Growth Spurt: Finish Strong

And today I want to start off by having you think about a great vacation that ended with a nightmare at the airport.

probably something we're all pretty familiar with, or a fantastic meal that ended with a rude goodbye at the door.

I want you to notice how the ending of both situations colors the entire memory.

That's not a personal quirk.

It is quite literally how the human brain is wired, how memory is wired.

And once you understand it, you can use it to benefit you.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, along with his colleagues, discovered something they called the peak end rule.

When we look back on an experience, we don't average out every moment and Instead, our memory is dominated by two things, the peak, the most intense moment of the situation or event we experienced and how it ended.

Now in one well-known study, people underwent an uncomfortable medical procedure.

One group had a shorter version and another had a longer version that added a few extra minutes of milder discomfort at the end of the surgery.

Now, logically, we know that the longer group experienced more total discomfort, but because their experience ended, with a more gentle, milder level of discomfort, they actually remembered the surgery as less unpleasant than the other group and were more willing to repeat it.

So the takeaway here is interesting, right? It's not about the total amount of anything that registers, whether that be pain, discomfort, nerves, it's the peak and the ending that do almost all of the memory shaping for us.

One way to put it is that we don't just live our experiences, we build memories of them and the ending of any experience gets a starring role.

So what I want to challenge you to do is start designing your endings on purpose so that you have more control over your experiences.

A few examples of this, the ending of your workday, right? Try to end your day on a small win or a moment of clarity rather than kind of this frantic, sporadic end to your day.

If you're wrapping up a meeting, I want you to try finishing with a clear, encouraging next step, a clear plan of where we go from here and maybe your coaching or parenting.

And I want you to think about how you end the conversation, because that is what your child or your athlete will take away.

Now, you don't have to make every ending perfect, right? That's not how how memory works.

But try to be intentional with the peak and endings of any situation so that you are having a strong and deliberate close to your day, to your conversations, to get the most out of it and to make sure that your message is clearly captured.