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

by Henry Cloud

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you make a move down a new path, obstacles will come as a result. Getting things done is hard, or more people would be doing it. So accept the fact that endings are difficult and hard to implement. You will be going through new waters, and there will be waves. Big bumpy ones. It takes courage and perseverance to keep going.

“And his decision is whether or not he wants to be that person. That is a decision that only he can make, not you. So tell him that. Tell him what you want, and then tell him he gets to decide if he wants to be that person and be with you or not.

part of it was the clarity of just saying what she wanted. But another part was the relief of not being the “bad guy” by rejecting someone she loved or feeling that she was judging him. She did not want to judge him, as he was truly a good guy, and she loved and respected so much about him. She was tired of being in the position of feeling like the nagging judge.

her standards would be the judge.

Self-selection for yourself works the same way. Set the standard:

is a good idea to know how much of your life or resources you want to spend on something before you lose them all. What matters is that you are in charge, and sometimes having a standard to self-select against takes the decision out of your head and makes it objective, similar to Jack Welch’s “Be number one or two in the market, or fix it, sell it, or shut it down.”

“What have you heard me say?” is a good clarifying way to do this. “I want to make sure that we are going away with a good understanding of each other.” If he comes back with a distortion, you can clarify at that point. “No, I am not saying that you are bad in some way. I am just saying that I need to make this change for the reasons I have said. I hope you can hear it that way and not as an attack on you. Are you clear on that?” There are a lot of different ways to do this, and helping the person correct his distortions can benefit him and also prevent a misinterpretation of what was said. Leave the conversation with hope and encouragement as well. “I hope that you can do well in the future and that you can take this experience in a way that will help you and not hurt you. That is my wish for you.”

So why does that matter? Pure and simple: energy and investment. Whatever you are going to build in your life or your business, it is going to come through investment of energy by you and your people in the new fill-in-the-blank. And the only energy you can invest is available energy. To make it available, you have to withdraw it from something else. The technical word for that in psychology is to decathect. Cathexis is the investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, an object, or an idea. So decathexis is the process of taking it back. The only way to do that is to grieve for what has been invested in before so you can move forward.

When people do not feel their feelings, positive and negative, about something significant that has ended, they will remain tethered to it in some way.

Unlike emotions that do not take us anywhere and in fact can keep us stuck, the feelings of grief have forward motion to them.

The danger when people do not face their grief is twofold. First, to keep from facing it, they sometimes continue to beat a dead horse, hanging on to false hope or staying angry at what is past. They get stuck in protesting reality. Second, denying the grief often leads people to do strange things on the rebound, which are really attempts to keep from feeling the grief involved in letting go. It is a defense mechanism.

The truth is that to the degree we were invested in something that’s ending, we will have to work the grief through our system in order to be ready for whatever is next.

To metabolize experience, whether in significant relationships or in business, you have to do what your body does with food: keep what is usable to you, and eliminate what is not.

But left behind consciously, as opposed to just denied and forgotten.

Different people eliminate crummy feelings in different ways, but in general you need to talk them out, cry if you have to, feel your feelings, express them, forgive, and let it all go.

What situation are you ending, or going to end, about which you should do some “metabolizing” work? • What project, strategy, loss, or other initiative should you and your team spend some “metabolizing” time on?

Webster defines sustainable as referring to “a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.”

The lesson: if you are doing something that is using you or your resources in a way that is depleting you or damaging you, you can’t keep it going. The reason? You are not just getting tired; you or your resource is getting depleted. You or your resource is being cannibalized. In short: you will run out.

Are you in a state that is eating your heart, mind, soul, or energy in such a way that you are headed for some sort of crash or burnout?

What I am talking about is a passive and negative state that you find yourself in over time, a state with no benefits and nothing but diminishing returns.

ask yourself where you are in the timeline of sustainability.

First, you have to do the very, very best you can do at each step along the way.

“Second, when it is time to have the courage to take the next step, you have to do that and not be afraid. I am not talking about being risky or making stupid moves. But I am talking about not being afraid to take bold steps when it is obviously time. That takes courage and faith, but you have to do that when it is time.

third, return to the first thing I said. Pour yourself into where you find yourself and make it all that it can be. And if it was a wrong step, that won’t matter, because you would have performed well, learned some things in the process, and people will notice your performance and will value it. That is why you won’t have to worry about tomorrow, because you will have done so well yourself, even if it is a bad deal or outcome. People will know from watching you. And you will be ready for what is next.

The endings and the great new beginnings are somehow linked together.

no matter how great a vision or a strategy, the leader must get it all done with and through people.

A boundary is a structure that determines what will exist and what will not.

The real problem is getting the people to do what it takes to make the plan work.