I had wanted to look at and deconstruct some of the common cliches, sayings and so on that are trotted out in training situations, and I’m stuck on ‘fail to plan and you plan to fail’. I have a poor relationship with this phrase, good though it is in certain situations and pleasing though the flipping-words-round quality is. There’s nothing bad about this phrase. It’s the disapproving, purse-lipped patina it has acquired for me that I’m so irritated by.  My problem with it is the people who use it, when and how.

So often it’s used in an ‘I told you so’ way, when you’ve slipped up, by people who have taken it as an article of faith, berating you with it in the predictable way that distinguishes their own lives (forgive me, I’m generalising here). Or it’s used as an ‘I’ve got my eye on you’ injunction by a manager at the start of a project that, before the doomful warning, looked alive and interesting.

Planning is good, to a point, but you just can’t plan your whole life out. Short-term plans are often essential and prevent life being chaotic on all levels. But they don’t insure against failure. A long-term plan can grip you with iron rigidity, ensuring that no opportunity is taken up, or it collapses under the weight of reality – and fails. Thus ensuring that you have, indeed, planned to fail.

Filed under: Life Coaching by Melanie