Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward

by Henry Cloud

Getting to the next level always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on. Growth itself demands that we move on. Without the ability to end things, people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them.

Being alive requires that we sometimes kill off things in which we were once invested, uproot what we previously nurtured, and tear down what we built for an earlier time.

Something about the leaders’ personal makeup gets in their way.

When we fail to end things well, we are destined to repeat the mistakes that keep us from moving on.

Learning how to do an ending well and how to metabolize the experience allows us to move beyond patterns of behavior that may have tripped us up in the past.

Pruning is a process of proactive endings.

The gardener intentionally and purposefully cuts off branches and buds that fall into any of three categories: 1. Healthy buds or branches that are not the best ones, 2. Sick branches that are not going to get well, and 3. Dead branches that are taking up space needed for the healthy ones to thrive.

Removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous.

If we accept the premise that pruning is necessary but still notice that we have an emotional misalignment with that premise, we will struggle to realize our vision of the future and our potential. But if you can become aware of your resistances and internal conflicts now, then you can begin to face them and work them through. If you have an intellectual antipathy to the concept of pruning, then I ask that you acknowledge that and agree to withhold judgment until you have read further.

“There is a big difference between hurt and harm,”

“We all hurt sometimes in facing hard truths, but it makes us grow.

Facing reality is usually not a damaging experience, even t...

“As a leader, you have got to redefine what positive and negative is. Positive is doing what is best and right for the business and for the people.

“It is sad but true that some people just cannot face the truth when it causes them discomfort, but that cannot be a reason that guides your decisions.

you have to know the standard you are pruning toward.

the growth goal that the company had was the standard.

forced the pruning moment. The pruning moment is that clarity of enlightenment when we become responsible for making the decision to either own the vision or not. If we own it, we have to prune. If we don’t, we have decided to own the other vision, the one we called average.

So step one for yourself or your business is naming the “rose”—in other words, defining the standard or goal you’re pruning toward.

If a GE business could not be number one or number two in its market, it would be cut. 2. Any business that was struggling (sick) would be “fixed, closed, or sold.” 3. Every year, GE would fire the bottom 10 percent of the work force. 4. Welch would get rid of the layers of bureaucracy in the company that slowed down communication, productivity, and ideas.

you always will have to choose between good and best.

Your attempts to fix should also include a realistic assessment of the potential for recovery and whether or not you are indulging in false hope.

Sometimes, the best thing a leader or anyone else can do is to give up hope in what they are currently trying.

How will you define success? and How will you measure it?

Define what you are shooting for, and then prune against that standard. That is when vision, goals, and even teams begin to take the shape that you desire.

The kind of pruning I’m talking about has to do with focus, mission, purpose, structure, and strategic execution.

Pruning is strategic. It is directional and forward-looking. It is intentional toward a vision, desires, and objectives that have been clearly defined and are measurable.

Make the endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life, instead of seeing it as a problem. Then and only then can you align yourself well with endings when they come. It has to do with your brain and how it works. If a situation falls within the range of normal, expected, and known, the human brain automatically marshals all available resources and moves to engage it. But if the brain interprets the situation as negative, dangerous, wrong, or unknown, a fight-or-flight response kicks in that moves us away from the issue or begins to resist it. Execution stops or automatically goes in the other direction. Put into the context of endings, if you see them as normal, expected, and even a good thing, you will embrace them and take action to execute them. You will see them as a painful gift. But if you see an ending as meaning “something is wrong if this has to happen,” you will resist them or fight them long past when they should be fought.

But, he was also able to admit when more effort was not going to bring about a different result.

first, accept life cycles and seasons; second, accept that life produces too much life, and third, accept that incurable illness and sometimes evil are part of life too.

Endings are easier to embrace and execute when you believe something normal is happening.

He cleaned the farm, getting rid of everything from the old business that would slow him down, including overhead and debt. He was truly making room for the new. That is what letting go looks like.

According to brain research and theory, we seem to have a capacity to really manage about 140 to 150 relationships.

I have watched well-meaning people literally waste years and millions of dollars trying to bring someone along who is not coming.

accept terminal illness and failure as a valid possibility. The best performers know how to fail well. They see it, accept it, and move on.

they are always wisely asking, “What kind of situation do I really have here?”

They know that if they execute the ending of one season’s tasks and get on to the next one’s, good things can occur. They know that if they cut some relationships and activities away, others will flourish. And they know that if they give up on trying to change someone who doesn’t want to change or is not ready, they will have helped that person get one step closer to seeing reality, and they will have freed themselves from the person’s negative patterns. So they take that step with love, certainty, and resolve.

It is time to realize that anytime pain is going nowhere fast, a few things must be occurring.

more times than we realize, we are not executing an ending because of internal factors, not external ones.

learned helplessness. It is a condition in which the person adapts to the misery because they feel that there is nothing they can do about it.

their focus was different. They did not spend their time and energy focusing on all of the things that were falling apart that they could do nothing about. Instead, they thought hard and fast about what they could do.

These are called by Seligman and others the three P’s. Events are processed in predictable, negative ways: first, as personalized (I am a bad salesperson); second, as pervasive (everything I do, or every aspect of the business, is bad); and third, as permanent (nothing is going to change).

Besides the negative thinking of the three P’s in the learned-helplessness model, I also saw a troubling pattern in some individuals—an even deeper sense of loss of control over things that were, in fact, still in their control.

Identify the internal maps that keep you from the endings you need to execute.

sometimes people get stuck in a type of misery in which they are prone more to inaction than action.

if your brain senses that something is the way it is supposed to be, it begins marshaling resources to initiate action. But if it senses that something is wrong, which registers as an “error,” it moves against or flees whatever it sees as wrong. That is why it is so important for you to have a worldview that sees seasons and life cycles as normal, so your brain will not register them as errors and fight them.

conflict-free aggression is energy that is free to take action, not hampered, so you can function.

having an abnormally high pain threshold, covering for others, believing that ending it means “I failed,” misunderstood loyalty, and codependent mapping.

Akin to having an abnormal pain threshold is the map that drives some people to take too much responsibility for others.

They often got to be so responsible in their “mapping” years because they were the superstars of families or other systems and learned that it all depended on them.

One of the most important aspects to any high performance is the ability to separate one’s personhood from any particular result.