![]() Nicole’s “sales” calls began to look like support calls, asking what they needed and how she could help, and wishing them well. HR professionals were working in incredibly stressful situations instead of selling, she needed to support them. Her usual work was calling on HR departments to sell them products and services, but last year, she told her boss that it just wasn’t the right time to sell anything. I had a conversation last week with Nicole Rafferty of Ultimate Kronos Group, a company dedicated to Human Resource services. What value, theme, or overarching idea have you been living into over the past year, even as your best-laid plans fell apart? The choice to lead ended up not being about teaching leadership, but about living into it, as we explored how best to serve and what was needed given the terrain we were traversing. With the leadership of WBI’s Phoebe Atkinson and Caroline Kohles of the Manhattan JCC, our community dove into daily webinars teaching the science of resilience, well-being, relationships, and more, as we applied the evidence-based skills of positive psychology to the new pandemic norm. New York City was shutting down, people were isolating and fearful, and I knew we had the knowledge, skills, and community that could help. I lived into that theme early on during COVID. My actual 12-month plan was completely wrong. I wrote in that 2019 article: “Next year, I’m dedicating my work to leadership-teaching, writing, and elevating the choice to lead self and others towards our highest and best.” What is the big idea that overarches every goal, metric, and tactic? Not the goal of sales, production, or any other metric of success. When I reread my article on my 2020 vision, I saw in retrospect what was most helpful in the planning process (and in life). So if life is inherently uncertain, and does not always conform to predictions and plans, what can we be sure of? How can we feel grounded, stable, and secure even when the external circumstances are anything but? Kenny Roger’s song “The Gambler” gives great advice on plans (and on cards), “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em. To stay sane, it helps to know when the plan needs to be tossed. The longer I hold onto the plan in my head of what should be, the more anxiety I feel. The sooner I’m able to pivot to the truth of the situation, the clearer I am. It was amazing-and so satisfying to meet reality as it is and say, Okay, if this is the way it really is, versus how I want it to be, what needs to change? And it turned out that the virtual experience was incredibly effective and transformational. I threw away the plans to have on-site immersions. Then, that same tangle happened again when I realized the next cohort had to be completely virtual. It took me a while, for example, to come to the realization that the second immersion for our foundation course, the Certificate in Wholebeing Positive Psychology, had to be virtual. It’s just that we tend to cling to our plans as if they are the reality we are living into. Most times, our predictions are pretty close to what does happen, so we think life is predictable. It’s our best guess about what the unfolding time will bring. Our brains are future-predictors, making constant judgments about what will happen next and what this physical body has to do now to respond to that prediction. But it actually holds true for every single year … every single day … and every single moment. That’s easy to see in the extraordinary year that was 2020. Planning is a mental representation of what you are predicting will happen. Planning is not the territory you are walking upon. I wrote, “I want 20/20 vision for a 2020 vision, clearly and deliberately crafting what the future holds.” At the end of 2019, I wrote an article about planning for the next 20 years, starting with 2020.
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