Even when we carefully craft action plans, things will come up that threaten to derail our progress. But I’d argue an action plan is still worth the effort AND we can further shrink the likelihood of failure by thinking through potential obstacles and contingencies. The way I differentiate this from writing your action plan is that your action plan should outline the things you know you will need to do to succeed. The contingency plan should only address things that might impede you. So while obstacles are inevitable, we don’t know exactly what we will face in a given year.

The way I like to go about this is to write out If/Then statements. The first part of this exercise is really fun for all my worst-case-scenario thinkers out there. In the “If” column write out everything that could go wrong or prevent you from accomplishing your goal. Be realistic for most of these, but also feel free to get outlandish. I’ll tell you…I did this exercise at the beginning of 2020 with a group of women and not a single one wrote “If a global pandemic shuts everything down…” so I will no longer criticize someone for using their imagination!

Once you have your obstacles written down, take time to go back through each one and write the “Then” part of your statement. For example, my goal is to finish writing 20,000 words in the next few weeks. So I might write “If my computer breaks and I can’t afford a new one, then I’ll write with pen and paper.” Or “If I break all my fingers at once, then I’ll use my voice memos to capture my ideas.”

Let’s revisit the goal of getting out of debt.

• If I lose my job, then we will re-evaluate our budget and savings goals to prioritize credit card payments.
• If my partner doesn’t stick to the budget, then we will have a conversation to identify ways to cut down on spending, ie: a cash “allowance”.
• If we have an emergency with a huge bill come up, then we will call the hospital/gas company/insurance company to negotiate a lower bill and payment schedule to avoid putting it on the credit card.

Some of these If/Then statements might seem a little vague, but that’s okay. The idea here is to make a plan for initial next steps in case one of these obstacles arises. Solutions will be fluid and circumstantial, so it’s okay to not have every twist and turn mapped out ahead of time. What we are trying to avoid is losing all the momentum that you’ve gained along the way. Imagine if I really did break all my fingers at once. The easiest thing to do in that situation would be to completely break down and give up if all I’ve thought about is how to write. But if I start off with the small little contingency of voice memos then I might actually keep going.

It is also important to remember that you aren’t going to be able to think through every potential scenario (see: global pandemic). But if we go through the practice of identifying our If/Then statements, when something truly unexpected is thrown at us we have already exercised the skill of coming up with a solution by thinking through other pathways to success.

Next week we’ll wrap up this series by talking about those Big Hairy Audacious Goals (or BHAGs) that might not fit into this goal-setting framework.