This week has got me thinking about the importance of endings. I’ve recently experienced a number of endings and it’s interesting to reflect on why they matter and what constitutes ending something well. In the space of the last month, I’ve finished a contract, ended a year-long mentoring relationship, had my last coaching session and graduated from an 8-week training course. It’s been intense, but here’s what the endings have taught me:
Do Your Endings Justice
You can have the greatest time, but you need to end it well to do the experience justice. In the same way that you safeguard time at the start to do introductions for events, team building and social contracts for new groups and project plans for agreed outputs, timelines and checkpoints we need to give the same time and space to how we close events, relationships and work. Without doing that means an ending can feel premature, rushed or unsatisfiying or worse there’s a risk it can taint your whole experience. We need to honour our endings as well as we do our beginnings.
Endings Aren’t Always Absolute
Some endings don’t have to be complete endings. In our final mentoring session, my mentee and I agreed we’d try and meet for a real-life coffee when he was next my way to see family. While the mentoring relationship is officially closing down via the charity we were matched through, we both want to stay in touch. A year of conversations means we’ve got to know each other fairly well, I’m invested in his charity’s progress and I’d consider him a friend. I’d love it if I could help again in the future and so with this particular work, it’s only an official ending.
Reflection and Feedback Are Vital
A core part of doing your ending justice is reflecting and feeding back on the journey – was it what you expected? How did it help/support you? How did it challenge you? What have you learnt? What would you change? Would you do it again/recommend it? Unless you (and all those involved) take the time to genuinely and honestly think over what happened, it’s so much harder to celebrate on the successes, acknowledge the challenges and cement the learning.
All Endings are Beginnings
The author Mitch Albom wrote, “all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time,” and it’s a great way to frame an ending. Some endings leave us sad, some leave us relieved, some leave us inspired and some leave us unfulfilled, but all are a line in the sand for the start of something new. Stepping over the other side might be easier for some things than others but it’s necessary for all. How can we take what we’ve experienced, felt, learnt, loved, hated and wondered about into the next phase? We need to understand how to make that experience count.
There’s no doubt that endings matter. We need to give them the credit they deserve, for providing the educational, emotional and developmental pause that keeps us moving forward well.
Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash