What To Do When Your Plan Fails? Follow This 3 Simple Steps To Fix It.
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Complaining is a common trait that can be noticed among most of us. So common that we rarely realise that we’re doing that. When we complain, though, we portrait ourselves as victims and focus only on negative side of things instead of looking at the entire picture. This toxic trait makes our lives only more miserable and often prevents us from going after our goals and dreams.
So it’s not a surprise that when your plan fails, your first reaction is to complain.
Can you remember the time when you were choosing new goals for the upcoming year? How did you feel? Were you optimistic about reaching them all? Yet, it’s likely that somewhere along the way, you forgot about your goals. Maybe you suddenly didn’t have enough time to focus on them, or your motivation disappeared and you just stopped pursuing them. Instead of figuring out the way to deal with obstacles that came your way, you just gave up and started thinking about yourself as a victim. You DON’T have time and definitely CAN’T do anything about it. Am I right?
At the same time, you keep dreaming how your life would look like after reaching those goals. How cool it would be to find a new job, buy a house, start a business, travel full-time? Life, with contrasting thoughts constantly running through your mind, is hard. I know about that. I’ve been there multiple times.
To put this into a perspective, I’ve been dreaming about having my own business for years. I’ve been wanting to have my own blog since primary school, where I heard about the idea of blogs for the very first time.
So when I finally gathered some courage to start this blog, I had huge plans. I knew what I wanted to write about and why, but it didn’t stop me from looking for things that could be my potential obstacles. That’s why I haven’t been very consistent with posting here. After publishing the first couple of posts, I started procrastinating more and more. Every time I was sitting down to write, I couldn’t focus because of many distractions that were everywhere around me. I did nothing to eliminate them because why would I? It’s not my fault I can’t focus or don’t have motivation. “I’m trying” and the results of that “trying” aren’t good, so why should I continue? Let’s message someone instead. Or scroll through Instagram. Watch YouTube. Do anything instead of taking action and doing what really matters. Weeks of such “writing” resulted in a burnout and getting so unmotivated that I almost deleted this website altogether.
A few months after that, I suddenly lost the opportunity to write anytime I wanted. I couldn’t just go upstairs, close the door, and pretend to write as often as I used to. It created a huge problem for me, because I believed I can’t do anything unless I had perfect conditions for it. That’s why writing during the day was a big no for me, and even bigger in the evening, when I wanted to spend time with my family. So I stopped doing anything productive at all, because I didn’t have any time for that. That’s where I was wrong.
This year, I had a very ambitious plan to write and publish 52 posts, one per week. It went wrong in so many ways I can’t even count. During the summer, I realized that just because I wasted most of the year; it doesn’t mean that I can’t do anything at all to change my situation. I had two options to choose from – keep thinking about myself as a victim and waste the rest of the year, or create a plan and take action. Sure, maybe I won’t be able to write as many posts as I was going to, but I can create a smaller goal and do everything I can to achieve that.
So, let’s dive in into what three steps you can take when your plan fails. Let’s go!
Navigate to where you want to go:
Give yourself a minute to recognise and deal with your emotions
First, let’s take a five. When your plan fails, you most likely feel mad and anxious about the entire thing. Acting based on your emotions is the worst thing you can do in that situation, so give yourself time to recognise and deal with your emotions first. You might want to journal through your emotions, meditate, or talk to someone about it. Every time something doesn’t go according to plan, I like to go for a long walk and talk it through with someone. Being in nature has a calming effect, and talking to someone helps to put the entire situation into a different perspective.
I wanted to give up on writing countless times. Every time I wanted to write regularly, I was quickly falling behind the schedule. I’ve never tried to create a plan and prepare before taking action. Motivation is a funny thing that comes and goes. When it disappears, as it does often, no matter what you’re doing, it’s easy to just give up.
At the time of writing this post, I’ve published only 17 posts so far this year while I was supposed to have 34 at this point. When I realized that, I instantly felt defeated. Should I continue doing that when I’m clearly doing something wrong? It’s so much more difficult to write to me than for other people. It doesn’t take them hours to write one article after all! I took a weeklong break from doing anything blog-related and spend a lot of time in nature instead. It took me a lot of thinking it through, journaling, and watching productivity videos on YouTube to realize that I didn’t fail.
To give you one more example of dealing with things that aren’t going according to plan, let’s look at another situation. I’m writing these words sitting in my living room, looking at the houses to rent, while I was supposed to be two thousands kilometres away right now. After spending hundreds of money and hours on applying for various documents, passports, booking hotels, flights, then rebooking most of them… We weren’t able to confirm our attendance at the wedding we were going to. The passport arrived 6.5 weeks late, two working days before the day we were supposed to fly out. I felt mad and defeated. I’ve wasted so much money, time, and energy for nothing.
Ask yourself why your plans failed…
… and make a list of all the things that went wrong. Then divide it into two categories: things that you can and cannot control. When you’re done, get rid of the second list – you can’t do anything with things you can’t control.
Simple thing to do, isn’t it? Often you don’t think about all the reasons something didn’t work out, but focus on the result itself. Brain is wired in such a funny way that it focuses mostly on all negativities instead of looking at the bigger picture. That’s why it’s so important to clear your head before you jump into action.
I gave you two examples of things not going as planned in the previous paragraph.
First one – my blog.
I’ve always had a thought in the back of my head that I’m behind and that was constantly stressing me out. I knew that I needed to take action at some point if I want to achieve anything. So after a weeklong break when I didn’t think about writing at all, I took a piece of paper and started brain dumping all the blog-related thoughts that came to my mind. I listed out all the obstacles, things that I wished I did better, everything that hadn’t been working out, etc. When I was done, I went through lists I just created and crossed out things I couldn’t control.
In the second example I gave you previously, my list of all the reasons the trip didn’t go as planned was very short. The only thing that stood in my way was outside of my control. There was nothing I could do to get a passport on time. What I could do, though, was to get as much money back as possible. It’s time to figure out what to do now.
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Figure out what you can do & take action
Take your list of thing you can control and go one by one, trying to figure out how you can fix things that went wrong. Remind yourself what your vision looks like and what the original goal was. What can you change to still make it happen?
Once I had a list of things I can control, I went through it once again to create an action plan. It turned out that all I really needed to do in order to publish regularly was create a few habits and routines. So, I limited social media usage and took part in 400 words challenge to force myself to write every day. It was difficult to get started, but once I did, it started taking me less and less time to write said amount of words. I created a habit of using pomodoro technique every time I struggle to get started and listening to a specific playlist during every writing session. By associating a specific type of music with writing, it became easier to get myself into “working mode” and focus on the task. All of that helped me with publishing new blog posts every week, and that’s what my goal was all about.
As for my second example, I couldn’t do anything to make the trip happened. What I could do, though, was to figure out how to get back as much money as it was possible. So I listed out all the things I’ve booked so far and tried cancelling all of them. If I couldn’t cancel something, I made sure to re-book it for the latest date possible to create an opportunity to use it at a later time.
What to do when your plan fails: Concluding thoughts
Complaining is a common trait of most people. That’s why when something doesn’t go as planned, we portrait ourselves as victims even if we have full control over all the events. We can change that, though, with a solid plan and a lot of action. Don’t fixate on things you can’t control and focus on what you can do instead.
We’re at the beginning of September, getting closer with each day to the end of the year. Even if you have accomplished no goals this year so far, you can easily change that by following the three steps listed above. Instead of thinking about yourself as a victim, recognise and deal with your emotions, create a few lists of things you can and cannot control, and see what you can do about them. Remember that any plan without an action is just a plan. Nothing will change unless you act on it.
Have you ever been in a situation where, instead of taking action, you allowed your negative thoughts and emotions to rule? How did it end up? Share your story in the comments down below!