How are you feeling as we come to the end of another year? Perhaps these past couple of weeks feel like a mad scramble, squeezing the last to do items out of the productivity toothpaste tube. Perhaps it feels more like a slowly deflating balloon, or a weary limp towards a faint finishing line. Maybe you feel refreshed, joyful, sparkling with delight. If that’s you, please tell me your secret.

However it feels, likely this is a time of transition, reflecting on the past year and orienting toward the next. Perhaps you’re checking in with your intentions from the beginning of the year and forming new ones. Or recycling familiar old ones. Again.

Whether we set hard core New Years resolutions or more general intentions or even vaguer hopes, our aim is to achieve something positive. Better health, better relationships, better future, better quality of life. And why not?

But whatever we want to achieve, it starts with our relationship with where we’re at now. That sets the tone for how we proceed. Are we striving or aspiring?

Striving is all about getting ‘there’. There’s a sense of effort, straining, driving to get from A to B, where B is superior and our current A just isn’t good enough. Maybe we’re not good enough. And there’s the risk of failing, not arriving, stalling on the road.

Aspiring is more about expanding what’s ‘here’. There’s an opening, broadening, deepening of possibilities. There’s more room for acceptance and softness for wherever we are and more curiosity about what might emerge.

Striving is more about the destination. Aspiring is more about the path we choose to take.

Training for helping professionals places a great deal of importance on engagement. How to establish a therapeutic connection where good work can happen. How to develop and deepen understanding of this unique individual. How to navigate trust and foster a sense of safety. How to connect in a genuinely authentic but appropriately boundaried way.

As it should. The basis of good treatment or support is a strong relational foundation and yet so many of the the people we support struggle with exactly that – forming safe, two way relationships where needs can be explicitly negotiated and met. For many people, the most dangerous thing on the planet is another human.

Yet we don’t spend nearly as long honing the skills of how to end the relationship. Termination, as it is so often referred to, is seen as an end of the work. Even the term itself has a brutality to it. At best, termination means reaching the last station of this train line. At worst, it is a ceasing to exist.

We know we need to be sensitive in how we go about it. Place the work in a broader context. Fan the flames of the person’s own sense of agency and forward momentum. Maybe leave the person with a small bouquet of achievements, plans or referrals. But essentially it is the moment where the work we do together is over.

Ending helping relationships well is one of the most therapeutic things we could do. It’s rare for any of us to experience a healthy and mutually respectful end to an intimate relationship. More often they are ended abruptly by death or conflict, or fade away through neglect or distraction.

Supporting people to experience a mindfully guided beginning, middle and end of a meaningful connection is an opportunity to help people process and navigate the life course of any relationship. It’s not the end of the work, it is the work.

We come into helping or caring roles because we want to support people, and we nearly always have ideas about what kind of changes might be beneficial.

Sometimes we are in explicit agreement with the other person, where we both have a clear and shared idea about the direction we want to head in together. Sometimes we invite the other person to at least consider options based on our experience or expertise that we believe may be helpful.

It’s hard to do this work without hope. Hope communicates faith – in the person and their future – and optimism. Hope is energising, giving us the stamina to hang in there through the slow process of change.

But hope can also bring a sense of pressure, an expectation that something should change, and often something specific. Our hopes can get in the way discovering theirs.

A stance of non-attachment can help. This is different to neutrality (being neither for or against the change) or indifference (not caring about the change). Non-attachment requires us to hold our hopes lightly, to unhook ourselves from becoming invested in them.

We might appreciate a beautiful sunset but we don’t try to make it last longer. All we can do is be as present as possible to savour the passing moment. Equally we can build our own capacity to be present, without getting as caught up in our own ideas about what could or should happen next.

One way to become less attached to the outcome is to shift the focus from aiming for a specific outcome to supporting the person to make a truly informed and considered decision that they can live with, coming from a place of kindness and acceptance toward themselves.

Now our hope and optimism can be directed towards the belief that such a decision is possible, fostered by a curiosity to discover what that decision might be. Even if the decision is not what we might have chosen for ourselves.