What are the challenges of planning for pause or closure?

The main challenge is that it’s hard.

If you’re thinking about closure, it’s emotional to consider your life’s work and sit with the importance of the role you’ve played in so many lives. It’s ok if you need to take time to work through this process to give you space to process those feelings.

It’s also pretty overwhelming. You’ve spent years building your business, and to hand that off to another person is daunting. How will you explain your intense spreadsheets, your weird passwords, or your precarious piles of filing you need to do? How can you set another person up for success if they have to take over all of those things and more?

Retirement planning is one thing. You can plan in advance and set the tasks as action items you can complete yourself. You can contact clients, wrap up those spreadsheets, shred or file those stacks of papers. It will be emotional and it will be a lot of administrative work, but you could do it successfully with enough planning and organization.

For emergency planning, you’ve got to choose someone to take on the tasks of your unfinished business. If you don’t proactively choose, it can fall to someone unsuited for the job, like a spouse, a child, or a friend. You could maybe assume a coworker would take over for you, but what if you’re solo? You’ll have to choose a person who can be kind and professional to your clients, but that you don’t want to overburden with the process, and who can balance the emotional shock of loss with the administrative tasks of loss. And, you’ll need to have discussed this plan with the person you’ve chosen, and they have to agree, and you have to keep them up to date on any major changes in your practice or plans.

Some of these factors are true for a pause as well, though the challenges can be different. It’s overwhelming to think about what tasks someone else could take from you for the duration of your absence. You’ll still have to explain your weird passwords and intense spreadsheets, but set it up in a way that it can be transferred to someone else and returned to you later. If you’re already leaving your practice for an extended time, it means something big is happening in your life. That event probably has it’s own logistics and adding the logistics of transferring to another person on top of that is a lot to ask of yourself. Making your plans ahead of time saves you from that heavy cognitive lift when the time comes.