We're trained to move on,
To jump on to the next thing.
And in doing so,
We miss something sacred.
We skip the ending.
I want to talk about the quiet power of endings,
The grief that follows peak experiences,
And how honoring this moment can change the way you lead at home and at work.
Let me start off with a story.
A few years ago,
I led a men's retreat in the woods of upstate New York.
It was one of those weekends that cracks you open.
We sat in circle,
We cried,
We screamed into the trees,
We laughed so hard it hurt.
There was a fire burning all weekend inside and a fire that we sat around.
And on the last day,
We stood in the circle one last time.
And when it was over,
I got in my car and I drove away.
And tears began to flow down my face and I was wondering what was going on here.
It wasn't because I was sad.
It was grief.
It was a holy kind of grief.
The kind you feel when something sacred ends.
Because for the several days there with those men,
I felt like I belonged to something real,
Something more real than the everyday life.
I had been a part of a village.
I had co-created a village with these men.
And then just like that,
It was gone.
The thing is,
No one teaches us how to end things well.
That's not common in our culture.
We don't learn that in business.
We don't learn that in school.
And we especially don't learn that in parenting.
And it's mostly because we live in such a fast pace,
But there's something deeper there as well.
Because we are great at beginnings.
We celebrate the launch when we're working on new projects at business.
We celebrate the birth.
We celebrate the firsts of everything.
But endings,
We're really uncomfortable with them.
We rush past them.
We don't even look back.
Let's zoom out a bit.
Think about your own life.
When was the last time you were part of a peak experience?
Maybe it was a high-stakes project at work.
Maybe it was the birth of your child,
Or a concert,
A sports win,
Or a silent retreat.
Whatever it was,
There was likely a moment where everything clicked.
You felt seen,
Connected,
Like you belonged.
And then it ended.
Did anyone name that ending?
Did you celebrate?
Did you allow yourself to grieve?
Did you take a moment to honor the experience?
Or did you just move on?
In business,
What I often see is we finish a big project and then we immediately ask,
What's next?
In parenting,
We move from one milestone to the next one.
First steps,
To the first grade,
To the first heartbreak.
And we rarely pause to say,
Wow,
That chapter just ended.
And what I've come to realize is that in doing so,
We rob ourselves and the people we lead,
Especially our children,
Of something deeply human.
Francis Weller,
Who's a great teacher of mine,
He writes beautifully about grief.
And he talks about what he calls the five gates of grief.
And one of those gates is what we're talking about here.
It's the grief of the loss of the village.
The grief of knowing what it's like to belong to something deeper,
To a community of people that help us feel the depth of the human experience,
And then losing it.
That's the grief I felt after that retreat.
That's the grief leaders feel,
But rarely name after a product launch,
After a team disbands,
After a major transition.
And that's the grief parents feel after their kids stop calling you daddy and just says dad.
I know I felt that as well.
Can I be daddy a little bit longer?
But most of us aren't taught how to sit with that.
So we just move on.
But what if we didn't?
That's the question I want to pose today.
Right now,
Today,
There is a massive opportunity for leaders,
For parents to reclaim this missing piece of the human experience.
To honor endings.
Because here's what happens when we do.
We deepen trust.
When you name the end of something,
When you say this chapter is ending,
You validate people's experience,
People's emotions.
You let them know this happened,
This mattered,
You mattered.
We anchor the learning.
Reflection,
Integration,
It helps people make meaning out of the experience.
It turns a thing that we did into something that shaped me.
Something that shaped me.
We make space for grief and gratitude.
And that opens the door to even more connection to ourselves and to others.
So let me give you an example.
A father that I know and I've worked with in the past,
He was wrapped up in a massive campaign with his team.
Now normally,
He would just send a thank you email and he would move on.
Sometimes he wouldn't even do that and this is quite normal in the business world.
But this time he paused.
He gathered up his team and he asked three simple questions.
He said,
What moment from this project will stay with you?
What are you proud of?
What did this experience teach you about yourself?
And these are the same questions that as parents we can ask our children after every peak experience.
What moment will you keep with you?
What moment shaped you?
What are you proud of?
What did this experience teach you about yourself?
In the experience here with the father I'm talking about,
Where he did this with his team,
People cried.
There was laughter.
And they remembered that there's more to the work that they're doing.
They're more than just roles.
They're humans in a shared experience.
At home,
This father did something similar with his kids after a family vacation ended.
They sat on the porch.
They shared favorite moments.
And I love this part.
He lit a candle to mark the ending.
He brought in the element of fire to symbolize the ending of this chapter.
His eight-year-old son,
He said,
It feels like saying goodbye to summer.
That's the village right there.
That brings up so much to me whenever I recall that moment.
So how do we build this into leadership?
How do we really integrate this into our lives,
Both at work and at home?
So here's a few ideas I want to toss over to you.
And I'd love to hear from you as well to see what's working.
The first is to ritualize the ending.
Create a consistent way to mark the close of a project or a season.
In my circles,
I call this the leader's chair.
Or when I'm working with men in particular,
I call it the king's chair.
For my wife's 40th birthday,
We celebrated what's called the queen's chair.
And it's this moment where everyone shares what they deeply appreciate about the person.
How they saw them show up in their bigness,
In their gifts.
And it's incredibly powerful.
So a consistent way to close could be a circle share,
Could be a team toast.
It could be a written reflection.
It could be a shared playlist.
Anything that creates closure.
But my invitation to you is have it last at least two times as long as you think it should.
And that's so that the nervous system can regulate.
And there could be a beat and people could feel the depth of the experience.
The second is to create a grief budget.
And what I mean by that is literally budget out time after big experiences to not move on immediately.
You'll often hear me say the harder you push,
The deeper you need to rest.
So whether it's a solo reflection walk,
It's a team debrief,
It's mandatory PTO,
Or it's a quiet night with your journal.
Grief needs space.
Needs space to sit in the silence.
The third is to teach your kids the power of goodbye.
After a vacation,
The school year,
Or even the end of a bedtime book series,
Pause,
Reflect.
Let them feel the ending.
A powerful phrase I find that works well here is,
This chapter has ended,
Or the end,
And talk about the ending.
The fourth is to name the transition.
Sometimes the most powerful leadership move is simply to say,
Hey,
This mattered.
This really mattered.
And now it's ending.
It's time to move on.
The thing is,
If we want to build cultures of belonging at home and in the workplace,
We can't just celebrate the high points.
We have to honor the endings.
As Martin Prechtel says,
To grieve is to praise.
To grieve is to praise.
Because when we do,
When we honor the ends,
We make space for something powerful,
For integration,
For healing,
For the next beginning to emerge.
Not just as a rushed response,
But as a natural unfurling.
So here's my invitation to you.
Think about something that just ended in your life.
Could be a project,
A season,
A habit,
A relationship.
Pause.
Light a candle.
Speak it out loud.
And then allow yourself to grieve.
Allow yourself to celebrate and let go.
Don't skip the ending.
Because in that space,
Between the last breath of one thing and the first breath of another,
That's where we experience the beauty of being human.
