Ending Resolutions

by Eddie Pipkin

My wife and I did not send Christmas cards this year. We’ve been mailing out season’s greetings with adorable family photos for three-and-a-half decades, so that’s a big change. The transition from old year to new year is often a time for big change and bold resolutions. It’s worth remembering that ending something can have just as much impact as beginning something new. Maybe more.

I’d like to tell you we sat down and thoughtfully considered the pros and cons of continued Christmas card distribution. After all, our shift in thinking puts us in line with long-term trends as people balk over the expense of maintaining an old tradition and instead embrace new technological alternatives. The truth is that we just got to the point in the December to-do list that we said “something’s gotta go,” and that was the thing that went.

Having crossed that emotional bridge, however, the savings in time, money, and bandwidth were self-evident.

We had intuitively made the decision that writer and leadership consultant Jason Feifer says is critical when consciously deciding to end something. His insightful recent newsletter on the topic is titled, “How to Make Space for Your Next Big Opportunity.”

I love that framing.

It takes an act that feels like failure and repositions it as a pathway to future success.

Feifer challenges us to be honest with ourselves about the cost of the thing we are doing now, in terms of effort, focus, and time and the benefits the allocation of these resources is producing. (I subscribe to only a handful of regular newsletters, but Feifer’s, which is called One Thing Better, is one of them. He has great productivity advice, but he delivers it with humility and practical examples.)

He argues that if we are honest with ourselves (our partners, our teams, and our organizations), sometimes the results are just not worth the volume of work. Sometimes the results are laudable or at least useful, but the work makes us miserable. In either case, giving up a project can free us to shift effort, focus, and time in new directions.

Even if we don’t immediately transfer those liberated hours to a glorious new project, the release of stress from abandoning something that has outlived its maximum impact can renew our attitude and energy surrounding all our other work.

Here’s an excerpt from Feifer’s newsletter:

What did you start this year? A new job? New project? New relationship? Congratulations!

Now, ask yourself: What did you end this year? And did you congratulate yourself for that too?

We often don’t celebrate endings. We think of them as failures or mistakes — as if the end invalidated everything else.

But endings can be many things: They’re how we preserve time and energy, how we reach a healthy conclusion, and how we prepare for something new.

He cites the question that good leaders ask their teams: “What are we doing that makes the most impact?” And follows it up with “What is not having the impact we thought it would, or once did?” The equation is simple. By ending something with little or no impact, however noble our original intentions, we free resources for concentrating on things that will have maximum impact.

It is hard for ministry organizations to calculate impact, because we struggle with defining metrics for success and we are schooled in “if one soul is touched, it was worth it” thinking. One soul is indeed worth it, but twenty touched souls is even better. Mindfulness about how effectively we are using time, money, and talent keeps us on the right track, and we structure mindfulness into our routine when we have clear metrics, robust feedback systems, and constant communication among leadership and ministry participants.

Ministry organizations are notorious for not having the greatest sense of when to end things. Local churches are carrying legacy programs and events that lost their luster years ago. Maintaining these legacy activities, often dear to the heart of a handful of people (and often influential people), can be taxing for new staff and leadership who don’t share the same nostalgia for them. These activities can be creatively reinvented, given the right circumstances, but a clean slate, although painful, can be the better path to fresh energy. It is not uncommon for the people who clung passionately to the old thing to begrudgingly admit a year or two down the road that the new thing was a good thing.

Feifer sees all experience as good experience, preparing us for new and better things down the road, and this is in line with best ministry practice. It’s a discipleship thing. Even when we are ending something, we should take time to celebrate the good that has come from that thing, lessons learned and lives changed. We should also give people a chance to grieve when they are losing a project or program in which they were deeply invested. We often skip this step, wanting to make a clean cut and move along, but grief is a natural and important process. We should give people a chance to say goodbye to things they love.

Once we have made the decision to end a thing, it can be challenging to share the news with those who are affected. Feifer addresses that in a companion newsletter, “How to Fire Someone or End Any Project – With Respect and Kindness.” Its tenets are simple: be straightforward in communicating what needs to happen; be clear; share your reasoning; show respect and empathy; explain what happens next. He illustrates these principles by sharing a story of a time he was fired but was so impressed by the manner of the person firing him that he was inspired as he moved on to even greater things.

What’s your process for deciding when it’s time to end things? As you are making your resolutions for 2025, do you have any “ending” resolutions on the list? It can be a hard decision to make, but there is relief on the other side of that moment of decision, and there is excitement in imagining the possibilities of the new thing for which you are making space. Here’s to a great year ahead.