Planning for the Future in Uncertain Times (yes, its possible)

“Plan your work and work your plan” — Napoleon Hill

“A piss poor plan poorly executed is better than no Goddamn plan at all” — possibly someone famous, and also my Dad

I love a plan, a to do list, a schedule. I live for calendars and planners and sticky notes and highlighters and white boards. My love of office supplies knows no bounds, and I get as excited about a trip to Staples as a frat boy does about a trip to Vegas. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a messy home that I feel an urgency to keeping things organized; maybe it’s because I am a terrifying combo of being both an Enneagram 8 and an Aries and therefore being a planner is a necessary part of my underlying compulsion to dominate the world. Whatever the case, I love to set a goal, develop a detailed plan on how to get there, and then get after it. It’s how I’ve run my whole life. There are no accidents, I don’t just “let things happen” or “go with flow”. I plan it.

So what happens to a sticky-note-loving, compulsive-list-making planner in the time of massive uncertainty when planning for the future seems, at best, laughable? For a bit of context: I’m in the midst of a few significant personal life events which, depending on which way they go, could dramatically change the course of my day-to-day life and everything I envisioned for my future (and while I tend to lean to hyperbole, what’s going on is actually that dramatic). Without getting too into it, since I can’t, the reality is I’m in a moment where I can’t even make plans for Memorial Day weekend; so how am I supposed to plan for the future?

To be fair, I (and all of us), have seen this film before. I got married in November 2019 and my husband and I had plans for 2020 that involved a March honeymoon, moving, buying a home and possibly kids….and then the world shutdown indefinitely and as we were both clinging to uncertain jobs, the pandemic-economy, and the health of ourselves and everyone around us, the idea of making any sort of major decisions like where to plant roots and if kids were going to be in the picture seemed kind of ridiculous. The uncertainty of that moment led to an era of stalled-momentum, stilted plans, and deer-in-headlights freezing that we all lived in for the better part of 2 years.

Eventually though, we adapted. Eventually, we moved forward. Eventually, effort and innovation and a collective rallying around a goal (to get the pandemic under control) worked. Vaccines were created. Rules were loosened. And life, while altered, returned to the new normal we exist in now.

Fast forward to today, where we’re not collectively in the grips of a global pandemic, but where my own life and immediate circumstances are shrouded in a vaguely familiar “freeze” pattern….Plans can’t be made, decisions need to be postponed, timing on certain goals need to be extended to TBD deadlines, because the present is uncertain, and the future therefore is as well.

(And before we go on any further, we can save each other the “control is an illusion” Nicole Kidman-with-perfectly-wild-hair Days of Thunder speech? Nothing is ever certain, we know. Death and taxes are all we can count on, got it. What we’re talking about here is what we all know to be true – that while nothing, not even the rest of today, is guaranteed, we all need to and agree to function under the collective belief that it is in order to actually get out of bed and human every day…).

So what’s a planner to do when living in uncertain times? How’s an hyper-control freak Enneagram 8 supposed to function when major decisions are TBD and answers to major questions are not guaranteed? Am I supposed to, just like, chill? Go with the flow? See what happens? Excuse me for a moment while I go scream into a pillow and then make a color-coded list of all the reasons that will NOT happen.

The fact is that while living with uncertainty happens to us all, at some level, at some point, there is still hope for those of us who wish to remain forward-thinking and forward-planning during even the most chaotic of uncertain times. While we may not know if the outcomes we want on the things most dear to us will come to be, we do know a few things. First, we know that on a macrolevel we, as humans, have been through uncharted territory before, and managed to forge ahead. In just my own lifetime we’ve made it through 9/11, the 2017 housing crisis, the aforementioned pandemic, and the first time that a bankruptcy-prone, misogynistic, racist reality star was voted to the highest office in the land (the 2nd time around is still TBD…but stay with me here!). My point is not to depress you - but instead to say that strange, scary, “we’ve never seen this before” things actually have happened before. And collectively, we made it through.

If you take this all down to the microlevel, the personal, the “yeah but for me…” level, it of course hits differently. Uncertainty with your health, job, finances, children, or anything else that is part of your day-to-day can rock you in a way you may rarely, if ever, have seen before. And it’s true also that, for me, in my current situations, I don’t really know where the finish line on any of this uncertainty is. So no, I can’t predict or control how long I’ll be living in this purgatory of unknown for, what is true is that I can control how long I will be paralyzed by it. I can control how long I will be upset about thwarted weekend plans of missed events with friends and family. I can control how long I want to wallow in this current state of affairs by eating all the crap and watching all the Bravo. I can control how much power I want to give to these circumstances mentally. I may not be able to do everything I want, but I can do that.

So with that in mind — how do you make plans for the future in uncertain times? You do it the same way you always have, because your only other option is to continue to be held hostage by your circumstances. You make your plans. You go for it. You pivot where you have to. You don’t attach to the outcome. You accept that things might change, that you may need to make changes mid-course, that you may need to ask for forgiveness or flexibility or even a refund ($$) if things don’t go the way you hope, and you just keep going. And you keep showing up as the version of you who everything worked out for. Because it could. And because believing it, showing up as it, and living into it will only increase the odds that that could happen.

And so, in this current moment, no matter what your own uncertainty is, keep going. Keep planning. Keep doing. Plan to buy the house; maybe you need to wait a bit longer to do it but that’s just a few more months to save or hunt for a great deal. Plan to save the money; sure, things may happen that force you to come up short of your goal but that’s better than not starting at all, right? Plan to have the kid; yes it may take longer to get some things in order right now, but you’ll be that much more prepared for when it happens. Plan to launch the business. Plan to run the marathon. Plan to put down the stress-nachos and get outside.

Look, everything is uncertain. But every day, babies are born, flowers are blooming, Bravo is still churning out new Real Housewives cities….Life carries on. It always has. You don’t need certainty to keep moving - you just to decide to keep going, even with a few sticky notes out of place.