Eight years, a cardboard box of desk junk, and one speech standing between your colleague and the door. Time to send them off properly.
It's a Friday evening and the office has quietly turned into a party. Someone has pushed the desks back, there's warm Prosecco in plastic cups and a supermarket cake with the wrong name piped on it. On the corner of a desk sits a cardboard box of eight years' worth of desk junk — a stress ball, a chipped mug, a wilting plant nobody remembered to water.
Because Sam is leaving. After eight years, a new job in another city, and today is the last day. Everyone keeps saying "we must do speeches" and nobody has done one — and you can see Sam eyeing the exit, hoping to slip away before anyone makes a fuss.
So it falls to you. A glass to tap, a room to hush, and roughly ninety seconds to do the hardest easy thing in the language: say what someone has meant to you, out loud, without turning it into a funeral or a joke. Thanks, a warm goodbye, and a promise you actually intend to keep.
Fond, a little nervous, secretly gutted. You've worked beside Sam for years and you're not letting them leave with a mumbled "bye". You've got a glass and something to say.
Touched but squirming, dreading any fuss, one eye on the door. Will pretend to hate the attention and secretly treasure every word of it.
Here's your toolkit. You don't need to memorise it. Read each phrase, say it out loud once, and pick the ones that sound like you. You'll have it open while you practise.
Draw a card and say what you'd say, out loud, in one or two sentences. Use your own words or the toolkit. Then peek at one possible answer.
Done a few rounds? Try again with the toolkit covered. When it flows, you're ready to hear them in a real conversation.
Read it out loud, one role each, then swap. Spot as many phrases from your toolkit as you can. Listen for how the speaker steadies a wobbly moment: a bit of warmth, a bit of humour, and one promise pinned down so it can't float away.
1. Before the speech even begins, the speaker slips in "I won't keep you long, I promise." What is that little line quietly doing for the room — and why say it first?
2. The speaker makes the classic party promise to keep in touch — but adds two things most people leave out. What are they, and how do they change how the promise lands?
3. Sam ends with "So this isn't goodbye. It's… 'See you soon.'" What is Sam doing to the idea of leaving here — and why is it kinder than just saying "goodbye"?
No script this time. You'll have a real conversation with a real person. They have their own mind, and you have a goal.
Say each step once, out loud, in your own words. No writing, no peeking at the phrases.
Pick your situation. Your partner plays the other person.
🏆 You win when the leaver smiles and the room applauds.
Start the scene first. Partway through, draw a card. Whatever it says, it just happened.
Now you're on the other side. Your partner takes your old part.
Draw another twist whenever you like.
Tick what you actually did, in either seat.
Run it one more time. Draw a twist before you start, and try to reach a good result faster than before.
In April 1916, Ernest Shackleton stood on a freezing beach on Elephant Island and said goodbye to twenty-two of his men. He was about to sail 800 miles across the most violent ocean on Earth in an open boat barely bigger than a rowing boat, to fetch help. The unspoken promise folded into that goodbye was the biggest anyone could make: I will come back for you.
Most farewell promises — "we'll stay in touch", "I'll visit", "let's not leave it too long" — quietly evaporate the moment the door closes. Shackleton's didn't. After several attempts were beaten back by the ice, in August 1916 he broke through and rescued every single man. Not one of them had died.
So the next time you tell a leaving colleague "don't be a stranger", remember what a kept promise is worth. It's the ones we actually honour that turn a goodbye into a "see you soon".