The Best Made Plans Don’t Always Work Out

Here’s What You Can Do

I had great plans for the holiday period. I was going to relax and enjoy it with my friends and family, but I was also going to get a whole lot done. Being self-employed, there’s often a lot to do at year’s end. Plus, I find it is a great time to clear out the old and begin the year anew: uncluttered, unfettered, and highly motivated. It’s a great time to plan my goals, create a strategic plan for accomplishing the things that are important to me. The sort of life I want doesn’t happen accidently.

So when those plans began to go awry, I’ll admit it—it threw me. Nothing felt in synch with my plans. The relaxation I’d so looked forward to on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day didn’t happen. You see, I communicate with my mom in Florida at least once a day. She’s 94 and getting more and more frail. The 600+ miles between her in Florida and me in Tennessee sometimes makes it really difficult.

She’d caught a cold, but was doing pretty well. But by Christmas Eve morning, she was having difficulty breathing and was “thinking about calling 911.” It took several phone calls to siblings and her neighbor to finally get her to agree to do that around 1 p.m. You guessed it, she ended up in the hospital through Christmas. My sister was able to come and help out until she fell to the flu December 25^th. My brother stepped into the breach, and came down from Gainesville to try to sort out what they were doing for her and how long she’d stay. She was ultimately discharged on the 27^th, and had some friends who could check on her. Everybody agreed she was much better. 

December 28^th was my birthday and I NEVER work on my birthday. It is the day I set aside to do whatever I want. Unfortunately, that plan didn’t work either. By the day after she came from the hospital, she was back having difficulty breathing, and I was trying to figure things out logistically from afar. I’d just had eye surgery and required frequent rechecks with the eye doctor, or I would have been in the car, driving down there to tackle what needed to be done in a more hands on way. 

She wasn’t eating. She struggled to breathe. She refused the idea of calling 911 again. Her neighbors handled the eating situation by bringing her food. (Not that she didn’t have some in the house, but she didn’t feel good enough to get up and heat it).

Finally, we got her to the doctors on the 29^th and things got better. A nebulizer with medication helped with the inflammation in her bronchial tubes and lungs, and oxygen helped with the supply. It’s still a day-to-day proposition as we try to put everything she needs in place and get her to cooperate with the plan.

Needless to say, with the worry, wondering, phone calls, coordinating and communicating with siblings, neighbors, her doctor’s office, etc., a lot of my best plans went unaccomplished. 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t resent that. It’s just a fact of life. You can have some great plans, but they won’t always work out.

When that happens, what can you do? The answer is born of necessity. Be flexible. Pay attention to the things that are most important and follow through with them, and pick up the rest when you can. You’ll need to figure out how to meet deadlines, especially if they are not flexible deadlines. Sometimes that will mean you’ll have to change your plans. Sometimes it means you’ll have to delegate tasks. Basically, you do what you can, when you can.

The whole idea of making plans is about making your life easier. When you can’t follow your plans in quite the way you’d hoped, you need to adapt and become flexible enough to meet the demands that are most important, and forgive yourself for the rest.

Plans can make you more productive, but only if you can figure out how to let go of them when necessary. Otherwise you’ll beat yourself up and wear yourself out trying to do too much.

What do you do when your plans get derailed? If this is something you struggle with, I’m happy to help you figure out how to manage it. After all, I’m getting to be an expert at both the planning and the recovery when those plans go astray.
 

Email me at Linda@InnerResourceCenter.com or call me at 865-983-7544.

 

"We get by with a little help from our friends." 

 

 

Let Go of the "Struggle"

I've always been a pretty hard worker. Even as a kid I was driven to achieve. As a youngest child, I had two older sisters to live up to and with whom to compete.  I used to have a belief that work had to be difficult in order to qualify as "work." After all, that's why it's called "work," right? You needed to always put out your best effort, and you needed to sustain those efforts until you succeeded. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" was my guiding principle back then.

Work involved lots of effort, lots of time, and lots of energy to be successful. I learned how all the labor-saving devices that had been invented to try to help us manage our lives more easily had, instead, somehow created more demands on our time. Even so, I knew that having the right tools could make the task easier, whether it was cutting wood or changing a habit. That sometimes meant training and studying to learn new skills. If you weren't good at something, you spent time developing that skill.

And then, everything shifted. The new paradigm became utilizing your strengths and outsourcing the other tasks, whether they were hiring a bookkeeper, or someone to design your business cards, or someone to clean your house. Along with it came shocking ideas such as "If at first you don't succeed, try something different;" and "Don't push the river, it flows by itself;" and "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well." I had a hard time wrapping my arms around those concepts.

But I began to imagine: What if things didn't have to be so difficult? What if everything didn't have to be a struggle? That idea really intrigued me. As I began to unpack it, I realized that despite what I'd always believed, things that were difficult weren't necessarily more valuable. What was valuable was the outcome. Something didn't increase in value because I'd suffered, struggled and slaved over it. Maybe I put some greater value on it because of all the time and effort I'd invested, but really, that was more about valuing the process and my efforts, rather than the outcome.

The process of achieving a goal--the work involved--isn't really the same as the outcome itself. What if you could achieve the outcome without the suffering and struggle? Hmm. That idea became very appealing. I realized that I didn't get extra brownie points because I worked hard. The reward and value was in the end result.

Climbing over obstacles to your success was necessary, but it didn't have to take so long. It didn't have to be so difficult. I studied and found some tools that made things easier. I learned techniques and experimented with others until I created resources that allowed my clients to make big changes without the struggle and huge expenditure of time, energy and money.

The first step is making the decision that something needs to change.

The second step is figuring out what that "something that needs to change" really is. For most of us, it has to do with how we've allowed our history to affect us. We've held onto negative emotions from past experiences. We've created identities based on some of those experiences, and we cling to them because they are familiar, not because they're working for us. We've formed or held on to beliefs that limit us, rather than empower us. We've allowed ourselves to believe that the struggle is part of life. Sometimes, we've allowed toxic people and situations to take over our lives. We've developed and held onto habits that don't serve us well.

The third step is to imagine, yes, imagine how things could be different. What would your life be like if you didn't have to struggle? What if it just flowed. Easily. Effortlessly. Taking you where you want to go, rather than where you think you must go. Create the vision of what your life could be like. Don't worry yet about how you're going to get there. Just imagine. Fill in all the details of what that life would be like. Would there be challenges? Probably, but imagine that you just handled them without stressing about it. What if you lived your life, whatever that means to you and those you love. What if you decided what you wanted and made it happen?

You can. Having the right tools helps make it easier. Call me and let's talk about what you imagine, as well as what stands in the way. Together we can figure out what needs to happen to get there, even if you decide not to work with me. You can reach me at Linda@InnerResourceCenter.com or call me at 865-983-7544.

 © 2016. Linda S. Pucci, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

Linda Pucci is a personal/business coach and trainer at the Inner Resource Center, LLC in Maryville, TN. She helps her clients get rid of the struggle and overcome obstacles to their success. Her specialty is helping people get rid of the mindset issues that lead to self-sabotage. For more information on letting go of the struggle in YOUR life, contact her at Linda@InnerResourceCenter.com

Life Goes On

"In three words I can sum up

everything I've learned about life:

it goes on."

~Robert Frost

Even when we are struggling in our lives, life goes on. Sometimes the best way to handle life's challenges is to put one foot in front of the other and just keep moving through it. Even when we think something has been a disaster, we can recognize that it is the journey--the process of living our lives--that is the most important thing.

This week: Take time to appreciate the movement of life. Take an inventory of where you have been in the past 10, 15, and 20 years. Do you see how you have moved? Can you appreciate how you have changed. Sometimes we don't notice how we have continued to move through the journey of our lives.

Linda Pucci, Ph.D. is a psychologist, life coach and trainer at Inner Resource Center, LLC in Maryville, TN. She helps people move forward in their lives--beyond obstacles--to lives of greater joy and meaning. For more information go to http://www.innerresourcecenter.com/ .