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

by Henry Cloud

coming together of knowledge, understanding, insight, and discernment so that a person knows what is good and what to do.

Wisdom comes from experience, either the experience of others or of oneself.

The person who ultimately does well is the one who can learn from his own experience or the experience of others, make that learning a part of himself, and then deliver results from that experience base. And that requires being open to feedback.

When truth presents itself, the wise person sees the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments.

The mature person meets the demands of life, while the immature person demands that life meet her demands.

The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.

They always want the outside world to change instead of them.

the strategy with a foolish person is to stop talking and move to two important interventions: limits and consequences.

Consequences are often the next essential step.

The strategy for foolish people is simple: Quit talking about the problem and clearly communicate that because talking is not helping, you are going to take steps to protect what is important to you, the mission, or other people. Give limits that stop the collateral damage of their refusal to change, and where appropriate, give consequences that will cause them to feel the pain of their choice to not listen.

The necessary ending that you have to initiate with people caught in their own foolishness is to end the pattern.

Whenever someone is not taking responsibility, there are always consequences. The question is, Who is suffering the consequences?

The need and drive to do something about it must be transferred to that person, and that is done through having consequences that finally make him feel the pain instead of others. When he feels the pain, he will feel the need to change.

A problem is something in someone’s performance or behavior that you need to end; it is specific and objective and isolated.

A pattern exists when there are problems but they do not stand alone as isolated issues or occurrences. Instead, you can link many occurrences together to see that this person made a mistake on the big project because she didn’t get organized or do her research.

Necessary endings happen when you get to a “good hopelessness.” It is that moment when you see reality clearly and know you have to bring “what is” to an end.

If you have hope in someone who is in denial, that is usually misspent time, energy, and resources. At the same time, as we have seen, there can be hope for them if you do the right thing and create an ending, that is, stop enabling the pattern by implementing some limits and consequences.

Time is working either for you or against you in terms of your needed ending. If you are stalling or waiting, then you are tacitly agreeing to more of what you already have or worse. If you are not creating urgent energy toward an ending, you will have no movement. So to get past the inertia of the past and present, you need to do both: address the urgency and the stall.

you were not designed to cope but to thrive.

make the threat to our future as real in our minds as it is in reality.

Make your heart and mind feel the reality today that is surely coming tomorrow. And remember, both the hazards and the opportunities must be felt.

Whether in a business or a life, bringing the future misery into a very real experience today will create urgency.

If you are leading a change movement in a company, you must form power alliances, or what are often termed “powerful coalitions,” people who will be the influencers of change.

Who are your change agents, either for yourself or your company, for the endings that you need to make happen?

Human brains are designed to create what they see in the future. Our internal resources begin to align with that internal reality and create it.

We need structure to organize energy, contain it, and direct it toward an effect.

Getting the best price for what you do not value is not the issue. Getting to what you do value is the issue. So, do it, no matter what, by a certain date. Time is the most important issue.

Set a deadline for someone to hear what your expectations and demands are and for her to respond, and let her know that if the date passes without action, you will create an ending.

I cannot have them putting their foot on the brake while I am putting mine on the accelerator.

a deadline without consequences is not much of a deadline. So promise consequences for making and missing the deadline, and deliver them.

Structure consists of time, plans, critical paths, milestones, deadlines, meetings, allocation and release of resources according to milestones, consequences for not meeting milestones, and other elements.

As a rule, the more immediate the feedback, the better the performance. Feedback helps create what well-known researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as flow.

At some point, if you are a leader, sometimes you have to lead, even when no one wants to follow.

they had two incompatible wishes.

Part of maturity is getting to the place where we can let go of one wish in order to have another. The immature mind “wants it all.” But the truth is that the most valuable things come with a cost. To win, we have to give up some things for others.

Which one am I willing to give up to have the other one?

“You are able to exercise the right choice because you are not overly attached to having it work out a particular way. Even though you want a particular result, you hold it loosely, do the right thing, and then don’t let your worry stand in the way.”

You can’t get attached to any outcome. If you do, you won’t ever be able to do what’s best for the health and future of the business. Because doing the right thing sometimes can threaten all potential outcomes.”

you have to be able to face losing some things you might want in order to be free to do the right thing. If you can’t, you are stuck.

What particular outcome are you unwilling to sacrifice to realize your vision of the future?

Later is one of the most abused drugs we have available to us.

• What real reason do you have for waiting?

The truth may be that you have already negotiated those realities a thousand times and if you could have fixed it by now, it would be fixed. To get over the resistance, you have to continually keep the whole picture right in front of your eyes. Stay focused on the entirety. “Yes, he is talented, and to have his talent, we have to also have an awful culture. Do we want both of those?”

As you get closer to the decision, do you find yourself focusing on the positives and already anticipate missing those aspects? • Do you forget or lose sight of all of the negatives? • Do you minimize the negatives?

It means we are willing to deal with the negatives to have the positives. That is commitment. Conversely, if we look at it all and don’t love it, there is an ending needed, because something about the negatives is a deal breaker.

Sometimes people put up resistance because your decision is going to affect them in some way and they do not want that change.

Whether in business or personal life, when you do something difficult but worthy, it confronts people with their own lives.

Skeptics oppose change because they have real questions and problems with the change, but they are open to being convinced.

they are entrenched against change and are not open to having their minds changed under any circumstances.

If you are in an organization or even an extended family or social circle, NoNos will by definition be against the change that you are trying to make. Understand that, and deal with it as the obstacle it truly is.