Every leader, at some point, faces the necessity of letting go. Letting go of a strategy that has stopped working. Letting go of an identity that was built for a previous phase of the business. Letting go of a key person who needs to move on, or a market position that was once a source of pride, or a vision of the future that the evidence has made untenable. The capacity to make this release cleanly, to grieve what needs grieving and then move forward without carrying the weight of what was, is one of the most practically consequential psychological capacities a leader can develop.

It is also one of the least discussed. The leadership literature tends to focus on acquisition: acquiring skills, acquiring clarity, acquiring capability. The equally important dimension of healthy release is largely absent. Traditional Chinese Medicine addresses this gap directly through its account of the Metal element and the organ system of the lungs, in ways that offer both a diagnostic framework for understanding why letting go is hard and a practical path toward making it possible.

The Metal Element in TCM Theory

The Metal element in the Five Element framework governs autumn, the color white, the flavor of pungency, and the organ pair of the lungs and large intestine. The shared function of these two organs is significant: both are organs of release. The lungs take in what is needed (oxygen, inspiration) and release what is no longer needed (carbon dioxide, what must be exhaled). The large intestine receives what has been processed and releases what is waste. At the physiological level, the Metal element governs the entire cycle of reception and release, of taking in what nourishes and letting go of what does not.

At the psychological level, the emotion associated with the Metal element is grief and sadness, and the function of healthy Metal energy is the capacity to move through loss without becoming stuck in it. The person with healthy Metal energy can feel grief fully and completely when there is genuine cause for it, and then, having allowed the grief to complete its natural cycle, can release it and restore clarity and forward movement. The person with Metal element imbalance, whether from excess or deficiency, becomes stuck: either unable to feel the grief at all, numbing through busyness or rationalization, or unable to release it once felt, carrying loss as a chronic weight that colors every subsequent experience (Maciocia, G., The Foundations of Chinese Medicine, 3rd ed., 2015).

For executives, the most common Metal element presentation is the inability to grieve adequately. The culture of executive competence does not make space for grief. Leaders are expected to be forward-looking, resilient, and solution-oriented. These are genuinely valuable qualities, but when they become a defense against feeling the genuine losses that leadership inevitably involves, they produce an accumulation of unprocessed grief that sits in the system as a chronic depletion of lung Qi, manifesting as reduced vitality, a quality of flatness or emotional unavailability, and an inability to be genuinely inspired by new possibilities because the losses of the past have not been fully honored and released.

What the Psychology of Grief Reveals

The psychological research on grief has undergone significant revision in recent decades. The stage model popularized by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, which suggested grief moves through predictable sequential stages from denial through acceptance, has been replaced by more nuanced models that better account for the variability and non-linearity of actual grief experiences. Bonanno, Columbia University‘s research on resilience and loss established that the most common trajectory following significant loss is not the prolonged grief of stage model theory but a pattern of relative stability, interrupted by waves of intense emotion, that resolves over weeks to months in most people (Bonanno, G. A., The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss, Basic Books, 2009).

What Bonanno’s research also identified was that the deliberate suppression of grief long-term outcomes than genuine, expressed engagement with the emotional reality of loss. The executive who does not allow themselves to feel the loss of a failed venture, a significant departure, or a strategic abandonment is not demonstrating strength. They are accumulating a physiological and psychological load that will manifest in other ways: reduced creativity, interpersonal withdrawal, a quality of going-through-the-motions engagement that eventually becomes visible to the people around them.

The Kabbalistic tradition addresses the necessity of genuine engagement with loss through the concept of aveilut, mourning: the structured practice of honoring what has been lost before moving forward. The Chida wrote in Midbar Kedemot that the person who does not mourn adequately for what has genuinely been lost carries a kind of spiritual debt that weighs on the inner life without being clearly identified, because the soul knows the weight of what has not been honored (Midbar Kedemot, Aleph, 3). This teaching has a direct parallel in the grief research: unacknowledged loss does not disappear. It goes underground and influences the system from below the level of conscious awareness.

The Lungs and the Capacity for Inspiration

There is a semantic richness in the word “inspiration” that connects the Metal element’s physiological and psychological functions in a way that is not merely metaphorical. To inspire is both to breathe in and to receive creative, enlivening ideas. The lungs govern the physical intake of breath; the healthy Metal element governs the psychological openness to new possibility that makes genuine inspiration possible. When the lungs are constricted, physically or metaphorically, both forms of inspiration are impaired.

The executive who has not adequately let go of past losses or outdated identities is, in TCM terms, breathing with a constricted lung system: the capacity to take in what is new and nourishing is reduced because the system is still occupied with what should have been released. This manifests as the leader who cannot genuinely get excited about new directions, whose engagement with emerging opportunities feels performative rather than real, whose creative energy is diminished even though the outward production continues. The restoration of genuine inspiration requires the release that only adequate grieving and letting go can provide.

Research on “creative openness and associative thinking, associative thinking depends on the availability of cognitive and emotional space: the person whose mental resources are occupied by unresolved conflicts or accumulated emotional weight shows systematically reduced performance on measures of creative thinking compared to those whose inner life has been cleared through adequate processing and release (Mednick, S. A., “The Associative Basis of the Creative Process,” Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232, 1962). The Metal element cultivation is, in this framework, a creative performance practice as much as a psychological health practice.

Practical Pathways for Metal Element Restoration

The restoration of Metal element balance involves both the completion of unfinished grief and the cultivation of the physical lung system that supports it. TCM practitioners typically approach Metal imbalance through acupuncture on the lung and large intestine meridians (particularly Lung 7, which opens the lung meridian and supports the release of suppressed emotion), breath-based Qi Gong practices that specifically expand and deepen the breath, and dietary approaches that support lung health including pears, white foods, and pungent herbs that open and clear the lung system.

At the psychological level, the most direct pathway to completing unfinished grief is structured acknowledgment: the deliberate practice of naming what has been lost and allowing the emotional response to that loss to be felt and expressed, whether through a private journaling practice, a conversation with a trusted coach or therapist, or a ritual of acknowledgment that honors the significance of what has been released. The form matters less than the genuine engagement with the emotional reality of the loss.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that genuine joy, simcha, is not the absence of sadness but what becomes available when sadness has been fully honored and released. The person who avoids sadness never reaches genuine joy. The person who enters sadness fully and allows it to complete its natural cycle emerges into a quality of aliveness and forward energy that is qualitatively different from the forced positivity that suppression produces (Tzavaat HaRivash, 44). For the executive who has been carrying unacknowledged losses, this pathway through grief rather than around it is not a detour from performance. It is the most direct route to the genuine engagement that sustained high performance requires.

Organizational Transitions and the Permission to Grieve

One of the most practically impactful applications of the Metal element framework is in the context of organizational transitions: mergers, restructurings, leadership changes, strategic pivots, and market exits. These transitions almost always involve genuine losses, for the organization and for the individuals within it, and they are almost always managed in ways that deny or minimize the grief dimension in favor of forward-looking communication about opportunity and vision.

William Bridges’ research on organizational transitions established that the failure to adequately honor the ending, the loss, the completion of what was, before launching into the new beginning, is one of the most consistent causes of transition failure in organizations (Bridges, W., Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, Da Capo Press, 3rd ed., 2009). People who are rushed from what was lost into what comes next without adequate time and space to honor the ending do not arrive at the new beginning with genuine readiness. They arrive carrying the weight of unmourned loss, which colors their engagement with the new direction in ways that leaders often attribute to resistance but that are more accurately understood as incomplete grief.

The Metal element framework suggests that the leader’s first responsibility in any significant organizational transition is to model the appropriate honoring of what is ending before championing what is beginning. This does not mean dwelling in loss or fostering organizational despondency. It means creating the space, through explicit acknowledgment, ritual marking, or simply the quality of honest conversation, in which the real losses of the transition can be named and honored. The Rashash taught that the ability to honor endings and completions is itself a form of wisdom, because it reflects the recognition that each stage of life has its own integrity and deserves to be properly closed before the next stage can be fully opened (Nahar Shalom, Shaar HaKlalim, 4).

References

• Maciocia, G. (2015). The Foundations of Chinese Medicine (3rd ed.). Churchill Livingstone.
• Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Basic Books.
• Mednick, S. A. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232.
• Chida (Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai), Midbar Kedemot, Aleph, 3.
• Baal Shem Tov, Tzavaat HaRivash, 44.