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

To have a beginning, something must end. It’s how we recognize, discern, and handle those endings that make all the difference. Dr. Henry Cloud, leadership coach, clinical psychologist, speaker, and bestselling author, guides us through this process in his book Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward.

Endings are a natural part of life, but not all endings are one and the same. Dr. Cloud differentiates between proactive endings and those forced upon us such as a firing, death, or illness, as well as endings that are successful or unsuccessful, in part, based on our personal view of endings. Reflection questions throughout the book help us get honest about how we really feel about endings and what internal maps we are unconsciously using that lead us astray. Cloud uses easy-to-understand neuroscience examples to explain how our brains resist change and acclimate to pain which diminishes the sense of urgency for endings.

Through numerous personal and business examples (e.g., the American Auto Industry, GE, Motorola, and Amazon), Dr. Cloud also explores the tricky middle ground that often muddies the waters leaving us uncertain if we should give something our continued time or create a necessary ending. For instance, when is hope real, and when is it false? Is it possible that a loved one or employee will change, or will they repeat the same mistakes? What if a business is producing but not in an overabundance? Are the positive aspects of a relationship enough to overshadow the negative ones?

Dr. Cloud argues that by asking the right questions, reflecting on past endings, facing hard conversations, and learning strategies to deal with internal and external resistance, we can normalize endings and see them as positive and necessary.

Endings Done Well

“When needed endings are done well, people succeed. When they're done poorly or not at all, people don't” (6).

Growth

“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” (7).

Patterns

“When we fail to end things well, we are destined to repeat the mistakes that keep us from moving on. We choose the same kind of dysfunctional person or demoralizing job again. Not learning our lessons and proactively dealing with them, we make the same business or personal mistakes over and over. 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” (12).

Pruning

“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” (15-16).

Good vs Bad Pain

 “… creating an ending might cause a little hurt, like pulling a tooth. But it is good pain. It gives life to you or your business….But there is another kind of pain, one that should not be embraced, one that you want to do everything in your power to end. The pain I am referring to here is misery that goes nowhere. That is not normal, and when it happens, it is time to wake up” (53).

“…you might have become acclimated to the misery in some way. You have gotten so used to it that you no longer feel it as pain but view it as normal. Pain by its nature is a signal that something is wrong, and action is required” (53).

Real Hope vs False Hope

“Hope is based not only on desire, but also on real, objective reasons to believe that more time will help” (89).

The Past and The Future

“…the best predictor of the future is the past” (93).

Urgency of Pain 

“The usual problem with ‘living in hell but knowing the names of all the streets’ is that you are not in enough current pain to create urgency. We get comfortable with our misery, as we find ways to medicate ourselves, delude ourselves, disassociate our feelings, or get enough distance from the problem that it does not touch us directly. CEOs and other leaders, for example, can often stay far enough ‘above’ the real problems in the trenches that they do not feel the urgency to change” (151).

No Attachment 

“This is a fundamental truth about endings: 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” (177).