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

by Henry Cloud

the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today.

the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today.

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.

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.

Pruning is a process of proactive endings.

In business and in life, executing the three types of necessary endings described above is what characterizes people who get results. (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.

When pruning is not happening, average or worse will occur.

We need it when things are going well and when things are not going well; it is a natural part of life’s seasons and a requirement for growth.

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

Facing reality is usually not a damaging experience, even though it can hurt.”

you have to know the standard you are pruning toward.

It is in complete alignment with the reality that both businesses and individuals will begin, gather, and have more activities than they can reasonably sustain.

if no one ever leaves your organization or your life, then you are in some sort of denial and enabling some really sick stuff all over the place.

You can’t prune toward anything if you don’t know what you want.

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.

All of your precious resources—time, energy, talent, passion, money—should only go to the buds of your life or your business that are the best, are fixable, and are indispensable.

Even the most gifted people and leaders are subject to feeling conflicted about ending things, so they resist that moment of truth.

Make the endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life, instead of seeing it as a problem.

That can kill a business that could have had a very good life if someone had seen that sowing had to stop and operating had to begin.

more than capturing value from what was left, the real task was to get to a field that had some harvest in its future.

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

Pain by its nature is a signal that something is wrong, and action is required.

the productive people did not think in a learned-helplessness way. Their internal software was more optimistic, seeing a “nonsale” as just one more number to get past to get to the one that was going to buy and sustaining other such optimistic-thinking paradigms.

Let’s look at some of the most common maps that keep necessary endings from happening: having an abnormally high pain threshold, covering for others, believing that ending it means “I failed,” misunderstood loyalty, and codependent mapping.

successful leaders are bigger than any individual outcome;

There is a difference between helping someone who is disabled, incapable, or otherwise infirm versus helping someone who is resisting growing up and taking care of what every adult (or child, for that matter) has to be responsible for: herself or himself. When you find yourself in any way paying for someone else’s responsibilities, not only are you stuck with a delayed ending, but you are probably harming that person.

successful people and successful leaders all have one thing in common: They get in touch with reality.

what is not working is not going to magically begin working.

The awareness of hopelessness is what finally brings people to the reality of the pruning moment.

Nothing mobilizes us like a firm dose of reality.

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.

What reason, other than the fact that I want this to work, do I have for believing that tomorrow is going to be different from today?