The week before Thanksgiving, I read a blog written by an initially happy mom who quickly turned cranky and punchy. “KaBOOM!” She wrote as if a speedboat just rammed into her sailboat getting ready to leave the dock. Well, her Thanksgiving trip had just been abruptly canceled. Covid, again, has torpedoed her family outings, sending her oldest child into a wailing fit – “I feel like we’re never getting out of here!”
Have you ever felt that way? You plan, you plan, and you plan, but things happened. Forces beyond your control scuttle your plan. You’re stuck, you feel doomed.
My husband and I felt bummed out as well last March when we had to
cancel a planned trip in April to visit friends and family in Utah and California whom we hadn’t seen in a long time. We did so out of an abundance of caution after we watched TV and read news reports that extra layers of security checkpoints at the airport and extra crowded conditions were ideal breeding grounds for the coronavirus. We changed course. We stayed home. In doing so, we moved from “the plan” to “the pivot.”
The pivot mode is light-footed and flexible, ready to swivel, and even to scrap “the plan” and start from scratch when we discern new information that steers us to a new direction. I confess that I am very much guided by General Eisenhower’s battle hymn “Plans are worthless, planning is everything” The point here is that the minute you hit the ground, your plans are subject to forces and conditions (externally and internally) that will interfere, upset and upend your plan. But in “planning”, you get into the mode of anticipating unexpectancies or emergencies. It will be this psychological readiness to watch out for surprises and your willingness to adapt to changing circumstances and to detach from “the plan” that will free you to recalculate and set new directions for success.
Last month, a close friend enthusiastically proclaimed that she had “a plan” for her future. Her excitement was palpable and enviable – she’d found a viable route out of a rut in her current job of two years. Her plan involves applying to numerous attractive graduate programs at various prestigious universities that are located in different historically and culturally rich cosmopolitan cities that appeal to her fancy. I was delighted to hear about her “plan” and encouraged her to think critically about her vocational purposes and contingency options. When “a plan” sounds very attractive, we have a tendency to fall in love with it. Don’t. In the age of Covid-19, preparedness for emergencies trumps a set plan.
Know your exit. Know your options. Be flexible. Be OK with second or third best. We live in unusual times, but soon enough, our DNA will be coded with antibodies against surprises because we’d become so used to anticipating emergencies. We have increased our capacities for KaBOOM in our lives. We may never be immune to feeling let down at first, but we can also rebound faster on our feet and aim differently.