When the Plan Disappears

A client of mine lost her job.

It wasn’t something she had been planning for. There wasn’t another opportunity waiting in the wings or some secret dream she’d finally been given permission to pursue.

She had a job.

And then she didn’t.

Almost immediately, her mind went to work.

What am I going to do? How long will it take to find something? What if I don’t find something? What does this mean for everything else I had planned?

It struck me how quickly one change can become twenty.

Not twenty things that have actually happened.

Twenty things that might happen.

I think we do this a lot when life changes unexpectedly.

Something happens in the present, but instead of staying there, our brains race ahead and start constructing an entire future around it.

And usually not the fun future.

We rarely leap directly to, What if something unexpectedly wonderful comes from this?

Nope.

We’re remarkably efficient at locating the cliff.

So I asked her a much smaller question.

What do you actually know right now?

She knew she had lost her job.

She knew she was good at what she did.

She knew she had experience, relationships and people she could call.

She knew she didn’t know what came next.

That last one was uncomfortable.

But it was also true.

And maybe there’s something freeing about separating what we know from what we fear.

We like to know where we’re going. We like plans and timelines and little dots on the map telling us YOU ARE HERE.

Major life changes have a way of stealing the map.

But not having a map doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lost.

Sometimes it just means you haven’t been this way before.

If You’re Curious…

• When something unexpected happens, how quickly do you start imagining everything else that could go wrong?

• What are you treating as a fact right now that is actually a fear about the future?

• What might become visible if you didn’t require yourself to know what comes next?