What Would You Need to Release to Move Toward What's Next? |
Photo from a bike ride over the summer. We biked along the shores of Lake Superior. |
Dear Empowered Reader,
Our summer travel officially ended this week.
Chuck and I got back, and the last stretch of any trip always has the same ritual: unpacking the car and sorting everything into two piles. What comes back into regular rotation. What goes into storage until next summer. It sounds simple. It never is. There's a camp chair with a broken zipper pocket I kept meaning to fix over the summer. A cooler we don't strictly need, we've got a better one at home, that I still couldn't quite talk myself into replacing, because it's the one that's always come along on our summer trips.
That's the part that gets me every year, trip after trip. It's not that the chair is particularly special or that the cooler is better than others. It's that we've already grown attached to them. And somehow that alone makes them harder to let go of than their actual worth would justify.
There's a famous set of studies behind that feeling, and it has nothing to do with camp chairs. Economists Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler ran an experiment in the late 1980s where they handed half a room a coffee mug and asked what they'd sell it for. The other half, empty-handed, were asked what they'd pay for the same mug. Classical economics says those two numbers should land close together; a mug is a mug. They didn't. The people holding the mug wanted roughly twice as much to give it up as the people without one were willing to pay to get it.
They called it the endowment effect: the moment something becomes ours a possession, a role, a way of doing things, a version of ourselves- we attach a value to it that has almost nothing to do with what it's actually worth to us going forward. It sits on top of an older finding from Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky: losses simply weigh more than equivalent gains. Giving something up feels like more than the thing is worth, purely because giving it up is what's on the table.
I think about this constantly in my work with leaders moving through change. A title, a way a team has always operated, a program someone built from scratch five years ago- none of it gets evaluated on its current usefulness. It gets defended because it's theirs. Not because it's still serving them.
What the endowment effect doesn't fully explain, though: why does releasing something we chose to release still feel like a loss?
Family therapist Pauline Boss spent her career studying what she called ambiguous loss (thanks to a friend for introducing me to her): grief with no clear ending, the kind that shows up when someone is physically present but psychologically gone, or physically gone with no resolution. She developed the concept working with families of the missing and families living with dementia. But the framework has become one of the most useful lenses for something much more common: the grief embedded in ordinary transitions we actually wanted.
When you leave a role, a version of yourself doesn't die cleanly. It doesn't get a funeral. It just becomes unreachable, still vivid in memory, no longer available to you. That's ambiguous loss. There's no ritual for grieving a job you were glad to leave, an identity you outgrew on purpose, a relationship that changed shape instead of ending outright. So the grief goes unnamed, and unnamed grief tends to show up sideways, as second-guessing, as nostalgia you can't explain, as a strange heaviness on a day that should feel like relief. |
Our trusty red cooler has traveled many miles..... |
Chosen change is still change. And change, even the kind you're proud of, involves mourning something real.
This is exactly the terrain of "letting go", the second stage in the Mountain 10 process. It's also the stage almost every team I work with tries to skip. Leaders want to move straight from awareness to vision, straight from "we need to change" to "here's the new structure," without ever naming what's actually being given up. But the endowment effect doesn't disappear because you didn't name it. It just makes the new structure harder to fully occupy, because part of the team is still quietly holding the old one.
Naming what's being released, out loud, specifically, is often what makes room for the next thing to actually take hold. Not skipping past the loss. Moving through it on purpose. |
Just like a sunset bridges day into night, so do the September days bridge summer into fall. |
Affirmation "I can grieve what I'm releasing and still be certain I'm releasing it for good reason. Both things are true at once."
A Seasonal Practice Take inventory before you release. Before letting go of a role, belief, or way of operating, name specifically what it gave you, not just what's wrong with it. You can't release something honestly until you've named its real value, endowment effect and all.
Separate the object from the ownership. Ask: is this still useful to me, or am I only holding onto it because it's already mine? The camp chair test works on roles and routines too.
Let the grief be small and real. You don't need a full ritual for every loss. A sentence is enough: "I'm letting go of X, and part of me will miss it." Naming it costs you less than carrying it unnamed.
Notice what's asking to loosen. Not everything needs to go. Some things just need a looser grip, a belief you can hold more lightly, a role you can occupy differently instead of abandoning.
Reflection Questions What are you holding onto right now mostly because it's already yours, not because it's still serving you? Where have you skipped the grief in a change you know was right? If you let yourself mourn it for one sentence, what would that sentence say?
Until next time, release what's ready, grieve what's real, and let fall find you a little lighter than summer did.
Julie
Sources: Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J.L., & Thaler, R.H., "Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem," Journal of Political Economy, 1990; Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A., "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," Econometrica, 1979; Boss, P., Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (1999) and Loss, Trauma, and Resilience (2006). |
We do not roar, we do not shout
When grief becomes our guest.
We simply wake and take a breath
With sorrow in our chest.
The quiet kind of brave it is—
To smile with trembling lips,
To hold the coffee, feed the cat,
With hands that shake and slip.
And yet we do it, day by day,..... Read the rest at, https://trustedmemorialplanners.com/post/inspirational-poems-about-grief |
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