photo credit: kyz

How do you stay flexible enough to accomplish your goals even when so many things could go wrong???

Have you ever felt that the bulk of your life amounted to doing your best to make your ‘Plan B’ work, despite recurrent longings to somehow get back to working from a Plan A?  I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

Surely you’ve been there yourself.  You had a plan.  You knew what you were doing.  You knew where you were going and how you were going to get there.  You had all your ducks lined up.  And then Wham! The “fit hits the shan!”  And all bets are off.  Or not.

On to Plan B

When something you didn’t plan for gets in the way of what you did plan for and forces you to reassess your path, then suddenly, it’s detour time.

Often a detour will put you right back on track, just by a more roundabout route.  When that happens in my daughter’s pursuit of her goals, she does what she calls a mental “Reset” – a reboot if you will, of her mental operating system to reorient her to the environment as it is, not as it was supposed to be.  Sort of like the GPS system in her car, she re-computes a new route to get from where she is now to where she wanted to go in the first place. And then she proceeds with confidence.

Preset Button – Another Way

This same daughter recently had an “AHA!” moment and, in addition to her “Reset” concept, she invented her very own mental “Preset Buttons” that access her Plans B, C, D, …  When negative expectations start crowding out her positive vision for future events, when she starts worrying over all the things that can go wrong, she now allows those negative expectations a “space” in her mind, much like the “compartments” noted by author James Clavell in his novel Shogun:

Put this incident away – that’s all it is, one incident in ten thousand.  You must not allow it to wreck your harmony.  Put it away into a compartment.

Only she’s given her compartments a more modern tag – Preset Buttons, which, like the radio preset buttons in her car, connect her to specific messages and points of view.  She goes a little bit farther and, instead of allowing just the negative expectations to occupy that space/compartment, she programs-in what I call creative optimism.  Let me explain.

Her Preset Buttons connect her with both the negative possibility and a plan for dealing with such an eventuality.  You see, when Murphy starts nagging her brain with all the things that can go wrong, she quickly considers alternative paths for each negative that rears its ugly head and then creates a Plan B (or C or D) and programs her “Preset Button” to give her instant access should she need it.  And, having programmed that Preset Button, she chooses NOT to listen to that station unless she runs into interference and needs to find a different path to success.

The experts call this Defensive Pessimism but I call it Creative Optimism – it’s her way of telling herself: I can do this, even if things go south, even if I have to adjust the goal, one way or another, I can do this.

You Can Do It Too

Before your momentum grinds to a halt, before your ducks start flying helter skelter instead of swimming in formation, consider anticipating what can go wrong and formulating your own Plan B – and then program your own Preset Button – set it and forget it until and IF you need it. You can do it, even if things go south, even if you have to adjust the goal, one way or another, you can do it.

How do you stay flexible enough to accomplish your goals even when so many things could go wrong???