Why unfinished endings keep showing up

Somewhere in my house is a box of memorabilia from every team, committee, organization, and training program I was ever a part of. I don’t know why I keep them. Maybe some part of me believes that each one marked something important; a chapter in the story of my life.

We don’t talk about that much in leadership circles. We talk about onboarding, engagement, succession planning, but we rarely talk about the whole arc: how we join a system, how we belong within it, and how we eventually leave it. Coaching Constellations calls this the cycle of joining, belonging, and leaving, and once you know about it, it’s tough to ignore. It shows up in your first job, your marriage, your kid’s hockey team, and yes, your current org chart.

Joining: The Awkward First Handshake

Every system you enter; a new company, a new board, a new relationship, comes with unwritten rules. Where do you sit? Who do you defer to? What gets said out loud and what gets said only after the meeting ends? How you navigate that entry often echoes how you first joined systems as a kid: your family, your classroom, your friend group. If you learned early that you had to earn your place by being small and agreeable, don’t be surprised if you’re doing the exact same thing in your new VP role thirty years later.

I see this constantly in my coaching work. A client lands a big promotion and instead of stepping into their authority, they shrink. We dig around together and find an old pattern from their family of origin; something about not outshining a sibling or not making waves at the dinner table. The present moment is dragging some very old baggage behind it.

Belonging: The Long Middle

This is the part we spend the most energy on, and rightly so. Belonging means finding your role, trying to contribute to something bigger than yourself, and managing what systemic work calls invisible loyalties. Those are the quiet, often unconscious commitments we carry that can pull us out of alignment with where we are now. Think of a leader loyal to an old boss’s way of doing things even after that boss is long gone. Or a team committed to protecting a founder’s original vision even when the market has moved on.

To be clear, belonging is not the same as comfort. Some of the most belonging-rich teams I have coached are the ones willing to have the hard conversation instead of avoiding it. Comfort without honesty is just a pleasant way of being stuck.

Leaving: The Part We Usually Get Wrong

Here is where most of us fumble. We leave jobs, teams, and relationships without acknowledging what we gave and what we received. We ghost and move on. If it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience, we badmouth it on the way out and we carry resentment into the next system. A healthy leaving means saying thank you even when it’s hard and cutting ties cleanly so you are free to join what comes next.

As Paul and Virginia Brown put it in Neuropsychology for Coaches, the person sitting in front of you in the present is their past. If you don’t understand where “here” is, good luck getting anywhere near “there.” Or as George Santayana said it first and more ominously, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Cheerful stuff for a leadership blog, I know.

Why Should Leaders Care?

I like to bring this cycle into my coaching and facilitation work. Recently, I was in a room full of senior leaders on the first day of an Executive MBA program, and I watched the whole cycle play out. These are people who are good at their jobs. And on day 1, they are asked to set that down and become beginners again, in a room full of strangers, at an age when most of us have stopped expecting to feel new at anything.

That’s a real loss, even if it’s a happy one. So instead of pretending it isn’t happening, I ask people to say out loud what they are setting down to be fully present; competence, status, being the smartest person in the room; and what they are bringing instead. It takes fifteen seconds a person and it does more work than an hour of small talk ever could, because everyone gets acknowledged as having taken their place.

I also plant the ending at the outset. I tell them this cohort will end in two years, and that a good ending is something we design together rather than something that happens to us. It sounds like an odd thing to say to a room that just met, but naming the leaving early makes the belonging richer, because nobody is pretending this is forever.

For a room of sharp, slightly skeptical executives, I don’t always lead with the language of constellations. I bridge it to something more familiar, like Tuckman’s forming, storming, norming, and performing, so it lands as established organizational science rather than something soft. But it’s the same truth: a leader joins a team already mid-story, inherits loyalties they never signed up for, and eventually has to leave that role and hand it to someone else. All of those moments carry emotional weight.

The invitation here is to hold a bigger frame than might feel comfortable at first. Look back far enough to understand the patterns you are bringing into the room, then use that clarity to build the future you want, instead of subconsciously recreating the one you already lived.

The things you hold onto, like the memorabilia in that box I can’t find at the moment, is trying to tell you something. Might be worth a listen.