Embrace the Grief: The Importance of Metabolizing Necessary Endings
Moe Girkins, a former AT&T executive, is the CEO of Zondervan Publishers, a division of HarperCollins (my publisher). When I told her I was writing a book on necessary endings and how difficult but important they are, she told me a story.
“I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “I saw this at AT&T when I was there. I had to oversee the closing of a company we owned. It had been there for decades, and the people had invested their lives there. When we had to shut it down, I knew we had to do it right.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“Well, I had a funeral,” she said.
“A funeral?” I asked.
“Yes, exactly,” she said. “A real ceremony to say good-bye.”
“What did that look like?”
“Well, we got everyone together and told stories, reminisced, and cried. We celebrated the past and said good-bye to it. And we buried a time capsule.”
“A time capsule?”
“Yes. We asked everyone to put something in the time capsule and told them that we would bury it on the site. The building was going away, and we wanted them to feel that although the business was ending, we would celebrate what they had all done over the years and preserve it for the future. It was really healthy, and it allowed them to say good-bye, leave it behind, and move on to the next stage.
“I knew that they had had so much invested in it that if we did not allow them to have a proper good-bye, they would not be able to move on. People can’t really disinvest themselves and move on unless they say good-bye to what has been. They need that sense of closure. And once they had that, it was amazing how they were able to go through the transition. But without it, I don’t think it would have happened as well. It was very important.”
Smart move, I thought. Pretty good for a non-psychologist, and certainly a sign of a good leader. Why? The reason is basic physics. If you have emotional and other energy invested in something, when you pull that out, and let go, you are going to feel it. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so if you make a move to end something you are invested in, there will be an impact. And if you do not deal with those feelings, you are going to have to do some funny things to get around them.
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.
The grieving process is a mental and emotional letting go. What that means is to face the reality that it is over, whatever it is, and to feel the feelings involved in facing that reality. It means to come out of the denial and numbness emotionally and feel whatever you feel. The reason that helps, though, is that grief has movement to it. It goes somewhere. It goes forward. Feeling the anger helps get the protest out of the way, and feeling the sadness helps move the letting go further along. It gets people unstuck. 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.
That is why the feelings involved in grief are unique. Unlike emotions that do not take us anywhere and in fact can keep us stuck, the feelings of grief have forward motion to them. When you feel grief, you are saying, “I am looking this reality right in the face and dealing with it, the reality that this [whatever this is] is over. Finished. Grief also means I am getting ready for what is next, because I am finishing what is over.”
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.
I once was in a consulting session with an executive team whose members were confused as they were charting their future. They were particularly troubled by the rabbit trails they felt their CEO had taken them down several times.
“What were those?” I asked. They said that he had come up with these “big visions” a few times and steered the billion-dollar enterprise in a direction that got them off mission and diverted a lot of resources that they really needed.
“There was project,” they said. “And then there was the whole debacle. And after that, there was the strategy.”
Each one had been a disaster and had taken a lot of money, time, and people. Then I had a thought.
“When were these, and what else was going on?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” they asked me back.
I elaborated. “What years did these happen in and what was going on in between, before, and after?”
What we found was amazing. On the big whiteboard in the boardroom, I constructed a chart that was more than revealing. We did a timeline over fifteen years, and an astounding pattern emerged. Each time something did not go well that the CEO was really emotionally invested in, immediately thereafter he would launch one of the initiatives that had been a big problem. In other words, to deal with a downturn in normal operations, disappointing results, or failure, instead of dealing with that loss and the grief involved in it, the CEO would grasp a “rebound relationship” with a new vision. It is the business version of the person who loses a lover, and instead of processing the grief, immediately jumps into a rebound relationship. You have seen how that works out, usually not good.
The reason is that the new whatever is chosen out of need, not merit. The person rushes to something new to avoid feeling the grief, disappointment, and loss. He idealizes the new but seldom thinks about the long term in those instances. He is just thinking, What can I do that feels better than I feel right now?
The discussion led to some important coaching with the executive team as to how to identify this tendency in their leader and how to work with it when it emerged. It also underscored to them, as it should to us, the necessity of “metabolizing” our losses, including endings. 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. In this instance, to avoid that working-through process, the CEO was just getting active for no truly good reason.
So, just like Moe Girkins, treat the endings with respect. Memorialize them, if appropriate. Whatever it takes to get the needed closure, do it. These symbols can help to make an ending easier. When someone dies, we have a ceremony, a funeral, to say good-bye. We even at times all put a bit of dirt on the grave, or toss some of the ashes into the ocean. The act symbolizes so much to us: the love we shared with someone, the value that we had for them and they for us, the celebration of a life well lived, and the psychic space to satisfy our very real need to feel our sorrow. Symbols and symbolic events do a lot to help us get our mind around an ending.
The good-bye party, the good-bye lunch to launch someone into their next season, or on the negative side of the equation, even the burning of the divorce papers—all play a part in helping the two sides of the brain to embrace and process what has actually happened. In significant endings, you must face your grief, and sometimes symbols help to do that.
Metabolize the Ending to Your Benefit
Joe was leaving a company that he had started five years before. Initially, the business had gone very well. It was bought out by a private equity group, which left him in place as the CEO. But slowly the relationship between him and the investors hit the skids, and after another year, the investors began to wind down his role and move him out. It was a lot of pain for both sides, but fortunately his position as founder was strong enough to help him get out in a good position, at least financially. Because of that, he felt pretty successful.
With his sails somewhat full of wind, he hit the streets looking for backers for his next deal. He was ready to go. But when we met, I had a different perspective.
“Joe, I don’t think you are ready for your next deal, at least not yet,” I said.
“Why not?” He pushed back. “I think you have to go when the momentum is there, and with this payout following the purchase, I think the buzz is pretty good right now.”
“That is the problem,” I said. “You probably could get a deal. And you would make all the same mistakes you made in the last one, and I don’t want you to do that. We need to do an autopsy.”
“An autopsy?”
“Yep. That is where you dissect the body to see what killed it, and we need to do that with you,” I told him.
The conversation got really interesting after that, as he had never really thought that there was much to be harvested from past experience, especially ones that didn’t go well. He was a “shake it off and move on” kind of guy. So when I said that I wanted to look at all aspects of the last deal, especially the parts that did not go well, he was surprised. But in my view, that is exactly why he had some long-standing patterns that had never really been overcome and seemed to still get in the way of his enormous gifts in a lot of what he did. So we got to work on “metabolizing” his ending.
What does that look like? Think of what you do when you metabolize food: You take it in (ingest it), and your body breaks the food down and recognizes its components as falling into two big groups. The first group is what is usable to you, the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. It takes all of the good stuff and turns it into things that you can use: fuel and structure. It keeps you going, and it literally becomes part of you. Want bones? Eat calcium. You get the picture.
The second group, the parts of food that are not usable, is called waste. And what do we do with waste? We eliminate it and get it out of the system. In fact, if you can’t eliminate waste, you get sicker as the days go on. So your body takes what it ingests, uses what is usable, takes that forward, and eliminates what it can’t use, leaving that behind.
In love and in work, experience is the “food” of life. Just as “You are what you eat,” you are what you experience as a person. You “ingest” experience like food, taking it in, and it becomes part of you. 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.
You have to look at the experience and break it apart. What was good about it? The relationships? The learnings? The new skills you attained? The modeling you saw? New knowledge? Your strengths? Take all of that and consciously make it a part of you, savor it, remember it, cement it, build on it, focus on it so it is not lost. It will become new “cells and bones,” parts of you that we refer to as wisdom, experience, or character. You will take it with you and be stronger and wiser for it if you heed the learning that was in that experience.
And on the negative side, there are some items that you will want to eliminate. You saw some things, did some things, had some things done to you, and perhaps you have some shrapnel from the battle that you need to dig out. Some splinters in your feet. Maybe you also shot some people yourself, and some amends are in order. Maybe you made other mistakes or saw some weaknesses you didn’t know you had. Whatever happened that was negative, take the wisdom out of it, learn from it, and then eliminate what is not useful to you. The pain, the bitterness, the feelings of failure, the loss and grief, and the resentment all need to be eliminated and left behind. But left behind consciously, as opposed to just denied and forgotten.
How? 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. Leave it behind after you have given it adequate attention. Decathect. If you do that, then you will be ready for whatever is next, having learned and benefited from what you have gone through, positive or negative, and you will show up in your next deal or relationship fully ready, even readier than you would have been had you not gone through it. No matter what happened, you are the better for it.
But if you don’t metabolize the last one, you are probably, like Joe, going to repeat the mistakes and not benefit from what you could have learned. You will have the same blind spots that lead you to trust the wrong person or be impulsive without due diligence or underestimate your strengths and real value again, thereby selling yourself short one more time and leaving money on the table. Whatever you did should be reflected upon and metabolized in the way we have described. Even in the deals that went well—you should know why, so you can capitalize more and more on whatever made that happen.
Team Metabolizing
I recently led an executive team retreat in which the focus was metabolizing the last big venture that the company had done. We spent a lot of time breaking down the experience and finding what was useful and what needed to be eliminated. There were mistakes discovered that led to structural changes in the company so that they would not happen again. There were lessons learned from the partners that the team was able to capture and institutionalize into some of their own processes. There were some personnel decisions that they were forced to make.
One geographical shift also was seen as necessary to keep the mistakes from ever occurring again. They moved some operations. There were team dynamics and working patterns that, once examined, they all committed to changing. On the positive side of that, when they looked at the contributions that each had made, they found a strength in one of the team members that they did not know she had and figured out ways to capitalize on that in the future. They changed her total focus. And as we went through the entire process, a huge strategic shift emerged as a result of looking at all the pieces. They left knowing more about their future from examining the last big deal than they would have if they had gone on a planning retreat. It was huge. But the lesson is that we should be doing this all the time as a matter of course, and pruning the bush.
Personal Endings
“Stop it!” I said to Jennifer. “Don’t even think about it!”
“Why? I think it will be great for me,” she said.
“Not a chance,” I replied. “The last thing you need to do right now is to be dating. That is like an alcoholic getting a job as a bartender or event planner. It is the worst idea ever.”
What we were discussing was Jennifer’s immediate signing up with a dating service right after her divorce. In fact, I don’t even think the divorce was final yet, and she was already getting ready to get back out there, thinking, “I will find a good one this time.”
Fat chance, I knew. She had several patterns in the ways she related to men that were going to ensure another bad choice and another failure. She had done it twice, gravitating to the alpha male who made her feel secure, and later finding that the relationship held no space for her, her opinions, or her needs. It “always had to be his way,” she said. Surprise? Look up alpha male. But that was her “type,” as she put it.
There were other dynamics too, both in her selection process and in the ways that she related to a man once she was dating him, that did not bode well. Bright and attractive and very much fun to be around, she had never had difficulties finding men. But the ones she would find, and what she would let them get away with or enable them to do—that was a different story, and exactly why I did not want her out there until she did some metabolizing.
So I talked her into enrolling in a divorce recovery class for six months before she began dating again. In that process, she made some huge discoveries. One day, she said, “I am learning that I have some issues with men.” Really? Wow! How about that? I thought.
“Gosh, Jennifer, that’s great. I am glad that the class is helping you,” I said.
“It is the best thing I ever did. I am going to be so much better in the choices I make when I get out there dating again. But I am nowhere near being ready. I think I need to take some time for myself, make sure I have worked through Jason, and not go on some rebound and make the same mistake again,” she said. “What do you think?”
“I think that sounds like a plan,” I said, biting back more than a few “I told you so’s.” Either way, I am glad that she did the metabolizing that she needed to do. It served her well, and about a year later, she found a good one as a result of the work she had done in relation to the last one. She took the lessons that were usable and eliminated from her life the pain that was not. So this time, she did not repeat it. Whew.
The Bottom Line
At any given moment, you are an amalgam of what has happened up until that moment. So if your last experience has been properly metabolized, you are ready. You have learned, made the changes necessary, added whatever you need, and are wiser and more prepared. Facing your grief, working it through, and letting it equip you is a significant part of a good necessary ending.
Two questions to consider as you reflect on your next necessary ending:
• 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?