Year End: The Psychology of Closure

Have you ever noticed that once you can tell a story about something, it’s in the past? 

The year’s end is upon us and I observe my clients reaching for closure to make sense of another time of upheaval in the world. I encourage everyone to engage the psychology of closure, not just at year end, but in any transition. Closure is a powerful force for change, growth and evolution and our brains are naturally constructed to use it. 

So this year, make yourself a commitment to bring an intentional close to the year and set your sights on new aspirations for the months ahead.

To help you prioritize making time to close out YOUR year, I’d like to explore this powerful dynamic more deeply. Why do our brains try so hard to tell the story of time in wrapped-up little packages with nice neat endings? And how can we use this to our benefit?

Photo by Sigmund

The Psychology of Closure

The term “closure” describes the ways in which our brains are built to “fill in the blanks” when they detect information gaps. Rather than seeing incomplete shapes, our physiology and psychology work together to perceive a partial circle as a whole circle instead. You can see the ways that visual designers use this principle to “trick” our brains into seeing shapes that aren’t there, a technique used liberally in logo creation.

This impulse to see a whole when only a part is perceptible is related to the ways in which uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion lead to greater stress. And this stress increases our urgency for finding certainty and clarity.

Our brains are pattern-seeking machines and this tendency our brains have to create wholeness is simple self-preservation. Every little bit of open-endedness takes energy to remain open in our short-term memory. Until we know how something ends, we have to keep checking back on it, remembering what it was about, cataloging new information and deciding when to come back and check on it again. This takes a lot of mental energy! It requires us to remember a bunch of (currently) unconnected details, and multiple–potential–patterns-of-connection.

By contrast, once the actual connections appear, we can “forget” all the irrelevant data and unsuccessful patterns we imagined before we knew how the story ends. We can free up our brain space to noodle on other–still resolving–patterns. Once we know how the uncertainty resolves itself, we can wrap up the whole thing, from end-to-end, and shove it into long-term memory, which makes more efficient use of our brain. 

The Power of Narrative

This is why our brains naturally use narrative intelligence to recognize and respond to patterns of meaning and motivation within and around us. Cindy Atlee and I use this amazing mental power to help people find Worklife Bliss in their careers and the process is as powerful as it is fun.

It feels good to wrap up uncertainty with a good story that has a happy ending. So of course we should use any excuse for transitioning from one time period to another, or one project to another, or one relationship to another… to leverage the psychology of closure. We speed our way through the transitions by telling the story of what happened before, which sets us up for success in whatever is happening next. 

Best of all, it helps us grow when we find the lessons learned, the happy ending and the challenges overcome narratives in our lives as often as we can.

In short, finding closure feels good because you have a good story to tell and you get to reclaim a lot of mental energy you were expending just sitting in uncertainty.

Closure and Narrative as Tools for Evolving Your Professional Identity

In addition to reducing stress, however, I actively recommend creating closure as a way of evolving your personal brand. Each time you change jobs and have to update your LinkedIn profile, you retell the story of your career through a new lens. And in that retelling you come to see yourself in a new, more empowered and more mature, light.

If you don’t change jobs very often, or take other transitional opportunities to refresh your public identity, you may find that the story you tell yourself and others about your professional identity is very out-of-date. Your lived reality, and the story you tell about it, may grow further apart, which creates its own kind of mental stress.

So this year, leverage the psychology of closure to declutter the year behind you and set yourself up for success in the year ahead. You’ll feel refreshed with an updated story to tell about who you are and where you’re going.

By the way, if you are interested in the wonky psychology and neurology of these dynamics check out this recent podcast Your Identity is a Story You Tell Yourself by Sean Illing.

InPower Coaching Members: Here are tools for an InPower Fresh Start for the new year.

Reposted cuz it’s still relevant this time of year.