What do you do when your life doesn’t go according to plan?

I was in London doing a peer coaching session, when I got a message from Steve. It’s not like him to phone when he knows I’m working, so I knew immediately that something was wrong. It was his mother. They’d found a tumour in her brain and were recommending immediate treatment.

We’d known she hadn’t quite been herself recently, but nothing had prepared us for this.

Getting through London in the rain, and onto a train out to Bucks was challenging. That evening we threw God knew what in a bag and waited for it to be first light, when we’d planned to drive down to Wales where she lives with Steve’s dad. We got there mid-morning, by which time she’d already had a batch of tests done and been sent home from hospital while the doctors figured out what to do. Meantime, she’d been told to report back same time the following morning.

And so a weekend of waiting and uncertainty began to unfold. With all the stress, Steve’s mum and dad had neither shopped, nor eaten. Steve and I went to Tesco, did a big shopping and cooked some lunch. A far cry from the weekend I had planned, in which I’d looked forward to spending time with Steve after his week-long trip to Canada, and to doing some more crunchy work around my blog.

Later, I got a chance to spend a few hours with my Mac, but 3 Mobile Broadband wouldn’t yield a powerful enough signal to let me online. The day before I’d had problems with both my Twitter and TweetDeck accounts, which I still had to fix. But it seemed there was no way even that was going to happen.

One of the most frustrating things was that I couldn’t even tell my online community why I wasn’t around.

Still, the offline time made me think.

Just because I can’t do what I’d planned right now doesn’t mean I’m not making progress.

I’d planned to do both fun and hard-edged things for my blog at the weekend. On the one hand I’d wanted to go take some photographs of my village to post them, and to put them on Facebook. On the other I’d figured on beefing up describing my coaching process, putting PayPal onto my site, and my Twitter and Facebook links. I did none of the above.

This morning, back home and online, I twittered about my difficult weekend. I had some beautiful messages of support from my Twitter community during the day. It was truly fabulous to have it reinforced that the online community is, by and large, a very human one.

Also, the fact that 3 Mobile failed me, made me realise that I had some basic stuff to attend to in my blogging business: that of having reliable mobile broadband access wherever in the world I am. Vodafone, here I come.

My life is not just my work

I blog about work. Work plays a huge part in my life – it gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. AND it’s not the only thing that does. I need also to be in good harmony with myself, and I need to be in good relationship with other people.

At different points in time these different things get more or less priority. But their balance is essential.

Things not working at the weekend kinda told me that it just wasn’t the right time to have my head in my computer.

Life brings stuff that you can’t plan: don’t fight it, roll with it

As a coach and business person, I am incredibly goal focussed. If I put my mind to something, I can normally make it happen.

But life has this underbelly to it that’s neither controllable nor predictable. These things have lessons for us and opportunities for creative growth and change that we won’t know about unless we pay attention and listen in a different kind of way.

This weekend I figured after a while that there was no point in being frustrated by things. That instead I needed to understand the challenge that was inherent for me in the situation.

This post is written from that place.

Related posts:

1. Work life change: event or journey?
2. How To Get Paid For Eating Chocolate Cake
3. Why you sometimes have to lose the plot
4. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
5. Introducing The Manifesto For New Work Pioneers