After the Unexpected

Your child's school calls. She isn't feeling well, and someone needs to come. You spend most of the afternoon in Urgent Care.

Resistance?

You have client calls scheduled for 3 pm. At 2:55 your boss calls you upstairs for a ‘brief’ meeting. You get back to your office at 4:15. You decide it's too late to start making calls. You begin getting ready to go home.

Resistance?

Traffic slows to a crawl in the rain, then stops entirely when there's an accident a quarter mile up. You arrive late, drained, and irritated. A leisurely coffee seems like exactly the right way to reset before you tackle anything.

Resistance?

Each of these looks like an unavoidable circumstance. Something happened, and now you're dealing with it.

But when external circumstances keep you from doing your work, is it resistance? Spoiler alert: It might be.

Neither the school call, the meeting, nor the weather were chosen. The questions worth asking when things like this happen are not about whether they are avoidable. They are: How do I maintain momentum? What is my next move? 

You may not be the only person who can pick up your child. A partner, another parent, a family member might be able to help out. The call came to you, but the response may have options you didn't stop to consider.

You get back to your office at 4:15. Reaching clients in the next forty-five minutes may be unlikely, but a message left on voicemail, or a short email, is not nothing. It maintains the relationship. It keeps the commitment alive in a different form. "Too late to start" may be accurate. It may also be a decision that was made before the options were examined.

The rain was unavoidable. The accident was unavoidable. The forty-five minutes you spent with a coffee while your work waited was a choice made in response to how the morning went. You had other options; it is not the same as the rain.

The Frictionless Mindset moves through three positions: Acceptance, Alignment, and Action. How to work through each one when circumstances push back is covered in Work Without Working. What matters here is recognizing where the process breaks down.

Acceptance means the event is registered as it is: not resisted with negative judgments, not dramatized. The school called. The meeting ran long. The traffic was bad.

Alignment means looking clearly at what's available from where you now stand. Not where you planned to stand. Where you are.

Action follows from that. Not from the original plan, which the morning already altered, but from what Alignment produced.

Your reaction to what looks like external circumstance blocking progress is often something closer to Resistance popping up incognito, using the external circumstance as an excuse to avoid success. Alignment helps you remember why you are doing what you are doing. 

The event may not be of your choosing. But your next move is.

Moving forward,
Alessandra