Necessary Endings (19 page)

It’s All About Hope

Necessary endings happen when you get to a “good hopelessness.” It is that moment when you see reality clearly and know you have to bring “what is” to an end. Unfortunately, sometimes that decision involves people, and deciding when to keep going with someone and when not to is one of the most difficult decisions that we have to make, and we must make it in many contexts, throughout life. It was much of what Peter Drucker referred to as the “life and death decisions” for leaders, and it is true in the personal space as wel .

So making people decisions should never be taken lightly. It is crucial that we have good criteria for when to have hope and when to reach hopelessness. If you have hope in someone who is in denial, that is usual y misspent time, energy, and resources. At the same time, as we have seen, there can be hope for them if you do the right thing and create an ending, that is, stop enabling the pattern by implementing some limits and consequences.

Conversely, other people can readily change, given the right input, because they are wise and open to hearing what you have to say. There can be great hope in many instances, provided they have the gifts and abilities to deliver what you want from them.

Seeing the differences between wise, foolish, and evil people wil be a good tool for you in making those difficult decisions.

Creating Urgency: Stay Motivated and Energized for Change

I
know I live in hel , but I know the names of al the streets.” This is exactly the response one woman made to a group of friends who were trying to get her to take some positive steps in her life. I wil never forget her words, as they epitomize one of the biggest problems in creating necessary endings in al of our lives. Endings, no matter how needed, are hard. They involve change, and for many reasons that we have seen, we resist the changes that we need to make, even when they would be good for us personal y or for our business.

Your brain’s hard wiring can resist change, as we have seen. But at the same time, you know you must change if you are going to end the misery of the present and get to the future that you desire. Both the resistance and the imperative are real, and both require attention.

We have examined some of the personal maps and belief systems that may have slowed you down. What we wil do now is look at some of the
accelerators
that wil get you moving, and some of
the in-the-moment thinking patterns
that slow you down and keep you from making the changes you need to make. In essence, this chapter is about two forces: time and energy. Time is working either for you or against you in terms of your needed ending. If you are stal ing or waiting, then you are tacitly agreeing to more of what you already have or worse. If you are not creating urgent energy toward an ending, you wil have no movement. So to get past the inertia of the past and present, you need to do both: address the urgency and the stal .

Creating Urgency

You have heard it said that people resist change. That is not always true. It is more true that people resist change that they feel no real need to make. For example, if I said, “Get up and go outside,” but you were relatively comfortable where you are, you would resist my suggestion. But if I said, “The building is on fire! Get out now!” we would see little resistance to change. We wil quickly make changes that we feel wil make pain stop or help us avoid it.

On the positive side, we wil do the same thing. If I asked you to stop shopping where you shop but you were pretty comfortable at your present store, then you would not go out of your way to change. But if I told you that another store, even a few miles farther down the road was offering three for one, you would be more likely to go. So getting your brain to move to create an ending, and getting the people around you to do the same,
is
going to take both
:
the fear of the negative and the draw of the positive.
Your brain needs to real y get it—that if you don’t move, something bad is going to happen, and also that if you do, you wil get what you desire. You have to break through the comfort level that you are in, where you are settling for living in hel just because you know the names of al the streets. Remember,
you were not designed to cope but to thrive.
But just like a rosebush, you can’t thrive without pruning, which means your necessary endings truly are urgent. Let’s look at how to get there.

Strategies for Creating Urgency

We saw how previous experience had seared urgency into the brain of one CEO, Julie Shimer. Al she had to do was to replay that movie in her present situation and she heard “fire alarms” going off al over the place. She immediately felt the urgency and made courageous moves.

Playing the movie forward is one of the best known motivators in human behavior, as it gets your brain aligned with what you want and can create new patterns of behavior. Remember, we saw how your brain wil get you moving toward anything that it agrees with, and avoiding pain is tops on its list. The usual problem with “living in hel but knowing the names of al the streets” is that you are not in enough current pain to create urgency. We get comfortable with our misery, as we find ways to medicate ourselves, delude ourselves, disassociate our feelings, or get enough distance from the problem that it does not touch us directly. CEOs and other leaders, for example, can often stay far enough “above” the real problems in the trenches that they do not feel the urgency to change. Remember Shimer’s description of how Motorola people were able to stay away from the painful pending reality by consoling themselves with the belief that their market share would save them from the digital revolution. We al use similar tricks, as we shal see later in this chapter.

So, the first step to getting to the necessary ending that we need is to
make the threat to our future as real in our minds as it is in reality
. That means that we have to smel the smoke. Most change experts talk about the need to “see the future” that awaits, clearly and vividly, in order to get movement out of our comfort zones. Here is how change expert John Kotter describes it in
A Sense of Urgency
(Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008):

Urgent behavior is not driven by a belief that all is well or that everything is a mess, but, instead, that the world contains
great opportunities and great hazards
[emphasis added]. Even so, urgent action is not created by feelings of contentment, anxiety, frustration, or anger, but by
a gut-level determination to move, and win, now. These feelings quite naturally lead to behavior in which people are alert and proactive, in
which they constantly scan the environment around them, both inside and outside their organizations, looking for information relevant to
success and survival. With complacency or false urgency, people look inward, not out, and they miss what is essential for prosperity.

This is a great description of how feelings that are truly motivating have to be related to reality, as opposed to a numb complacency medicated by al sorts of excuses, or to an emotional crisis created by a nagging or angry boss or spouse. The ones that work come from within, from seeing the world as it real y is, motivated by its dangers and opportunities. This is why interventions with addicts work when nagging doesn’t, and why real P&Ls have an effect on boards and executives that words don’t. Earnings reports create action in boardrooms. Reality can move us. In my view, that is why Kotter’s suggestion to get people to go outside of the organization helps, as they begin to “open the system” and infuse it with the truth of the real opportunities and storms brewing outside the wal s of the company.

So, back to our question. How do you make the brain smel the smoke? How do you get the heart to align with the needed change? My suggestion is to “play the movie”: “Do you want to look the way you do now, overweight, in June, on the beach?” Or “Do you want to stil be losing market share this time next year because you haven’t fired your VP of sales?” Make your heart and mind feel the reality today that is surely coming tomorrow. And remember, both the hazards and the opportunities must be felt.

Here is how. Get alone and get honest with yourself. Look in the mirror if you have to, and ask that person if he or she wants you to lie to you or tel the truth. If the answer came back “Lie,” then you can stop reading this book. If you lie to yourself, you wil never get there. But if the answer was

“Tel the truth,” then sit down and think of al of the realities of the situation that you have been avoiding:

• The continued frustration with a particular person’s performance

• The continued frustration with the difficulties of trying to get someone to hear something

• The continued frustration of poor returns

• The continued frustration in a relationship

• The continued frustration of a pattern of yours or someone else’s

• The continued frustration of a particular business line or strategy not working

Then, stop the excusing, the medicating, the rationalizing, or any other interference, and project into the future: one month, six months, one year, two years, five years, or more. See yourself at that time having the same discussions that you are having now, with no better results. Picture it, feel it, smel it. You already know what it is like, so you don’t even have to use your imagination. You are living it right now. I just want you to picture yourself living it for real five years from now. Is that what you want?

I had an employee once whom I real y liked working with in many ways. He had many strengths. But he continued to make the same mistakes over and over, and after many, many conversations to get him to improve and his not seeing a need to make any changes, I got hopeless and final y made a change. I had resisted for a long time because of al of his strengths, as I real y wanted him to make it. This kept me stuck for a while.

But one day it al changed. I pictured myself dealing with these same issues a year from then, and I got sick to my stomach. In the day-to-day, I was able to numb myself to it, hoping for change and trying to ignore some things. But the reality was that I was sick of dealing with the poor performance in the areas where it was poor, and what put me over the edge was
seeing that the future was going to be just like today.
I wanted better than that for myself and my team, and “playing the movie forward” was al it took.

The reason was that my brain got aligned. I showed it a fire ahead, and it final y said, “I don’t want to go there. I wil make a change.” Until then, I had been trying to motivate it to take some uncomfortable steps in a firing, but it could resist because there was no bigger pain looming. But when I played the movie forward, my whole being final y got aligned with action and said, “OK, there is no way I want to be doing this in another year.”

One woman told me that this method is what final y got her to step up and end a six-year relationship with a boyfriend. She said that she had gotten comfortable with the lack of emotional intimacy in the day-to-day, always feeling as though she could put up with it
today
because of other reasons. She had kind of numbed herself to it. Then, one day, she said that she looked into the future and saw herself married to him, feeling alone in her marriage, and something snapped inside. She knew that she had to end it, so she did. Today she is in a better relationship.

Fortunately, she was single, and that kind of ending is part of the path in most people’s journey. But even in the covenant of marriage, which is designed not to end, there should stil be endings to unfulfil ing patterns, and playing the movie forward is what final y gets people to stand up and say, “I do not want to be feeling this way about us for the rest of our lives. We have to get some help.” Or “I don’t want to be living with your addiction this time next year, or even next month. Get treatment or move out.”

We have an incredible tolerance for pain, especial y if we think it “might get better.” So, we tel ourselves little lies like “It wil turn around” or “It’s not always like this.” So we make it through the day, and another, until the days turn into years. But the truth is that there is no ending or better time coming unless we do something. So we have to get our mind to see that “hazard,” as Kotter terms it, and stop the lies.

Recently a friend told me how he quit smoking. He got a coach who made him play the movie forward to feel the future reality of his habit where his heart would feel it: with his kids. He has two little boys, five and seven. So al his coach did was tel him that he had to take their photos and put them inside the cel ophane wrapper of his cigarette package. That way, every time he took out a cigarette, he had to look at the photos of his little boys first, and picture them fatherless when he dies a premature death. That is a lot different and a more powerful approach than simply nagging someone with “You should quit smoking.”

The reason is that it creates a painful reality that he would move to avoid, instead of a merely uncomfortable reality that he would avoid, i.e., nicotine withdrawal. Quitting gets uncomfortable, and most people avoid that discomfort—unless they are staring into the faces of their children at that moment. Then it brings the ability to create the ending. It is the same reason that interventions work with addicts when you can get al of the loved ones in a room sharing the pain that the addiction has caused them and giving the absolute promise that they are leaving if he doesn’t go right into treatment. In the good interventions, the group also expresses a vision of the great opportunities that lie ahead if the addict gets treatment: we wil al be together and be a family.

Whether in a business or a life, bringing the future misery into a very real experience today wil create urgency. Sometimes that future misery is in continued frustration, and sometimes it is in future loss and regret that you wil have if an ending does not occur. I talked to one leader once about his pattern of disconnecting from his junior high school–age daughter and asked him to think hard about the time when she’d be leaving for col ege and the risk of not knowing her. What would that loss and regret feel like? Playing that movie of future loss was what got him to change.