ENDING THIS YEAR READY FOR THE NEXT
by Lizzie Bentley Bowers
As we count down to what will for many of us be a break over the festive season, my thoughts are very much with those continuing to work every day to keep us safe and well. A year of gratitude closes with an abundance of that very same gratitude and a hope that you get your break too.
In this last post for 2020 I’ll be sharing a method, based on the work I’ve done with my wonderful friend and colleague Alison Lucas on Endings In Organisations, to close the year from a business perspective, in a way that will help me truly take a break, and fully turn towards 2021. I hope it might be useful to you too.
As readers of my blog posts will know, I think of September as my New Year. You can take the girl out of the academic year etc! Something I do in December though, taking advantage of the fact that this gives me two opportunities to reflect and plan if I cheat a little and use both New Years, is to spend time with my supervisor reflecting on the work I’ve done with clients, and the work I’ve done on me and in collaboration with others, and from there set intentions for the business for next year. As I prepare for this supervision session, I’m going to use some work that has been incredibly important to me in many ways this year, as my guideposts.
My conversations with my treasured friend and colleague Alison Lucas have been enriching my work and indeed my life for many years. In 2017 we had a conversation about the extent to which we paid attention to how we closed our coaching relationships, versus how we began them in terms of time spent, co-creation with the client, attention to detail, clarity and boundary among other things. This led to many more conversations on the subject of endings, and a two year enquiry into endings in organisations, that also coincided with some deeply personal and difficult experiences with endings in our personal lives. As we talked more and learned more, we incorporated what we were learning into our work, and saw for ourselves how clients were seeing better beginnings, stronger teams, greater energy, clearer thinking and were turning more fully to the future as a result of the seemingly counter-intuitive action of paying closer attention to endings, including the emotion and sometimes difficult stuff bound up in them.
2020, as we all know, saw a dramatic increase in the endings that organisations and the people in them were experiencing. Leaders navigating their way through all the kinds of endings we had been looking at (people leaving, redundancies, end of a project, mergers and more) but in huge numbers. We wanted to share something beyond our clients to support more leaders through this time. This led to an article that introduced our four pillars of endings in organisations:
REALITY – INCLUDING THE TRICKY AND MESSY STUFF
EMOTIONS
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
RITUAL
The response to the article was extraordinary and the accompanying requests for more resources led to a podcast, further exercises for leaders and opportunities to speak to leaders and organisations. You can get the article here.
It feels fitting then, not only to acknowledge the impact of this work on my own year, both in terms of the conversations it has led to, the opportunity to do even more work and thinking with Alison, and the opportunities it has created, but to also use it as my handrail for doing my own personal work on how I close this year in order to truly take a break, from the thinking as well as the doing, and to ready myself for January. By fully turning to look at 2020 and all it has involved I can then fully turn to 2021. Even as I think about doing this, I notice I feel a little lighter, stronger and more optimistic.
My exercise to close the year will involve looking at my business and making notes on each of the four pillars in relation to my work:
REALITY
Starting by fully articulating the year for the business. The figures. The projects completed. The balance of coaching and facilitation. The collaborations. The days worked and the shape of those days. The adaptations to this year. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, including all the tricky and messy stuff that we might not want to look at, but frees us up when it’s been fully surfaced rather than rattling around our minds or being uncomfortably boxed up.
EMOTIONS
This is about ensuring that having got a full picture of the reality, that you are also getting a full picture of you feel about it. Or how we felt at the time versus how we now feel.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
The important work of acknowledging what has been accomplished. There is always something. And once you start there is usually more than you thought too. By taking care not to hurry through this or gloss over our accomplishments we re-resource ourselves, both with a sense of satisfaction and contribution, and a greater awareness of the strengths and skills we bring to the challenges ahead.
RITUAL
Having paid attention to the first three pillars we can turn our attention to the myriad of ways we can say a proper goodbye to something, and in doing so, be able to turn our energy and attention more fully to the future.
For me, this exercise has helped to truly name 2020 from a work perspective. Rather than thoughts and feelings bouncing around my head, I’ve got them down on paper, and gone beyond circular or repeated thoughts into some thinking with more depth and breadth. In doing that, I’ve settled myself. Looking at both the reality, the tricky stuff and the emotions has reminded me of just how much in it’s very different way this year has packed in, of the work that’s been done, and collaboration and time with clients and colleagues, and the pretty huge amount of learning that has arisen from all that. Naming my accomplishments is a useful way to end the year and again, pausing to do this means that as well as the more obvious things I’m proud of, there is even more than I would perhaps have given myself credit for. Accomplishments include bottom line results but are far from exclusive to those. What are the categories of yours I wonder?
And I’m a human being, so of course this exercise brings up other aspects of my life too. For me, whilst there is plenty to reflect on, it’s reflection I’m comfortable doing and that I know if I need to, I can take to a supportive conversation with someone else. As Ali and I say whenever we share this work ,we are aware as we offer it, that this is an area that people often choose (either consciously or unconsciously) not to attend to for the very reasons that we wrote the original article, in that it can be painful, challenging and emotive work. We encourage you in doing this work, to seek support if you think you need it. We encourage you to start with work on yourself, and not use these approaches to work on others unless you feel safe and qualified to do so.
START WITH YOU. WORK SAFELY. SEEK SUPPORT.
Having done all this, I’m now giving thought to the ritual. When the ‘out of office’ goes on, what am I going to do to tip my hat to everything I have acknowledged in the 2020 pillars and in doing so, make way for clear thinking, energy, creative and strategic thinking, and readiness for 2021? I haven’t decided yet, but I think it’s going to involve a long walk, sending some letters or cards, and something with the family.
If you are spending some time closing the year, I hope this offers some useful structure for your thinking – having walked our talk on this I can say it’s been really helpful, and has really shifted the energy and perspective I’ve been able to bring to planning and goal setting for 2021.
P.S. I’ve now completed the exercise. It was a profoundly useful and at times moving piece of work. I’m so glad I’ve done it. I won’t share the detail, but wanted to let you know that it turns out that my ritual will involve fertilising soil and planting bulbs, so that’s where I’ll be this Friday afternoon! Take care.
