Nobody Teaches You to End It

I have been to four trainings and read most of the literature, and I can count the pages devoted to ending an engagement on one hand. This is strange, because the ending is the part clients describe when they describe the work years later.

It is also the part with the most obvious commercial pressure attached, which may be why nobody wants to write about it.

The three bad endings

The first is the fade: sessions get harder to schedule, then stop, and nobody says the word. It is the most common ending in the profession and it teaches the client that difficult things are best allowed to drift.

The second is the extension. The work is done, both people can feel it, and one of them has a diary to fill. This is the one nobody admits to and everybody has done.

The third is the abrupt stop — a client who ends by email after a session that went somewhere uncomfortable. That is not always a failure, but it is always information, and you will not get it if you do not ask for it.

What a good one looks like

It is scheduled from the beginning, it is named as the last session when it arrives, and it spends most of its time looking backwards rather than tying off loose ends.

The question I use is deliberately blunt: what did you come in saying you wanted, and what would you say now. People are startlingly honest in a last session. They have nothing left to protect.

And then you say the thing that is hardest to say to someone who has been paying you: you do not need to book another one.