We don’t go through life planning to fail.
Those old 1980s anti-drug ads are partly correct. No one grows up hoping to be a junkie.
No one likes losing. Nobody in sales goes to bed thinking “Tomorrow I’m going to give a presentation and it’s going to fail.” No business owners is happy at the prospect that their business might go down the drain. No person wants to hear that they might have a life threatening disease. No one goes into a fight intending to lose.
Most people go through life thinking that things will generally work out. Even pessimists are on the whole somewhat optimistic about the future. If they weren’t they’d be called suicidal not pessimistic.
Generally the optimistic thinking goes “When A happens then I can do B and then C can occur” and I’m not even talking about grandiose plans just day-to-day stuff like “I’ll catch the bus so I can get to work so then I will get a paycheck to pay the bills”
But sometimes our best laid plans go to hell. Sometimes we get a piece of bad news. We keep working away at our problems and keep hoping against hope but despite it all the signs are there that things are going to go badly for us no matter what we do.
This is where a bad situation can be managed to become just a bad result or without proper planning it can turn into a disaster.
So where to start? You get news that something is going bad for you. Could happen months from now or maybe 5 minutes from now. Either way you’ve got no time to waste.
Assess the situation.
How bad is it? Is it something life threatening? Will it alter your lifestyle significantly or is it just a short-term shock to the system?
You need to be coldly clinical in your approach as if it’s happening to someone else. Stick to the known facts and not emotion filled guesses. The facts won’t change but assessing them carefully might help you make better sense of what you’re facing and thinking more about the situation may make it less daunting.
Life threatening situations usually require immediate action. If you’re in an accident or a fight or something bad is about to happen you need to do something. Doing something is always preferable to doing nothing at a time like this. Doing nothing just insures that the worst possible outcome will happen. Whether you prefer to fight your way through this or run away is up to you but doing nothing is not an option.
Something more long-term. Here’s the meat of the subject.
You have time to think about it. Firstly know that your first impression of the situation is always going to be wrong. It’s not going to be nearly as bad as you thought and the consequences aren’t going to be as dire. You will make it out alive on the other end of this, the sun will rise again, and life will go on. On the other hand maybe things aren’t as rosy as you think. Maybe those things you are pinning your hopes on are illusions and you need to dig a little deeper in to find out that there is something fundamentally wrong somewhere and it needs to be addressed now or things will totally collapse.
My point? You don’t really know till you start thinking about things. Look at the root causes of what’s really going on.
So you’ve assessed the situation and know that the bad thing will happen. Now plan on how to lessen the impact on your situation. If it’s a disease (for you or someone you love) begin thinking how you will adapt your life to this. Make the necessary arrangements beforehand. Find the help you need. If you’re going to lose your job, start talking to people you know for job leads, for advice, for moral support. Look through the want ads. Not for an immediate job necessarily but to see what employers are looking for. If you’re in school and you know that you’re going to flunk a course find out what you can do to get back on track? Not for this particular course but for your academic career as a whole.
List out all the negative impacts that this event will have on you and have either total or partial solutions for each of these impacts. Don’t just hope that it won’t be too bad or stand paralyzed by fear and do nothing.
Lastly the short-term shock to the system. Usually this is something personal and highly emotional. A broken heart, the death of someone close, some sort of tragedy. In some ways this is the hardest thing to get over. Even though you can share your burden with others, they will still not be able to fully understand. Even though you want to think about it logically, logic won’t apply here. Just remember that life does go on. This is just a part of your life not the whole narrative, unless you let it become that. Let yourself feel bad for a time and lean on others for support.
“How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?” – Captain Kirk
So to paraphrase that, planning for failure is just as important as planning for success.
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