Endings & Beginnings

Years ago, I was recruiting a talented soccer player. I had watched her play many times and we had developed a good recruit-recruiter relationship. All of my interactions with her led me to believe she was exactly the kind of person I wanted to coach.

I decided it was time to offer her a spot on our roster as well as an athletic scholarship to attend our university. I was confident in the relationship we had built and I felt strongly that she would say yes to this opportunity.

I know that selecting a college is quite likely the biggest decision that any 17-year-old will make, so it was important to me that I made her the offer face to face. As a result, I drove several hundred miles to have a ten-minute conversation with her. As I began to share with her that we wanted her on our team and that we could provide an athletic scholarship in addition to the academic scholarship she would receive, I noticed that her body language was screaming “YES!” but instead she said, “Thank you, Coach. Can I call you in a few days and let you know my decision?” I said, “Of course. I want you to be comfortable with your decision so please take whatever time you need.” And then we parted ways.

Once I got in my car, I found myself very confused. Her body language clearly said yes, but she didn’t immediately accept our offer and I was perplexed as to what had just transpired.

Sure enough, later the next night she called and said she would love to come play for us and earn a degree at our university. She also apologized that she couldn’t tell me this in person. She went on to explain that she had narrowed down her college options to three universities and she had developed a relationship with the coaches at each school. She said that our university had always been her first pick, but she needed to call the other two coaches and say no to them before she said yes to me. Yes, a 17-year-old understood that how you end one thing is how the next thing begins. She needed to end those relationships with honesty, transparency, and healthy communication. It shouldn’t surprise you that over the next four years our player-coach relationship was rooted in those three things.

As you prepare to turn the page from one calendar year to the next you may discover there are things you want to leave behind. I would encourage you to end those things properly while recognizing that most healthy endings don’t happen in one day or even over the course of several weeks.

Maybe you need to end a relationship and you are tempted to allow it to fade out while you mentally move on to another relationship. The inability to value the sacredness of your current relationship will be the foundation of your next relationship.
 
Maybe you are leaving a work environment that doesn’t provide you with meaning and purpose and you are considering going out in a blaze of glory, which includes confronting co-workers and saying all the things that you’ve never said. That anger will be the bedrock of your next career path.
 
Or maybe there are pieces of yourself that you’ve discovered are no longer serving you well and you desire to make a personal change in the New Year. If you close out the year, all the way through the midnight countdown, celebrating your old self then that will spill into the New Year becoming the cornerstone of a not-so-new you.

The temptation that many leaders face is to set new goals filled with graphs and data, moving quickly to the next big thing while forgetting that their past is a part of their future. It is important that leaders model a healthy way to process and bring resolution, before moving on to a new future.

So, take a page from the performing arts. We all know that feeling when a great song comes to an end. We can feel it building and then the last chord is played and there is a sense of resolution, a finality to the song which is often followed by a pause of silence as the final notes hang and then fade in the air. Maybe that is a good mental model to adopt as we shift into the New Year. Figure out what needs to come to a close, embrace a clear process of resolution, and then allow space for silence to linger before you move on to whatever is next.

Seneca’s words are important to remember: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” In this season of endings and beginnings remember that how one thing ends is how the next thing begins.

Your New Year’s resolution may be less about what you want to do in the next year and more about how you bring the current year to a close.

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