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

by Henry Cloud

endings are a natural part of the universe, and your life and business must face them, stagnate, or die. They are an inherent reality.

my hope is that you will be comfortable and confident in seeing, negotiating, and even celebrating some endings that may be the door to a future even brighter than you could have imagined.

The first was exhilaration, the kind of energy that he knew related to building a future that had life in it. The second emotion was fear, related to what would happen if he actually went through those doors to the future. But he also noticed something else: the heaviness was gone. It had been replaced with another feeling, a new kind of determination to face reality, which was simultaneously motivating and scary. He knew that to cross that divide, to face the fear and jump over that canyon, would require doing some hard things, relationally and emotionally.

Why endings? Whether we like it or not, endings are a part of life. They are woven into the fabric of life itself, both when it goes well, and also when it doesn’t.

On the good side of life, for us to ever get to a new level, a new tomorrow, or the next step, something has to end. Life has seasons, stages, and phases. For there to be anything new, old things always have to end, and we have to let go of them. Infancy gives rise to toddlerhood, and must be forever shunned in order to get to the independence that allows a child to thrive. Later, childhood itself must be given up for people to become the adults that they were designed to be.

Endings are also an important factor in our personal lives. There are relationships that should go away, practices and phases that must be relinquished, and life stages that should come to an end to open up the space for the next one.

A breakup, an ending of some friendships or activities, or an unplugging from some commitments often signals the beginning of a whole new life. It is a necessary step I refer to as pruning, a concept that we will examine in more depth in chapter 2.

In the personal realm, we can get stuck in situations or relationships that are hurtful, problematic, or toxic and must be ended. Or sometimes it is not relationships we need to end but behaviors—destructive patterns and practices that hold us back. In many contexts, until we let go of what is not good, we will never find something that is good. The lesson: good cannot begin until bad ends.

Endings are crucial, but we rarely like them. Hence the problem.

The economic crisis gave them the push they needed to do what they should have done much sooner. In the months following the meltdown, many leaders told me things like this: “Some of this crisis was good for us. These are changes we should have made years ago.”

Somewhere along the line, we have not been equipped with the discernment, courage, and skills needed to initiate, follow through, and complete these necessary endings. We are not prepared to go where we need to go. So we do not clearly see the need to end something, or we maintain false hope, or we just are not able to do it. As a result, we stay stuck in what should now be in our past.

There are also the endings that are forced upon us, endings we do not choose but that we cannot work through very well either. As a result, we remain in pain or stuck, unable to pursue a new phase in life. These endings include divorce, being fired or laid off, death of a loved one, disintegration of a friendship, chronic illness, and so on. We do not choose these endings; they are thrust upon us by people we have trusted or sometimes by truly horrible events in life. If we are not prepared or have had too many losses before, these endings can render us broken, depressed, and floundering, sometimes for years.

Equip you to diagnose when a business or a relationship has hope of getting better and when it should end;

Bring endings into the common language of your workplace so that pruning and continuous improvement become part of the culture;

Rosebushes and other plants produce more buds than the plant can sustain. The plant has enough life and resources to feed and nurture only so many buds to their full potential; it can’t bring all of them to full bloom. In order for the bush to thrive, a certain number of buds have to go. The caretaker constantly examines the bush to see which buds are worthy of the plant’s limited fuel and support and cuts the others away. He prunes them. Takes them away, never to return. He ends their role in the life of the bush and puts an end to the bush’s having to divert resources to them.

In the simple word pruning is the central theme of what a necessary ending is all about: Removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous.

(1) If an initiative is siphoning off resources that could go to something with more promise, it is pruned. (2) If an endeavor is sick and is not going to get well, it is pruned. (3) If it’s clear that something is already dead, it is pruned. This is the threefold formula for doing well in almost every arena of life.

are you only achieving average results in relation to where you or your business or team is supposed to be? In other words, given your abilities, resources, opportunities, etc., are you reaching your full potential, or are you drifting toward a middle that is lower than where you should be if you were getting the most from who you are and what you have? When pruning is not happening, average or worse will occur.

“There is a big difference between hurt and harm,” I said. “We all hurt sometimes in facing hard truths, but it makes us grow. It can be the source of huge growth. That is not harmful. Harm is when you damage someone. Facing reality is usually not a damaging experience, even though it can hurt.”

When pruning a rosebush, the first step is to ask, “What does a rose look like?” In other words, you have to know the standard you are pruning toward. The gardener knows what a healthy bud, branch, or bloom looks like and prunes with that standard in mind. The same thing is true in business and life—we have to have a good definition of what we want the outcome to look like and prune toward that.

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. It is a moment of truth that we encounter almost every day in many, many decisions.

both businesses and individuals will begin, gather, and have more activities than they can reasonably sustain. Some of those activities may be good, but they are taking up resources that your best ones need. So you always will have to choose between good and best. This is especially tough for some creative people, causing them a lack of focus. They create more than they can focus on and feed, they are attached to every idea as if they were all equal, and they try to keep them all alive. Instead of a to-do list, they have a to-do pile. It goes nowhere fast.

Sometimes, the best thing a leader or anyone else can do is to give up hope in what they are currently trying. As we read in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to give up. Wise people know when to quit. Winners don’t throw good money after bad. Or as the song says, they “know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” Welch’s phrase to “fix, close, or sell” clearly implies that there will be diagnostic criteria that will force a pruning moment. Some people have a mantra of “fix, fix, or fix,” but they never do because that branch or bud or person is just not going to be fixed, period. It’s time to move on.

In your business and in your life, don’t just “cut back” and think that you have pruned. 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. If you have that, you know what a rose is, and pruning will help you get one of true beauty.

Let’s look at three organizing principles that will help you make endings both necessary and normal: 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. Taken together, these three principles will help you to make peace with endings, so that when their time has come, you will be able to do what you need to do.

Many marriages, for example, fail because the couple does not make the shift from spring to summer. Spring, the sowing time, is new, exciting, forward-looking, risky, stretching, and enlarging of both people. But after a while, the relationship has to be tended to—the tasks of summer. Some people do not make that shift, wanting the sowing to continue, and they become disillusioned, or in the alpha-male version, continue to sow elsewhere. Serial sowing becomes a pattern, and over a number of years, no relationship equity, no trust, is ever built. If they could see that sowing ends and the work of tending begins, they could harvest an incredible relationship that lasts for many more seasons.

In the language of Ecclesiastes, are there situations in business or in life where you are trying to birth things that should be dying? Trying to heal something that should be killed off? Laughing at something that you should be weeping about? Embracing something (or someone) you should shun? Searching for an answer for something when it is time to give up? Continuing to try to love something or someone when it is time to talk about what you hate?

Many people wish for a different universe than the one in which we live. They want one where every day is harvest time and there are no long laborious summer months to go through in order to get there. And when the harvest is ripe and they are thriving, they want no approaching winters where they see that the harvest is over and a cold death is looming. Also, they want a world where they have no limits. They want to believe that they have enough time and energy to gather people, products, and activities infinitely and never have to end any of them. They do not want it to be true that at some point, they run out of time and energy and have to make hard choices. They want a limitless life where time and space are not realities. And they want a world where every person is committed to being good and getting better. In this world, if they try to help someone long enough, that person will improve, wake up, and get it. They do not want this universe, the one we really live in, where some people just don’t change and still others truly want to hurt you. But this is the only universe we have, and in it all three of these realities exist.

In a learned-helplessness model, the brain begins to interpret events in a negative way, thus reinforcing its belief that “all is bad.” For instance, when someone doesn’t get a sale, it means “I am a loser, the whole business is bad, and it isn’t going to change.” 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). You can easily see why this leads to helplessness and inactivity.

I have seen many leaders drive companies downward in a relentless, stubborn drive to make a particular vision or strategy succeed, or even a person, so they would not feel like or be labeled a failure. In reality they became much more of a failure because of their failure to fail well. Failing well means ending something that is not working and choosing to do something else better.

you were designed to do proactive endings, developmentally, throughout life. But if you had many painful endings or dysfunctional maps of endings in your formative years, you might have difficulty with them now.

The awareness of hopelessness is what finally brings people to the reality of the pruning moment. It is the moment when they wake up, realize that an ending must occur, and finally feel energized to do it. Nothing mobilizes us like a firm dose of reality. Whether it is finally getting an addict to hit bottom and end a destructive pattern or getting a CEO in front of a bankruptcy judge to force the restructuring that he has been avoiding, only reality gets us to do difficult things.

Hope is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. With hope, we can endure almost anything, and certainly more than if we lose it or don’t have it to begin with. In short, hope keeps us going. And that is the problem. When it comes to seeing reality, almost nothing gets in the way like a hope distortion, in either direction.

In that case, it is hope that keeps us going down a road that has no realistic chance of being the right road or making what we want come to pass. In a false reality, hope is the worst quality you can have!

But it only came about because she got to the hopeless moment of her former way of operating. So sometimes hopeless can be about just getting rid of the way that we were going about something, not about the something itself. But we can’t get to the new hope of the new plan if we don’t face the reality that what we have been doing is not working.

In the absence of real, objective reasons to think that more time is going to help, it is probably time for some type of necessary ending.

But if you can get to the wonderful virtue of hopelessness by seeing that there is no reason to believe that tomorrow is going to be any different from today, then you finally have gotten to reality. It is hopeless to continue to do what you are doing, expecting different results. That kind of hopelessness is great. It is the doorway to getting on the right track.

So here are the first questions to ask yourself about the anatomy of hope, no matter whether you are assessing a person or some aspect of business: • What has the performance been so far? • Is it good enough? • Is there anything in place that would make it different? • If not, am I willing to sign up for more of the same? Those four questions may get you to see reality clearly and, if answered truthfully, could keep you from going down a road of certain failure—the failure of the past.

We wrongly put our hope in some promise, belief, or wish that the person expresses, but ignore the clear reality of who they actually are. I don’t mean this in a negative or pejorative way at all, but in a reality-oriented way. The reality is that the person has not produced so far, and unless something changes, the future that you can expect is more of the past. Sorry or becoming committed does not make Jim Carrey a great golfer, or make Jack Nicklaus funny.

Recommitment does not make a person who is unsuited for a particular position suited for it all of a sudden. Promises by someone who has a history of letting you down in a relationship mean nothing certain in terms of the future.

It is not irrational to listen to a crazy idea from a proven sane performer. It is often irrational to listen to a seemingly good idea from a proven nonperformer.

Here are nine objective factors to help you determine whether you can have hope that tomorrow will be any different from today: verifiable involvement in a proven change process, additional structure, monitoring systems, new experience and skills, self-sustaining motivation, admission of need, the presence of support, skilled help, and some prior or current success.

Change must be structured for many reasons, but one is the way the brain works. Old patterns get reinforced unless a new discipline is introduced to override the old patterns. People who have never exercised on their own because of a lack of self-discipline cannot be trusted to all of a sudden begin to get in shape because the doctor says they need to. They usually need the structure of regular times with a trainer or a class in order to make the program sustainable. New brain patterns must be developed from outside structure.

To have hope that people are truly going to change, you must have an admission from them that they really need to change. They must see that they have a problem and own the problem.

What you want to hear from someone is not only “I have a problem and need to change,” but also “I need help and am looking for it.” Taken together, these statements are hopeful, but one without the other is not. Someone who admits to a problem and is not getting help is stuck, and someone who is getting help but then always tries to convince the helper or the coach that she really doesn’t have an issue is equally hopeless, at least for the time being. Change requires both.

All successful systems of change involve a strong social-support component.

Conversely, if someone desires change but is still hanging around people who work against that change, the risk is much greater. An addict must, for example, lose the phone numbers of his addict friends. A nonperformer must shun other nonperformers. In the same ways that we worry about whom our kids hang around with, we need to worry about it in the change process for adults as well. This is another good reason to prune the nonperformers out of a company, as other people “catch” the sickness. And it is a good reason for leaders to make sure that the people they are trying to develop spend a lot of time around high-performers.

In some situations, we can expect enormous change in a short time with specific interventions. For example, I recently worked with a VP who had a horrible track record with direct reports. What I found was that he simply had never been taught how to talk to people in difficult conversations, and with a few months of coaching, he had turned around some key relationships. But in other kinds of situations, especially where long-standing personality issues are involved, change is a process. So, to have hope, you must have patience with people making significant changes.

So the truth was that there had been hope, but we just could not see it at the time. But why? Why was there hope and not just a wish? The reason that our stalled enterprise was able to gain steam was similar to a law of physics: entropy increases, or things get worse over time, in a closed system. But if you open the system up and bring in a new source of energy and a template or a structure of truth to give direction to the energy, things can turn around. Entropy can be reversed. That is what happened, there was new truth to give direction to the energy that we were pouring into the enterprise. The wisdom of the highly experienced health-care industry professionals gave us direction, structure, and a path. Everything reversed course and got better. They added what we did not have. So the lesson here is this: you can have objective hope if you are bringing some new knowledge, wisdom, or know-how to the situation. Obviously if things are not working, you need a second opinion, some new ideas, some knowledge that is not present. Without that, you may only be wishing. But if you really are bringing new wisdom to bear on a situation that is hopeless, you might have good reason to have true, objective hope.

If you have energy without intelligence, it will be wasted and not go toward a direction or a path. But likewise, intelligence or a plan without energy is not going anywhere at all. Even the best-laid plans will stagnate without a force driving them. So the relevant diagnostic question regarding when to have hope is Where is the energy going to come from to change things? I have seen so many situations where there could be very real reasons for hope, where there is great wisdom, intelligence, and planning, but the energy component is under-resourced or not thought of at all. You need new infusions of energy toward the change process that you have decided upon.