Why Planning For The Worst Case Scenario Might Prevent It
I’m a relationship coach. It’s not uncommon for me to get a new clients who’s goal for coaching is to save a failing relationship. They will come to the calls, eager and willing to do just about anything to fix what seems broken at home. So imagine their surprise when the thing I ask them to do first is to create an exit plan. I’ll just tell you, it’s usually met first with some silence and then a healthy dose of resistance. The resistance isn’t all the surprising considering they just hired a relationship coach to help them save the relationship. If I were on the receiving end of that coaching suggestion, at first glance I might not like it either.
However, on second glance it does make sense. By the time someone is trying to “save a relationship”, the thing they are most afraid of is it failing. They are fearful about what the future would look like if they were to end up alone. They can’t imagine where they’d live or how they’d manage without their partner. They wonder who would make the car payments or take care of the kids. Understandably, there is a lot of very sticky energy there.
When a relationship is failing, nine times out of ten what people are focused on is avoiding a BREAKUP – breakup being the key word.
It might surprise you to hear, I’ve seen the exit plan save a lot of marriages. When you make an exit plan two things happen. First of all, you know you can survive if you ever have to leave the relationship. At the very least, you know you’ll live. Secondly, because you know you will live, the fear comes way, way down and the energy opens up to other possibilities. Those possibilities were there all along, but you couldn’t see them because your vision was clouded by fear.
From an LOA perspective planning for the worst case scenario might seem counter-intuitive. A lot of people are very hesitant to put energy on something they don’t want to create. However, if you can’t shake your fear, you are way better off to address it than to stick your head in the sand and hold your breath until things shift, because it might be a very long time before that shift occurs. Fear has a very powerful energy. It tends to pull you in it’s direction a lot like gravity. A lot of stuff sticks to fear.
This doesn’t just apply to marriages. It applies to anything that’s scaring the bejeebers out of you. If you’re afraid of losing your job, lining up another opportunity takes the pressure off and the sting off the fear. If you think you might end up in foreclosure, figuring out where you might live if you had to move, makes reading the letters from the bank more tolerable. If you’ve got a toothache, sometimes just finding a really cool dentist does the trick.
If you really can focus on what you want, without entertaining your worst case scenario, then, by all means, do that. However, when the stakes are high, most people can’t, not because they’re weak, it’s because they’re human. Meeting fear head on is usually the shortest path to getting through it and on to real solutions.
So, the next time you’re panicked, trying to find a way to avoid something, you might want to consider taking the back door to peace and plan for the catastrophe instead. Once you’ve got a plan in place, and you can breath easier, you will be able to breathe life into some real solutions at last.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Sharing is sexy. If you liked this article, share, comment, or pass it on.
Lisa Hayes, The Love Whisperer, is an LOA Relationship Coach. She helps clients leverage Law of Attraction to get the relationships they dream about and build the lives they want. Lisa is the author of the newly released hit book, Score Your Soulmate and How to Escape from Relationship Hell and The Passion Plan.
