The Best-Laid Plans

The Best-Laid Plans

“The best-laid plans of mice and men oft’ go awry” is a line from the poem “To a Mouse” written by Robert Burns in 1785. January 25th happens to be Burns Day (the poet’s birthday), so perhaps that’s partially why that quote has been in my head recently. But mostly it’s because it is an inescapable part of the human experience that things will often not go according to plan. Clearly all of us living in the Los Angeles area have experienced this recently to a greater or lesser extent.

Despite this fact (or maybe because of it), I know that the ability to create and/or follow a plan is one of the biggest keys to success for just about anything. Everyday we create training plans for our Breakthrough members designed to get them results. Whether the goal is to improve strength and fitness in a more general way, or to hit specific targets in peaking for a competition, everyone follows a plan. Rather than just having our members do “random acts of variety” workouts, following a plan allows us to track progress, build on skills being developed, and see what’s working and what needs to be adjusted.

What about when plans go awry? It happens all the time. Someone gets sick and misses a couple weeks of training. Work gets stressful and the intensity of training needs to be dialed back. Someone slices a finger in the kitchen and needs stitches, or jumps a fence and cracks their heel bone on landing (both true stories) and suddenly there are major considerations to training safely. 

Sometimes the current training plan needs to be set aside entirely in favor of a new plan. But often, we can make the necessary adjustments to the current program. And because we have so many years under our belts of creating plans and adapting as things come up, we frequently can just make these changes in the moment that our members share them with us. They trust us to create the plans, and are so used to following them, that they know they won’t have to stop training entirely. We will adapt to whatever challenge is presented, and figure out how to move forward.

Last week in our Nutrition Made Simple seminar, I shared that the first step to success with nutrition is developing the habit of making a weekly meal plan. I told the story of how when Caleb and I first got married, we were in our early 20s, I was finishing my last two years of college, and the only thing we knew how to cook was Mac & Cheese. We would often find ourselves at dinner time going back and forth about what to eat until hours would pass, we were starving, and we would end up at the Carl’s Jr. that was behind our apartment for the 3rd time that week. 

At a certain point, we knew we had to make a change for our sanity and our health. We weren’t ready to learn how to cook at first, so we started by just figuring out what takeout we would have each day… Mexican restaurant on Monday, salad place on Tuesday, Thai food on Wednesday etc. 

The small amount of time spent on the weekend planning for the week, saved us a ton of time and stress in the evenings. And making the plan naturally improved the quality of the food we were eating, without us really thinking that hard about it. Having the plan allowed us to learn how to tweak it. We started to see how some of the meals we were picking up might easily be made at home. We became more aware of whether we were getting too much of some foods, and not enough of others. We also noticed that when something would come up to change our plans, we could more easily adapt because we had a plan in the first place.

Planning can be helpful not just for accomplishing big goals, but also for simplifying certain aspects of your life. If that resonates, the best place to start is by picking something that you can take action on that is an “easy win”. Something small that you are 90% sure you can accomplish. For example, if making a weekly meal plan for all your meals feels overwhelming, pick a couple of meals for the week to start with. 

Now, I am certainly not advocating for over-planning every aspect of your life. There needs to be balance. There needs to be an understanding that so much in life is beyond our control no matter how much we plan. But I have seen over 16 years of coaching that people who have some skill in planning, do much better when plans have to change than those who have less skill. They can more easily adapt and keep going when the best-laid plans go awry. And they can experience self-confidence and enjoy gratitude when things do go according to plan. Possibly most importantly, they can marvel at the magic of what happens when something even better than what they had planned for comes their way.