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?
Imagine you’ve just been rejected from your dream job. If you’re caught in the trap of personalization, you might blame yourself for not preparing for three hours instead of two or stumbling over that one answer in your interview. But in order to tap into your own inner resilience, it’s important that you acknowledge that it’s not all your fault. It’s likely that a combination of multiple factors led to this job not working out. Sure, maybe you stumbled over one of your answers but it’s more likely that the hiring manager was looking for someone who had qualifications that you didn’t. And you can’t control that.
Pervasiveness: This P asks, "How widespread is this failure?" Does one setback mean that everything else in our lives is falling apart too?
Maybe you’re on the receiving end of a negative performance review at work. If pervasiveness has you in its grasp, you might start to think that you’re failing everywhere in your life. But the truth is that receiving a negative performance review doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent or a bad sports coach or a bad friend. It doesn’t even necessarily mean you’re a bad employee - it just means that there’s a misalignment between expectation and impact. Resilience requires that we mitigate pervasiveness and not let one setback infect your entire world.
Permanence: This P asks, "Is this temporary or forever?" Do we see setbacks as permanent roadblocks or temporary detours?
Perhaps you’ve just been laid off and for the first time in your adult life you do not have a job. The first thought that runs through most of our heads in a situation like this is “I’m never going to work again”. But a layoff isn’t a permanent state of being, it’s a singular, really awful event. To shake off the perspective of permanence you have to remind yourself that this too shall pass.
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.