Letting Go of the Good — why meaningful is not the same as right

Two endings, one pattern — and the question of whether you can let go before you know what comes next

At some point this year I was asked whether I was now a strategic advisor or a seminar trainer. I had an answer for both. That was the problem.

This year I ended two things I had done gladly. In April, my psychotherapy practice. And now spannungsRAUM, the brand I had built myself. Both were subjects I pursued with passion — and that was as it should be. Without that passion I would not have had the energy to deal with the difficulties that came with them.

That is exactly what makes such decisions hard. Not the doubt about whether the thing was worth something. The certainty that it was.

The easy decisions

It used to be easier to decide against something. It did not fit. The market was not there. The price competition could not be matched. Decisions like that are unpleasant, but they are simple: reality decides, and you carry it out.

But there are subjects that genuinely hold up. That are important, worthwhile, meaningful. Where no number and no market takes the decision off your hands. Here the usual yardstick stops working.

The question that is not enough

The psychologist Jens Corssen likes to ask: Does it become me? A good question — it pulls you out of the logic of obligation and asks whether something fits who you want to be.

In my case the answer was yes, twice. The practice became me. The brand became me. Both made sense, both were respected, and I could have defended either without lying. A question whose answer is yes carries no decision.

The question that changes the answer

What changes the answer is a second question, and it is less comfortable: Where do I want to go — and does this help with that?

Only here does it become tangible how much you are attached to something that is simultaneously keeping you from getting where you want to be. Not because it is bad. Because it binds time, attention and explanatory effort that the direction needs.

Meaningful is not the same as right. Meaningful means: it is worth this existing. Right means: it belongs to what I am becoming. The two often coincide. And when they come apart, it is harder to notice than when something simply does not work.

Why doing creates safety

I do not have a completed degree. At the decisive points, things got in the way. At the same time I was always drawn to subjects one could have studied. So I had no choice but to work my way in, find other routes, and show that I could do it. I had no other proof.

Later I taught at universities — precisely the things I had taught myself and tested in practice. In the end the proof was the work, not the certificate.

That pattern made me do things. It made me feel safe, and it taught me something I would not have learned otherwise: how to actually move things forward. It also has a price, and the price is letting go. Twenty years ago I ran software projects. They were my babies. I was so bound up with them that handing them over was genuinely difficult.

Today I work with leaders, and many of them have exactly this pattern. They used to be experts themselves, and they are excellent at doing. What I work on with them is detaching from the content work, concentrating on leading, and shaping conditions so that others can do good work.

That is often not easy. I know fairly precisely why.

Letting go before knowing what comes next

When I closed the practice in April, I knew one thing: it helps me work with more focus. Overnight there was revenue missing, and I knew neither how nor when I would make it up. But I sensed that the direction was right.

And then I reached for a replacement anyway. I tried to close the gap with my brand, pushed courses, sharpened formats — until I noticed how grimly I was fighting to make it work. The grimness was the signal. Not the revenue, not the market. The way I was pulling at it.

The first separation was right, and immediately afterwards I held on to the next thing. Only the second one took the lesson. Anyone who tells this more tidily is telling it wrong.

Looking back, that was not a market decision and not a flaw in the plan. It was a leader who could not tolerate his own uncertainty — and therefore reached for an answer instead of leaving the gap open. That is exactly the movement I see in organizations. I learned it on myself.

What helped was not resignation, and not throwing it away in frustration. It was seeing that there are better paths — for me, and at best for the thing itself, because it passes into other hands. What you hand over, you do not have to end.

What this means for transformation

You can let go without knowing what comes next. What you need is a direction, not a plan B. A direction is not a target picture — it is a criterion that lets you decide while the destination is still open.

Most transformations attempt the opposite. They want to hand people the new thing first, or at least be able to describe it, so that the old becomes easier to release. That is a trap, and it springs in two places.

The first: you put yourself under pressure to always have answers — purely so that you never have to tolerate uncertainty. What presents itself as care is frequently self-protection.

The second is the more expensive one. An organization learns to handle uncertainty only where uncertainty is allowed to appear. Cover it up every time before it reaches anyone, and you deny it the chance to practice. And then you are surprised that it handles the next upheaval as badly as the last.

What carries instead is unspectacular: say where this is going, and say what you do not yet know. The second part is the one that gets left out. It is also the part that makes the statement credible — and that lets people sort themselves out instead of waiting for an answer nobody has yet.

Closing

Both decisions were against something good. That is why they were hard. It is not a reason not to make them.

Anyone who waits until the new thing is there never lets go. They only swap.