Completion

Today I had a great experience with completion. A business partner and I decided to go our separate ways officially, but to do so with completion as the focus.

Completion is bringing something to a close and can apply to many areas of life.

As part of our completion conversation, my now former business partner and I spoke of all parts of our relationship together; the things that were great, the things that were not great, the things that we learned from our partnership, and the things we are excited about with future partnerships.

It was a special conversation because it allowed us to close the chapter of our business together because we choose to, not because it just fizzled out for neither of us to actively complete on it.

It was my former partner who initiated the conversation and it wasn’t until we were having it that I realised how important it was for that to happen for this journey.

It ended with a really deep and open connection between us that we want to continue as friends rather than have our former business hanging in the air if we bumped into each other without this completion. It also creates the space for us to support one another in the new partnerships we have without any bitterness or animosity towards what we were creating together.

When else is completion important?

This experience also got me thinking about why completion is so important in all things in life that come to an end; death, relationships, business partnerships, job, career, friendships, children leaving the nest and the list goes on.

A lot of trauma can come from things that are left open-ended. It can start off subtle but over time they niggle away until a subconscious rule is put in place about that experience. For example, if my business partner and I had not had the completion we did today it might have subconsciously left a feeling that working in partnership with someone in a business never works for me.

By doing the completion it put an end to that chapter that meant we shared about new business partnerships we are working on that are serving both of us in better ways as a result of the experience we had working together. It clarified what is important for both of us in a partnership regarding communication and we could celebrate that we are both working with other people.

The relationship I had with my business partner also taught me a lot about communication in intimate relationships as well, because in our business partnership we brought up triggering in the moment and talked about it. This had not been my experience in past intimate relationships or friendships but in this business partnership we were both communicating with each other and yet at times we were not satifying the others need for more communication or different communication.

This was a new experience for me and it was the first time I had ever had a business partnership. The learning was huge and the completion just added to the learning from that experience that has made the experience positive rather than it potentially becoming a sour experience.

Completion also creates the space for new opportunity without bringing in potential baggage from a past experience. When I think of death and the importance of grief work, it makes me think of completion too. Grief work is coming to terms with and processing the emotions around loss. It can be heartbreaking and incredibly painful but not doing it means carrying that hurt and pain forward forever. It doesn’t mean that grief work removes the sadness of the loss, it just means not having to carry all the heavy emotions along for the rest of your life. And when heavy emotions do present themselves you are able to process them more in the moment rather than bury them and dig them up again.

The same goes for past relationships. Painful or plutonic in their ending there is still important completion work to do as an individual, otherwise it gets carried as baggage into a future relationship. Like grief, it doesn’t mean that you forget everything about the past relationship, it means that you can reflect on it and be with the emotions that come up without them always having to be raw and painful. A couple of examples of completing a relationship are to do a burning exercise where you write out everything you feel is outstanding or where you felt shut down and then burn it to let go of it or talking with a close friend and allowing yourself to be vulnerable in their company.

Whatever the thing is that has been lost it is important to complete with it. As mentioned, it doens’t mean letting it go or forgetting it ever happened, it means not having to carry it around constantly like stinking trash that won’t stop stinking.

Invitation

If you or someone you know have areas of your life where there are experiences that feel like they are lingering and need completion, get in touch.