence, where fear is mistaken for intensity, where being “data-driven” becomes a cover for being human-blind. Hambley Lovett’s insistence that you must be the CEO of your own career lands, then, not as motivational fluff but as a description of reality.
Chapter 7, on warning signs before accepting a job, is an antidote to the naïveté that many ambitious workers are trained into: that a prestigious title or salary should silence inner alarms. Hambley Lovett encourages culture sleuthing the way people now actually do it: reading patterns in online reviews, talking to former employees, scrutinizing job descriptions for values coded as buzzwords, and – crucially – treating interview behavior as data. Does the interviewer interrupt? Do they boast in ways that crowd out curiosity? Do they respect your time? Do they answer questions about leadership and culture with concrete examples, or with vague slogans? The book’s most valuable instruction here is that you are allowed to evaluate them. You are allowed to let the interview be mutual.
Chapter 8 pivots into post-trauma career coaching, and the author’s tone becomes, if anything, more tender. She asks the reader to imagine themselves as the CEO of “You, Inc.” The phrase carries the faint whiff of LinkedIn, but she rescues it from cliché by treating it as a reality check. Companies merge, downsize, restructure; loyalty is rarely reciprocal; job security is, for many, a nostalgic story. To be the CEO of yourself is to accept that you will need a network of allies, a portfolio of skills, and a strategy that values your long-term health over short-term approval.
Her distinction between networking and ally building is especially well observed. Networking, she notes, is often transactional and activated in crisis. Ally building is reciprocal and continuous. The shift matters because it changes the emotional temperature of the act. Instead of “Who can help me?” the question becomes “How can we support each other over time?” The book includes stories of mentorship looping back decades later, of generosity compounding, of careers shaped as much by quiet advocates as by formal ladders. It’s a worldview that refuses cynicism without denying reality: yes, workplaces can be brutal, but people can still be decent.
The discussion of skill portfolios is familiar but well handled. Hambley Lovett separates job-specific skills from transferable ones and argues, persuasively, that the so-called soft skills are often the hardest to develop because they require self-awareness, empathy, and emotional regulation. This places her in the same neighborhood as “Radical Candor,” “Dare to Lead,” and “Crucial Conversations” – books that insist the interpersonal is operational. But she adds an important wrinkle: when you have been shaped by a toxic boss, your skill set includes not only what you can do, but what you now flinch from doing. Some readers will recognize this immediately: the way feedback becomes a threat; the way a calendar invite triggers dread; the way a neutral Slack message can send you spiraling into interpretation. The book’s strength is that it does not treat this as irrational. It treats it as conditioning – and therefore treatable.
Perhaps the most psychologically acute section is the one on rebuilding trust after a toxic boss. Hambley Lovett introduces a “trust meter” continuum, from highly distrusting to highly trusting, and then shows how a low-trust stance can warp onboarding: keeping your cards close to your chest, mistaking rigid boundaries for safety, sliding into perfectionism as a defense against being shamed. She describes how hypervigilance can become a new cage: you have left the toxic boss, but you are still organizing your life around their possible return. This is where the book quietly brushes up against trauma literature. Hambley Lovett never forgets she is writing about work, not war, but she understands that the body does not sort harm into tidy categories. Readers who have found illumination in “The Body Keeps the Score,” “Burnout,” or Lori Gottlieb’s “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” will recognize the emphasis on nervous system recovery and the slow rebuilding of self-trust.
The “Resources” section makes explicit what the rest of the book implies: recovery may require community and professional support. Hambley Lovett points readers toward mentorship tactics, online communities focused on workplace bullying, and a grounded overview of therapy modalities, from EMDR to CBT, ACT, and somatic approaches. The inclusion of crisis lines is sober and appropriate. It signals that the author takes seriously the ways work can become a mental health emergency, not merely a morale issue. And it quietly aligns the book with a current-world shift: mental health at work is no longer just an HR initiative, but a public health conversation.
There are, inevitably, limitations. The book’s voice is firmly North American and, at times, corporate in its assumptions about HR departments, benefits, and mobility. Readers in precarious employment, in the gig economy, or in sectors with weaker protections may find some prescriptions hard to enact. The taxonomy of toxic bosses, while useful, can also tempt the reader into diagnosis as a substitute for decision. Naming the persona is not the same as changing the conditions. Hambley Lovett largely resists the trap, but the reader may still feel the pull: if I just identify the type, maybe I can outsmart it. Sometimes you cannot. Sometimes the only winning move is leaving.
Yet the book’s modesty is also part of its integrity. Hambley Lovett is not writing “Work Won’t Love You Back” or “Bullshit Jobs,” books that widen the lens until the workplace becomes cultural critique. She is closer, in spirit, to “The Good Enough Job” and to Robert Sutton’s blunt pragmatism in “The No Asshole Rule” and “The Asshole Survival Guide.” The aim is not to provide a theory of capitalism. The aim is to help a reader survive Tuesday, and then to help them build a better life than Tuesday allowed.
The book’s timeliness is not only cultural but legal-adjacent. As more jurisdictions debate stronger protections against bullying and as unions, employee resource groups, and whistleblowers test the limits of corporate accountability, Hambley Lovett’s emphasis on documentation and patterns reads like layperson due diligence. Her insistence on boundaries also feels like a counterspell to the era’s ambient urgency – the Slack ping, the “quick call,” the crisis that is never quite a crisis but always insists it must be handled now. The book does not pretend you can control an institution with a checklist. It does insist you can control your next step.
And on its own terms, “I Wish I’d Quit Sooner” succeeds. It refuses to glamorize suffering. It will not flatter you with the idea that enduring cruelty makes you noble. It urges you to be practical, to build evidence, to consult your body, to track patterns and turnover, and to treat your own career as worth protecting. It offers permission to prefer dignity to drama, clarity to chaos, steadiness to the addictive roller coaster of approval and punishment. If “quiet quitting” was ever a cultural shorthand for what happens when people stop offering their full selves to systems that do not protect them, Hambley Lovett’s book is the adult version of that conversation: not “do less,” but “do not volunteer your life for harm.”
If you are looking for a book that will dismantle capitalism, this is not it. If you are looking for a book that will tell you to manifest your way out of workplace cruelty, it refuses that, too. Instead, it offers something rarer: a vocabulary for what happened, a set of steps for what to do next, and permission to believe that leaving was not a failure of character but an act of self-preservation. The final feeling is not a revenge fantasy. It is a clearer horizon. You can imagine yourself, again, as someone whose life is larger than their job.
For a work that is, at its core, an applied guide, Hambley Lovett manages an unexpectedly literary feat: she restores personhood to the reader. In today’s workplace vernacular, that may sound almost radical. My rating: 83 out of 100.
September 10, 2025
I had just gotten out of a job with a toxic boss, so I grabbed this book to start reading right away. It certainly did not disappoint. Unfortunately, it also details statistics of how many of us have bad bosses, some more than one. I am in the 2+ category. This book did not really fit the profile of the previous boss, but I had an extremely bad experience a long time ago with a very toxic work environment and I suffered from every malady she mentions both during and after leaving. I wish I had this book then.
The book details the types of toxic boss personalities and ye gads, you can have more than one type (there are multiple examples where someone is working for a boss with 3+ of the personality types). There is also a detailed quiz to see how badly you are fairing under this person and ways to plan your escape. It also talks about if the boss makes the decision for you and lets you go and coping mechanisms for that.
I appreciated the journal prompts and while I am not feeling all the things this time, it would have made a lot of sense when I got out of that prior horrendous environment (still the WORST job I have ever had) and she details how it is possible to develop PTSD as a result of a poisonous work environment.
I appreciated all the research and examples the author uses, as well as the handy guide in the back to explain some things specifically that she did not want to bog down on in chapters. I think the best tool that is offered is the self-check up list after leaving your toxic boss. I think some people really need that to see how badly they were affected and how to get through it.,
I also was happy for the "how to spot a toxic boss" in the interview process so you hopefully don't repeat the same experience.
I think this is a book people should be aware of when they leave a terrible working environment so they can help themselves not feel small and hurt but empowered and ready to make positive changes.
My thanks to She Writes Press and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
The book details the types of toxic boss personalities and ye gads, you can have more than one type (there are multiple examples where someone is working for a boss with 3+ of the personality types). There is also a detailed quiz to see how badly you are fairing under this person and ways to plan your escape. It also talks about if the boss makes the decision for you and lets you go and coping mechanisms for that.
I appreciated the journal prompts and while I am not feeling all the things this time, it would have made a lot of sense when I got out of that prior horrendous environment (still the WORST job I have ever had) and she details how it is possible to develop PTSD as a result of a poisonous work environment.
I appreciated all the research and examples the author uses, as well as the handy guide in the back to explain some things specifically that she did not want to bog down on in chapters. I think the best tool that is offered is the self-check up list after leaving your toxic boss. I think some people really need that to see how badly they were affected and how to get through it.,
I also was happy for the "how to spot a toxic boss" in the interview process so you hopefully don't repeat the same experience.
I think this is a book people should be aware of when they leave a terrible working environment so they can help themselves not feel small and hurt but empowered and ready to make positive changes.
My thanks to She Writes Press and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Author
This is SUCH an important book to read, especially in this day & age as the landscape of work keeps changing and evolving, and not always in ways that benefits us ! (see: AI, layoffs, terrible economy......)
As someone in the super early stages of my career, I've felt like a fish out of water when trying to figure out where I want to work, what kind of work environment is the best for me, and how do I know if a place is a good fit or not. And a HUGE part of that involves knowing what a toxic boss is, how to identify one, and some useful (and not bridge burning LOL) ways I could potentially get out of a sticky situation like that before it ruins my health and my life.
Dr. Laura does an amazing job of laying out the information clearly, concisely, and most importantly, compassionately. It's comforting to read this book. It gives you hope. And you can learn from it no matter where you are in your career - early, mid, late, or even in retirement. I found myself reflecting about my previous bosses from jobs I worked when I was a teenager - turns out some of them WERE toxic, and I never connected the dots until I read Dr. Laura's personal stories and the ones from her research participants, and worked through the useful activities and checklists included in the book. Now it totally makes sense why I got burnt out, stressed, and dreaded coming to work. And now I feel better equipped to not only help myself, but help my friends & family when they also find themselves working for a toxic boss.
Thank you so much Dr. Laura for sharing this book, and your knowledge, with the world <3 HIGHLY recommend everyone to read this book - I promise you'll learn something!!
As someone in the super early stages of my career, I've felt like a fish out of water when trying to figure out where I want to work, what kind of work environment is the best for me, and how do I know if a place is a good fit or not. And a HUGE part of that involves knowing what a toxic boss is, how to identify one, and some useful (and not bridge burning LOL) ways I could potentially get out of a sticky situation like that before it ruins my health and my life.
Dr. Laura does an amazing job of laying out the information clearly, concisely, and most importantly, compassionately. It's comforting to read this book. It gives you hope. And you can learn from it no matter where you are in your career - early, mid, late, or even in retirement. I found myself reflecting about my previous bosses from jobs I worked when I was a teenager - turns out some of them WERE toxic, and I never connected the dots until I read Dr. Laura's personal stories and the ones from her research participants, and worked through the useful activities and checklists included in the book. Now it totally makes sense why I got burnt out, stressed, and dreaded coming to work. And now I feel better equipped to not only help myself, but help my friends & family when they also find themselves working for a toxic boss.
Thank you so much Dr. Laura for sharing this book, and your knowledge, with the world <3 HIGHLY recommend everyone to read this book - I promise you'll learn something!!
October 17, 2025
I received this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
This book is an amazing step-by-step resource for those dealing with a toxic boss.
It is great for helping people recognize that what they are dealing with is in fact NOT normal and gives them a road map to choosing the right path for themselves based on the available options.
I think this book would be a great read for anyone who is unhappy in their job or even vindication and closure for those who have dealt with a toxic boss in the past.
This book is an amazing step-by-step resource for those dealing with a toxic boss.
It is great for helping people recognize that what they are dealing with is in fact NOT normal and gives them a road map to choosing the right path for themselves based on the available options.
I think this book would be a great read for anyone who is unhappy in their job or even vindication and closure for those who have dealt with a toxic boss in the past.
January 20, 2026
Thank you to Goodreads for this e-copy of I wish I’d Quit Sooner by Laura Hambley Lovett in exchange for a honest review.This is a great practical guide for an employee who has to work with a terrible boss.It explains in a clear, concise manner how to plot your escape.It is very sad that employees are subjected to this unimaginable behavior but Dr Laura helps the reader help identify the boss’ behavior and offers effective strategies on how to remove yourself from this toxic environment.Great reading and help offered!
January 19, 2026
A great book for anyone who has experience with toxic authority figures.
Journal and other prompts help take action, it’s an easy read where the length of chapters help the book move along. Although it is difficult to reflect on past experiences with toxic bosses, this book validates those experiences and considers multiple factors such as physical and mental health, finances, etc.
It’s realistic and points readers towards action - I really appreciate that.
Journal and other prompts help take action, it’s an easy read where the length of chapters help the book move along. Although it is difficult to reflect on past experiences with toxic bosses, this book validates those experiences and considers multiple factors such as physical and mental health, finances, etc.
It’s realistic and points readers towards action - I really appreciate that.
January 16, 2026
Dr. Laura has created a practical guide for navigating a toxic boss. It interweaves self-reflection, practical strategies to manage and change your work situation, and personal stories to ensure you do not feel alone. Everyone will take something different out of this book, as there are multiple pathways rather than one predetermined solution.
February 12, 2026
Having worked as a senior Human Reources executive for many years, I've seen how a toxic boss can cause pain and undue suffering to employees. I love this book for how it offers guidance know how to identify the type of toxic boss you may be working under and give practical tips on your options to stay or leave.
January 14, 2026
This book is great for self-reflection and provides inspiration on what a great leader can be by dissecting the leader you don’t want to be. I especially liked the differentiation between Toxic Leadership and Difficult Bosses – neither of which I would want to be.
February 2, 2026
Well written and researched. The tone is studious, like you can trust the information the author is giving, while also being approachable.
I like hearing from real (anonymous) people. It's terrible how widespread our experiences are.
I like hearing from real (anonymous) people. It's terrible how widespread our experiences are.
January 11, 2026
I received this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
The title and the subject of this book really resonated with me as I’m still experiencing a highly toxic workplace which includes an extremely toxic boss and has led to me taking time off due to the impact on my mental and physical health particularly over a prolonged timeframe.
Although I could’ve done with the book sooner on my journey - especially how to look out for a toxic boss - I still found it useful and there were useful takeaways and strategies but perhaps more if was the sense of validation it gave me and knowing “it’s not me”. I also felt too that I would likely benefit from the physical copy when it’s released, as reading the Kindle version meant I couldn’t highlight pages and make notes.
It was great that the author is an experienced organisational psychology who has done/is doing a lot of research in this area but could also speak with authenticity because of her own lived experience of toxic bosses and workplaces.
I recommend this to anyone with any sort of interest in workplace culture and employee engagement but also so they’re equipped should they experience a toxic environment or need to support someone in navigating one.
I powered through the book in an evening and took a lot of screenshots and as I say am likely to purchase the book when it’s released.
Recommend!
The title and the subject of this book really resonated with me as I’m still experiencing a highly toxic workplace which includes an extremely toxic boss and has led to me taking time off due to the impact on my mental and physical health particularly over a prolonged timeframe.
Although I could’ve done with the book sooner on my journey - especially how to look out for a toxic boss - I still found it useful and there were useful takeaways and strategies but perhaps more if was the sense of validation it gave me and knowing “it’s not me”. I also felt too that I would likely benefit from the physical copy when it’s released, as reading the Kindle version meant I couldn’t highlight pages and make notes.
It was great that the author is an experienced organisational psychology who has done/is doing a lot of research in this area but could also speak with authenticity because of her own lived experience of toxic bosses and workplaces.
I recommend this to anyone with any sort of interest in workplace culture and employee engagement but also so they’re equipped should they experience a toxic environment or need to support someone in navigating one.
I powered through the book in an evening and took a lot of screenshots and as I say am likely to purchase the book when it’s released.
Recommend!
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