Beyond the Best Laid Plans
Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

Beyond the Best Laid Plans

How to Thrive in a World of Unexpected Change

“But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, / In proving foresight may be vain: / The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promis’d joy!”

- Robert Burns, “To A Mouse”, 1785

As a culture, we’ve been talking about how nothing actually goes according to plan since 1785 - and yet every time it happens in my life I find myself shocked and surprised. What do you mean that my vision board / solid resume building job / fool-proof investment opportunity just went up in flames? How could that possibly happen to me??

Robert Feiler has done a pretty remarkable job unpacking our societal resistance to shifting our “best laid” plans in his seminal book, “Life is in the Transitions”. There, he traces the roots of the fallacy we’ve been hooked into: a good life is steady, consistent, and goes according to plan. In other words, a good life journey should look like a straight line - as age increases, so steadily and surely does life quality - traveling up and to the right on the graph of life. But after studying the actual life journey of 225 individuals, Feiler found that nothing could be further from the truth. The shape of our lives are squiggles and curves and stars and fields of dots. Our lives are not linear, no matter how hard we try and force them to be. Our paths are marked by transitions and shifts, with the average person in the study experiencing a fairly significant deviation from their life plan every 12 - 18 months. Most of us will experience 3 - 5 seismic shifts in our lives (which Feiler appropriately calls “lifequakes”) each which can last up to 5 years. If you do the math, this means that more often than not our best laid schemes do exactly as Robert Burns suggested: they “gang aft agley” (or in modern English, “go astray”).

It’s human nature when faced with moments like these to strive to be solution oriented. And I could write a whole book about how to leverage this change energy to support your well-being and kickstart your goals (...there’s an idea…). But I think it’s important to slow the momentum down for a minute and tap into what it takes to be resilient when things fall apart.?

Positive psychology has been studying resilience for decades, and leading researchers like Martin Seligman have found that this “mental immune system” is pivotal to our ability to flourish in this world right now. Resilience is a compound phenomenon - there is no one quick and easy way to build the inner reservoir that allows us to weather emotional storms. However, Seligman offers that one of the first tools we can leverage is our own inner “explanatory style”. “Explanatory style” is the way we talk to ourselves about the events of our lives, and this self-talk can either significantly increase our resilience or lead us down a pretty dark path.

When it comes to how we talk to ourselves about the setbacks in our life, Seligman cautions us to keep an eye out for the 3Ps:?

  • Personalization: This P asks, "Whose fault is it?" Do we take full responsibility for everything that goes wrong, even when external factors are at play??
  • Pervasiveness: This P asks, "How widespread is this failure?" Does one setback mean that everything else in our lives is falling apart too??
  • Permanence: This P asks, "Is this temporary or forever?" Do we see setbacks as permanent roadblocks or temporary detours??

The good news is that we can train our brains to be mindful of these 3Ps and not let them take the reins on how we speak to ourselves about the setbacks in our life. The next time you find that your best laid plans have gone astray, stop and check-in with yourself: are you allowing Personalization, Pervasiveness, and Permanence to own the story? Or can find ways to reframe the narrative to honor your resilience.

It’s not all your fault.?

This doesn’t mean that everything is falling apart.?

This too shall pass.

Life is not a simple, straight line for any of us. But with this knowledge in hand, I hope we can all learn to recover from setbacks, tap into our resilience, and emerge stronger than before.


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