How to Reroute When Your Plan Breaks Down

I love to plan. Whether I’m starting a business, hiking, repairing homes, traveling, or shaping a way of being, I really enjoy creating a strategy to produce a result. I enjoy running through all the scenarios that can happen in projects and how doing so enables me to be successful.

I also notice I can fall in love with my plan. I have noticed I can be more committed to the plan than to my intentions — which can lead to a breakdown. Sometimes I hide my plan’s breakdown from even myself because I can’t admit that the plan is failing.

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What it Means to Plan — And How Plans Can Break Down

When making a plan, I focus on a schedule and keeping to the duration I decided on when we started and do not pay attention to producing a superior situation at the end.

I’m tossing lines to land perfectly and am so focused on tossing the next line that I don’t notice the imaginal moment. (Imaginal moments are the moment my listener creates a new story about their situation and is open to accepting my help.)

I am implementing a turnaround strategy I invested months creating — of course, it’s perfect — and I miss how it’s not taking care of one of the customers.

I simply toss myself the line, “How’s that working?” This question triggers me to notice my Scared Self is hiding that the plan is not producing my intentions, probably because it can’t admit my plan is in a breakdown. I smile and re-center on my intentions, and immediately I come up with new actions to produce them.

People and teams can get so committed to a plan that they don’t notice their Scared Selves may not want to reveal the plan isn’t producing their intentions. When I notice this, I toss the line “How’s that working?” There is normally a long pause, which I hold is Self-Talk at full speed. A common response is, “not very well.”

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