The Last 90 Days
How to leave your organisation gracefully.
Most leaders try to survive their last 90 days in an organisation, hoping to manage the politics and logistics and push through to the end without popping. But leaving can offer a rare opportunity for real developmental growth if you know how to work with the heat that’s generated.
“I’ve handed my notice in.” Their shoulders dropped and their face softly smiled. “I’ve taken the new role and I’m leaving in 3 months.”
Their face flickered and a frown cracked their forehead. “I feel like I should be really excited and freed up, but I feel exhausted, overwhelmed. There’s so much going on! My boss is being really unreasonable and my team are playing up like never before. I need to find a way to stay calm in the midst of all of this.”
You’ve made the decision. You’ve accepted the new role. You’ve told your boss, and now the clock is ticking on your exit. And suddenly, everything changes. You’re seeing things more clearly than ever before and are now rapidly becoming irrelevant. Your boss is alternately ignoring you or making unreasonable demands on your time. Your team are either delighted for you or demanding that you make things right before you go.
This is the territory no one prepares you for. You’ve had lots of advice about what to do when you join a new organisation: using the first 90 days to take stock, to build relationships and to work on quick wins. But leaving? That’s supposed to be simple. You give your notice, hand things off to others and move on. Except it doesn't feel that simple at all.
The last 90 days of a role is its own kind of crucible. Everything intensifies. Whatever habits and patterns you have will get activated in the pressure of ending. And other people’s habits and patterns will also activate in the face of you leaving. Whatever challenges the organisation faces will now become suddenly and painfully visible now you’re no longer invested in managing it. And you have to navigate all of this while completing your work, and not disappearing or burning everything down on your way out.
Leaving is a classic developmental “heat experience”. One of those rare situations that creates an intense pressure that can’t be resolved through your habitual ways of operating. Most leaders try to just survive these 90 days, to manage the politics and the logistics and push through to the end without popping. But heat experiences are beautifully rich developmental opportunities: conditions under which real growth happens, if you know how to work with them.
The question isn’t whether you’ll feel the heat. You will. The question is whether you’ll just endure the heat or find a way to use it. Whether you’ll carry the unresolved tensions into your next role, or use the heat that’s generated to develop capacities you didn’t have before.
Confidential Limbo
Before any of the public pressure begins, there’s a particularly excruciating period that no one talks about: the limbo of confidentiality.
You’ve told your boss. You’ve accepted the new role. But it’s not been announced yet. You can’t tell your team, your peers, sometimes not even your closest colleagues. You’re walking around with this enormous piece of information that changes everything, and you have to act like nothing has changed.
This period can be its own special kind of torture. You’re in meetings planning projects you know you won’t complete. You’re being asked for input on initiatives that will outlast you. Your team is talking about the future as if you’ll be part of it, and you have to simply nod along while holding your secret.
And the timeline is usually unclear. “We’ll announce it next week” becomes two weeks. And then it’s a month. HR needs to finalise things. Your boss wants to control the timing. The organisation has its own rhythm for these announcements. Meanwhile you’re suspended in this awful space where you’ve decided to go but are unable to acknowledge the decision.
The body holds all this tension. The tightness in your jaw from biting back the truth. The pressure in your chest from holding onto information you can’t share. The exhaustion of managing your face and your responses and your energy so the secret doesn’t leak out. You’ve become hypervigilant. Did I say too much? Did that sound like someone who’s leaving? Am I being too aloof? Too keen?
The worst part is the inauthenticity of it. You feel like a total hypocrite. You’ve always advocated openness and honesty and being authentic. You’re hiding something enormous from people who trust you. People you’ve built genuine relationships with. You’re performing continuity when you know there’s rupture coming. Every conversation feels like it has a false bottom. What you’re saying and what you know but can’t say. It corrodes something in you, this enforced dishonesty, even though you can see the organisation’s perspective for the secrecy.
Some leaders handle this by withdrawing slightly, creating distance so the lying-by-omission feels less intense. Others overcompensate, being extra present and engaged to prove to themselves they’re not already gone. Both strategies create their own problems. Withdrawal makes people suspicious. Over-engagement makes the eventual announcement more shocking. Both are exhausting.
This confidential period is where many leaders start internally checking out, even though they might be months away from their actual exit. The gap between what they know and what they can say creates a split in their presence. They’re physically there but already halfway gone. And once that checking-out starts, it’s hard to recover even after the announcement is made.
An Emotional Cocktail
Then the announcement happens. And the moment you go public with your leaving, you’re subject to a whole cocktail of emotions flying at you from all directions.
Your boss makes a last-minute demand for you to complete a major piece of work before you go, work that will take weeks. Your closest colleague goes cold on you. It turns out they applied for the same role you’re taking and didn’t get it. One of your team members comes to your office in tears, asking how you could abandon them when they need you most. Another team member is visibly delighted, already positioning themselves as your successor.
In a single morning, you’ve gone from being a trusted leader to being the person who’s betraying everyone by leaving, or the person who’s finally getting out while the rest of them are stuck here, or the person who doesn’t really care about the work because if you did you wouldn’t be going.
And you’re trying to navigate this cocktail while feeling your own complex mix of emotions. You might feel relief that you are escaping the organisational dysfunction you’ve tolerated for so long. Grief about relationships ending and the hopes and potential that will now be unrealised. Excitement about what’s coming next in your new role. Guilt about leaving your team behind. Overwhelm at the sheer weight of the years of service that is suddenly landing on you now that you’re letting go.
The urge to just check out mentally is very strong. You’ve already decided to leave, so why bother staying engaged? The urge to over-function is equally strong. Trying to fix everything before you go, making yourself indispensable, proving you are a good colleague and manager right up to the last minute. Both are ways of avoiding the real work of leaving, which is much harder than checking out or over-functioning.
The Body Knows You’re Leaving
Your body knows you’re leaving long before your mind fully accepts it. The tightness in your chest when your boss makes another demand you resent. The collapse in your belly when team members look at you with accusation or fear. The agitation that makes you want to start the new job now, to be done with this waiting period, to escape the discomfort of being in this in-between phase.
This is where the developmental work happens. Not in your strategy for how you’ll hand things off, or in the clarity of your communication plan. The work happens in learning to stay present with what you’re actually feeling in your body as you navigate these last months.
When a colleague’s jealousy activates feelings of guilt or defensiveness in you, notice where that lands in your chest and shoulders. Feel it without immediately explaining yourself or withdrawing. When your boss makes unreasonable demands, notice your familiar pattern of over-accommodating before it takes over. Feel the “yes” forming in your throat when you actually need to say no. When your team’s resentment lands, stay with the discomfort of being the one who’s leaving without apologising or defending.
The habits and patterns you’ve been operating for years in the organisation will all show up with extra intensity now. The people-pleaser who can’t disappoint anyone will find it almost impossible to set boundaries. The perfectionist who needs to leave things perfect will exhaust themselves trying to button up every loose end. The controller who needs to ensure continuity will struggle to let go of influence. The rescuer who’ll want to save people from the difficulties generated by their leaving.
Seeing Things Clearly
One strange and valuable thing that happens when you’re leaving is that you start to see the organisation as it actually is. All the challenges and crises you’ve been managing and normalising. The way you’ve been adapting yourself around other leaders. The team dynamics you’ve been trying to hold together. You’re like a fish that can see the water it’s swimming in. And just how contaminated it is.
Now you’re no longer invested in making things different, you get to see how fragile things are, where the blocks are, and just how unhelpful many of the repetitive patterns and routines are.
This clear seeing is really important. Not so you can judge the organisation or vindicate your decision to leave, but so you can see your own part in it. The ways you’ve over-reached to compensate for other people’s fragility or their under-functioning. The ways you’ve absorbed dysfunction to keep things stable. The ways you’ve made yourself indispensable and then resented being needed so much.
When you see this clearly, without the distortion of either defending the organisation or needing it to be wrong so you can feel right about leaving, something shifts. You can feel genuine gratitude for what this place gave you. The opportunities you were given, the skills you developed, the relationships that mattered, the challenges that shaped you. And you can also acknowledge the organisation’s limitations and your own readiness to leave.
Gratefulness and Boundaries
There’s a core practice that can turn the heat of the last 90 days from something to endure to something to work with. It’s simple but not easy: staying grounded in a sense of gratitude while maintaining clear boundaries.
This sense of gratitude is not meant as a platitude or a hollow sentiment, but as a deeply felt sensory experience. The reality is that the person you are now has been directly shaped by the experiences you’ve had over the past few years and that has created the person who is now moving into the next role. This gratitude can be turned into a developmental practice by actively voicing these sentences:
“Thank you for all the challenges and opportunities and learnings you’ve given me. And thank you for all challenges and opportunities and learnings you received from me. I wouldn’t be me without everything I’ve taken from my time here. And I wouldn’t have this next opportunity without all that I’ve received from you.”
This isn’t pretending that difficulties didn’t exist or that you weren’t ready to leave. It is about acknowledging the truth that this place shaped you, allows you to hold this knowing and leave with respect for that as you move on.
And this gratitude needs to be held within boundaries. Clear, kind, consistent boundaries. Saying no when people try to load you up with projects for you to finish before you leave. Saying no when your boss wants you to stay later than your agreed end date. Saying no when team members want you to promise you’ll stay involved after you’re gone. Saying no when the urge to rescue or fix or be responsible surges up in you.
These nos aren’t aggressive or defended. They’re clean.
“No. I won’t be able to complete that before I leave.”
“No. That won’t work. My last day is … ”
“No. I won’t be here to support your work, so it’s important that you connect with your new manager now.”
The practice is noticing when the familiar urge to say yes arises. Feel it arise in your body as that familiar pull to accommodate or prove yourself or not to disappoint people. Feel it and choose differently. This is hard. The patterns have years of momentum behind them. But each time you’re able to offer a clean ‘No’ creates a little more space, a little more ground, a little more actual separation between who you’ve been in this role and who you’ll be in the next. This is the work of developing yourself in the heat.
Discharge: The Work No One Talks About
You can’t leave well if you’re carrying years of accumulated tension, frustration, disappointment, and unresolved anger. This stuff has to go somewhere. If you don’t discharge it consciously, it will leak out as passive aggression, as you checking out, and as you burning bridges in all kinds of small ways you’ll regret later.
The body holds all of it. The rage at decisions that made your work harder. The grief about the hopes and potential that never materialised. Yours, your team’s, the organisation’s. The sheer physical exhaustion of years of trying to navigate the complex politics and relationships.
This is why practices for discharge become essential during your exit. You need ways of actually releasing this emotional energy, not just managing it intellectually. For example,
When you’re feeling angry: let the physical energy of the anger discharge rather than trying to ignore it or hold it in or acting it out at people. Find a private space and let your hands and body shake for 90 seconds. Splash cold water on your face. Make sounds in your car.
When you’re feeling sad: try to feel the sadness fully instead of pushing through it. Have a good cry in the shower. Sit with the grief of what won’t happen now that you’re leaving. Let yourself feel the loss of belonging, of mattering in this particular way without collapsing or pretending it’s not there.
When you create conditions for conscious discharge something clears. You can be present with people without needing to explain yourself or defend your choice. You can feel the full weight of leaving without being crushed by it. You can maintain your effectiveness in these final months without depleting yourself. And most important of all, you’ll be clearing away unhelpful material that will resurface in your next role.
Shifting Identity
The hardest part of the last 90 days isn’t the logistics or even the emotional intensity. It’s the way that your identity will shift. You’re no longer fully the person in the old role, but you’re not yet the person in the new role. You’re in between. In transition.
This in-between state is deeply uncomfortable. Your mind wants to resolve it—either by checking out completely (“I’m already gone”) or by staying over-invested (“I’m still responsible for everything”). Your body feels unmoored, like you’re floating between worlds. The impatience becomes almost physical. You want to be done with this, to start the new thing, to not be in this awkward transitional space.
But learning to be present with not fully belonging anywhere is the work. Learning to hold the discomfort of ending without rushing to the beginning. Learning to create space for this important process of separation. The shifting between who you were and who you’re becoming without forcing it or avoiding it.
Your habitual ways of operating are no longer effective when you’re in the middle of the transition. The pressure, discomfort, patterns activating, and identity dissolving. You can’t control the outcome. You have to feel things you’d normally avoid. If you rush through this phase, you’ll carry the old role’s unfinished business into the new one. Whatever patterns drove you to leave will show up in the new context because you never actually separated from them. The wounds and disappointments follow you because you never let yourself feel and release them.
If you can stay present to the discomfort, notice your patterns activating, discharge what needs to release, and allow the identity shift to happen at its own pace, you can arrive in the new role genuinely fresh. Not carrying resentment or inflation or the need to prove anything. Just being present with what is.
90 Days of Gracefulness
The last 90 days of a role is a practice in staying grounded when everything’s activating. It’s a practice in boundaries when people want more from you than you can give. It’s a practice in gratitude without bypassing the difficulties. It’s a practice in feeling the anger, sadness, loss, grief, excitement, and relief without being controlled by any of it.
Most leaders just try to survive the exit. They manage the logistics, maintain professionalism, and push through to the end. This works in the sense that they get through it, but they miss the opportunity to actually complete the cycle. To leave with grace rather than just getting out.
So what does leaving with grace mean?
Staying present and effective until your actual last day, not checking out mentally weeks before.
Setting clear boundaries that protect your energy and integrity without being punishing or defending yourself.
Feeling and discharging the accumulated tension so you’re not carrying it forward.
Seeing what the organisation was able to give you and what it couldn’t, without needing things to be all good or all bad.
Creating a balanced story about your time in your role that describes what you’ve given and what you’ve received.
Allowing the identity shift to happen in its own time, staying present with the natural discomfort and confusion that arises.
Arriving in your next role ready and present, not still processing the last one.
This kind of leaving takes deliberate work. The kind that happens in your body, not just in your exit plan. It requires support from trusted colleagues, people outside the organisation, coaching or therapeutic professionals. And practices that help you to stay grounded, feel into what’s actually happening and discharge what needs to be released.
But when you do this work, something becomes possible that most leaders never experience: you complete a cycle fully. You don’t leave trailing unfinished business and unresolved emotions. You don’t arrive in the new role still defending yourself from the old one or proving you made the right choice.
You’re just present. Ready. Clear.
That’s what leaving with grace means. And it’s worth every bit of the difficult work it requires.
If you’re navigating a transition and want support staying grounded through the exit, I work with senior leaders on exactly this. The Last 90 Days is its own kind of crucible, and you don’t have to do it alone. Reach out if you want to talk about how to leave gracefully.
This is simply human | complex world — a space for grounded practices and personal stories as we navigate the complexity of modern life together. I work with people who are caught up in patterns they can see but can’t seem to shift. Coaching through the messy middle of developmental transitions. The kind where old patterns don’t work anymore but new capacities haven’t fully formed yet. If that’s where you are, let’s talk.