No matter how hard we work, how much time and energy we invest, or how stellarly we execute our detailed plan, the truth is many things don’t go according to our plan, whether it be the event that got rained out, the flight delay that caused us to miss our meeting, or the career path derailed by a layoff.
Along the way, stuff happened we didn’t want to happen, didn’t plan on happening, and didn’t expect to happen. It just does.
The irony is that some of our best memories are made due to the unplanned. They are the ones we repeatedly talk and laugh about years later. Like when I was staying at a golf resort in Mexico, I was convinced we should use the brand-new golf cart to go to dinner at a restaurant on an adjoining property. Our dinner, view, and evening were spectacular. Everything was going according to plan until it wasn’t. At about 11:00 p.m., three-fourths of the way back to the house, as we are talking about how great the dinner was, the golf cart died in the middle of nowhere on an unusually cool pitch-black night, with little hope that anyone would pass by to help.
Our options were to 1) wait for someone to come along that could help (not very likely), 2) leave the cart and walk the rest of the way back (and hope it would still be there in the morning fully intact), or 3) push the cart back to the house. I’m not very good at sitting and waiting. Wearing a cocktail dress and heels, I jumped out of the golf cart and helped push it (yes, uphill) the rest of the way to the house. To this day, neither one of us can remember what we ate, but we tell the story, laughing the entire time, about the dead cart and what was said to convince me to go in it – “Let’s take the cart, he said. It will be fine. I have taken it there before, he said. It will be fun, like resort living, he said!”
Much like how the unplanned, unexpected, and unwanted can end up being positive things in our personal lives, the same is true of our professional lives. Many of the best learning and growing experiences, as well as career opportunities, come from them.
Early in my career, I accepted a position with a large company based primarily on an agreement with the President that promised me job security in exchange for meeting certain revenue goals in a specific timeframe. Being highly motivated by having job security in a very challenging economic time, I invested almost all of my time and energy into meeting the goals at the expense of time with my family. I lived up to my end of the agreement; however, the President did not. I was out of a job less than 24 months after starting.
When it happened, I was convinced it was the worst thing that could have possibly happened and at the worst time. That’s the thing about unwanted changes, they never seem to happen at a “good” time. But what happens is not nearly as important as how you process it. After the initial shock, anger, and disbelief wore off, I pivoted quickly from looking backward and beating myself up with all the “what ifs” to looking forward to what was possible in the future. This pivot changed my mindset from one of the setbacks to one of growth, from defeat to one of learning, and from one of loss to one of opportunity. What I thought was the worst thing that could have happened turned into a new career opportunity and a wildly successful career that I never thought possible. In fact, it wouldn’t have been possible had I not left that company.
Rarely do we grow and learn when things go exactly as planned. By processing the things that you didn’t want to happen in a productive way and seeing the opportunity in them, you gain valuable skills. Use those unwanted, unexpected, unplanned changes to your advantage. Learn from them and apply what you learned to your advantage in future situations. You will become more confident, courageous, and resilient, prepared for the next one that will happen. You will move forward stronger!
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Julia A. Nicholson is a former CEO, executive leadership expert, business consultant, and adjunct business professor who has excelled for decades as an industry-leading visionary on governance, strategic planning, team building, and executive performance. But she has also faced an inordinate amount of adversity in her life. In the span of 15 years, she went from a near-fatal head-on collision and a challenging role as a single mother of two young children after leaving an abusive marriage to being the CEO of a $450 million company. She now brings her expertise and passion to organizations and conferences nationwide. The transformations that led to her successes are central to her upcoming book Move Forward Stronger. Julia has been featured on Forbes.com, and her TEDx Talk “The Way We Think About Loss and Grief is Dead Wrong” was featured on the TEDx Talks YouTube Channel with 36 million subscribers.
by Julia A. Nicholson, the author of Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief.
