23
Nov

What’s your Backup Plan?

Not having a backup plan means that you set unrealistic expectations about life, you assume that things are always going to turn out as expected and that life will always be in your favor.

The reality is that life is not one-sided for anyone, not even the most successful people that you admire in this life or you might have heard of or read about in books…  look more into their life story and you will find adversity throughout their journey, they just dealt with it differently, they didn’t let it stop them.

Life is mostly about polar opposites: Pain and Pleasure, Good and bad, Up and Down, Kind and Mean, Loving and Hateful, Happy and Unhappy. It’s just how life is, shit happens.

If adversity is something that is expected because you realize that it’s part of life, then you can also be prepared for it, so you don’t really see it as something negative when it happens, it’s just there and you can deal with it. This applies from small things like the computer breaking down before a major project,  to big things like losing your job or losing a loved one.

I don’t subscribe to putting all your eggs in one basket, I don’t subscribe to having only one source of income and I don’t subscribe to counting on any other specific person for your life for your happiness or on one company, or on one specific venture that you are working on now.

I subscribe to backup plans: Plan A, Plan B and even a Plan C. With backup Plans you just make sure that you know within yourself you are safe whatever happens. You create this certainty that if anything ever goes wrong, everything is going to be ok, because there is always another way to tackle the issue, another way to move ahead in life and be happy. You open up to the fact that possibilities in life are endless.

It’s all about feeling good about the present, feeling safer about life and releasing feelings of worry and uncertainty.  Believing that you only have one direction to go in your life and you have to make it that way otherwise you will be unhappy, or you will be broke, or you will be a failure… whatever it is that you think will happen to you if something goes wrong, puts way too much pressure on you, so much that you don’t enjoy the journey. It also limits your expectations of yourself; it limits you from exploring the best of all possible outcomes on how your life can turn out.

Backup plans are going to be more and more important in the next few years as job security is becoming an outdated term. The business environment is the most unstable it’s been for a long time for entrepreneurs and governments are running out of budgets. What is your backup plan?

 

2 Responses

  1. Hi Pavlina,

    Besides that my saving money and action investments are not doing well, I experience no real problems in Belgium. Maybe we are the last in Europe to get involved in a real crisis, who knows. But at the moment it is just not there.

    But it is true that our business environments are changing in a very fast tempo. Job security still exists in Belgium, but it true that there is a high pressure to become more flexible. Thinking about a backup plan to assure our future in the coming 20 years is a smart idea.

    1. Hi Mark,
      I understand that some jobs are very stable and I know people myself who have guaranteed work probably until they retire in the positions they are holding today…. However I also know some bankers, investment consultants and government employees in Cyprus, Greece and UK who 5 years ago could not even imagine that their job or salary status would be in danger, but now they are finding themselves in a totally new state of being, having to readjust their entire life, not affording expensive mortgages on houses they bought and being forced to start thinking about backup plans if they hadn’t before. Those of them who did have backup plans, have handled this shift much more smoothly and are still ok with the changes.

      The article is not referring only to financial backup plans but to all areas of life. We feel better if we know that we will be ok whatever happens, we open up to the possibilities. And yes a long term backup plans are the best thing to do to feel safer about our future, easy to say but for most not so easy to implement 🙂

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.