When Life Destroys Your Plans (But Saves Your Life)

Have you ever fought with everything you had to prevent a disaster, only to watch it fall apart anyway? 

We spend our entire lives trying to control our circumstances, engineer perfect safety nets, and avoid "bad" outcomes. But what if the very thing you are running from is the exact catalyst you need to break through to the next level? 

In this episode, we unpack a powerful story about the illusion of control and the hidden gift of forced transformation. We explore why our greatest moments of growth, resilience, and clarity rarely come when things go perfectly—they come when life completely wrecks our plans. 

If you are currently navigating a setback, a failed project, or an unexpected detour, this episode is a roadmap to shifting your perspective and uncovering the hidden path forward.

Inside this episode, you’ll discover:
• The psychological trap of trying to control the uncontrollable.
• Why hitting rock bottom often provides the solid foundation you were missing.
• A framework for turning unexpected detours into your greatest competitive advantage.

Connect with the Community:
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• Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qkgnd1gAiho

Connect with the guest in this episode, Angela: https://www.healingenergy.world/

Transcript

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We spend a lot of our lives trying to avoid the things we don't wanna happen. The phone call you don't wanna get, the diagnosis you don't wanna hear, the empty chair at the kitchen table. We try to eat well so we won't get sick in the short term or really sick in the long term. We don't say the thing we know we need to say to avoid the truth we don't wanna deal with. We buy insurance. We lock doors. We've built whole industries, whole religions, whole personalities all around trying to avoid pain. And I get it because I've done a lot of that myself. But here's the thing it seems like nobody wants to say out loud. We don't actually control any of it. We never have, and we never will. Life happens on life's terms whether we want it to or not. The call comes or it doesn't. The diagnosis lands or it doesn't. The chair at the kitchen table empties or it doesn't. And all that energy we spent trying to prevent it, that was never really about prevention. It was about managing our own fear and how we'd react or what we'd have to deal with if life threw us a curveball. And observing that very human behavior leads us to a deeper question. What if the thing we spend so much energy trying to avoid might be the very thing that turns us into who we were always supposed to be? I know that sounds like something you'd see in a personal development book oozing with toxic positivity, but stay with me because it's not about positivity. It's about progress that only comes on the backside of pain, and this episode is going to make a case for it I would say on the whole, I have figured out, um, ways to move through some of that challenge and a perception that is more Uh, from above. You know, I feel like rather than navigating Earth here just with the lens that I had previous to my husband passing away, I have this huge perspective on life that's so much broader and takes in so much more than just this life that I was brought up to live. That's Angela Clement, and the reason she feels that way today is because of the thing she never wanted to happen to her. Welcome to Better Beliefs What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, about the world around you? Thousands of people have faced that very same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brent Kocal, and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds Angela lived on a ranch in Canada. It was a small community about 75 miles from the nearest grocery store, right next to the Grasslands National Park. When she wasn't working on the ranch, she was a teacher, and eventually the principal of the local school. She and her husband raised two boys there. They had cattle, and they knew everyone in town. Life was good, not perfect, but good. And like a lot of us, she lived with the natural assumption that the real good stuff was still up ahead, that when she and her husband retired, they'd travel. And she naturally assumed that when the kids were grown and gone, their pace of life would slow down. That when there was both a little more time and a little more money, the good life would arrive. That's a belief most of us hold, maybe without even realizing it. We think that happiness is something we earn later, like it's a reward or a destination. And somewhere out there, probably past the next milestone, is a version of us that finally gets to live the life we really want. Angela and her husband, they thought that, too, until Thanksgiving of 2020 Yeah, he wasn't feeling good. It was... When we look back, we say like Thanksgiving of 2020, he was not feeling great, but we didn't really think anything of it. And then at Christmas time, he just wasn't even able to eat the Christmas meal, like he just wasn't feeling good. And there was a pain in his side. And, um, when he was doctoring, I just thought, "Well, he's probably got a hernia, a hernia." That's what I thought. I thought, "That's probably what it is, or it's a gallbladder thing." Never suspected cancer in that at all. But it was cancer, colon cancer to be exact. And by the time the doctors found it, it had already spread to his liver, and they gave him 10 months to live. Put yourself in Angela's shoes for a second here. You've been with somebody for 35 years. You live with them. You work the land with them, raised your kids together, and you've just been told that in a few months they're gonna be gone. What would you do? Most of us would do exactly what Angela did I couldn't even imagine it. You know? It, it wasn't something... A person doesn't wanna go there. You know, I, I had other friends that had lost their husbands a similar age to me, and I couldn't even really relate. You know? It was-- And if I did think about it, it was just too much. I couldn't just fathom that happening, and so I would choose not to think about it because it, the thought of it was just overwhelming. She did what we all do. She avoided it. I don't think that's because she was weak, and I don't think that's because she was in denial. I think it's because the weight of it was too much for her to carry directly, so she put it down and found other things to hold I was busy, really busy, and that has always been my go-to. So I, we had moved so he was diagnosed in January. We moved in April. We... And in that time between February and April, I resigned from my position, and I, um, started packing up that 35 years that we'd been together into boxes so that we could move into Maple Creek. And that really kept me busy, and it kept my mind off all that was happening even though he was in and out of hospital and very sick a lot of the time. That seemed to keep me from completely imploding. And the same thing when I moved here, then, you know, I was unpacking the house. I was trying to figure out, you know, I'd go golfing a little bit and try to meet new people. Just kept myself really busy All in 10 months, she resigned from her job and she packed 35 years of life into boxes, moved to a new town, and then unpacked every single one of those boxes. She tried to meet new people, and she took up golf. And that's not to mention her husband was in and out of the hospital the whole time. Now, whatever you think of that, this is an amplified version of a pattern almost all of us recognize. When something is too big to emotionally process and it's coming at us, we do whatever we can to distract ourselves. We start a project, train for a marathon, or we deep clean our garage. Basically, anything we can do to stay out of the storm we don't wanna be in. And we tell ourselves that we're being strong, that we're being responsible, that we're taking care of business. And there's a name for this in psychology. It's called experiential avoidance, and it works like this. When you suppress a painful memory or avoid a scary situation, your anxiety about it, it drops, which then trains your brain that avoidance actually works, which that's not so bad in the short term. In the long term, though, it shrinks your life by spiking your anxiety around anything you think will be painful or scary, which basically is anything new. And that avoidance mechanism kicks in hard. And the research shows that when we work hard to push away these uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, memories, we don't actually get rid of them. We just delay them. And the delay, it almost always makes them worse when we eventually have no choice but to confront them, which is exactly what happened to Angela when her husband died in October, 10 months after his diagnosis. She wasn't in the room when it happened. The nurses had actually asked her to step out while they moved him to a new bed. And when she came back, she knew immediately that he was gone. And that need to be busy, it came right back. The funeral happened, and the community showed up in ways small communities do. Her mother moved in with her for a month, and Angela just stayed busy. There's more paperwork when somebody dies than you'd think. Changing names on accounts, closing things out, settling the estate, and she threw herself into all of it I just wanted to get that all looked after. I think I felt like I couldn't just grieve until that was done. And then the grieving started, and I could really feel the emotions coming up, and I felt like maybe this would be the way it was gonna be for the rest of my life because I couldn't see how I could feel happy again. Like, how could I ever enjoy life again when the person that was with me all the time was gone? And it just... I kept looking for a message somewhere that would tell me that I would be okay, that I would have joy again, and that it wouldn't always be like this. But sadly, there was a lot of messages out there that were disheartening. Eventually though, the stack of paperwork turned into a few loose pieces, and everything on her to-do list had been crossed off. The people who came to support her, they went back to their own lives, and Angela was left alone with the things she'd been trying to avoid for almost a year, until Mother's Day. Not Christmas, not his birthday, not the anniversary of his death, Mother's Day. She had dinner with her sons and had come home to an empty house I didn't suspect it to be so hard because I thought I went through Christmas, and I went through Easter, and, it wasn't good, but it wasn't like this. It was like I got slammed on the side of the head with a two-by-four. Like, where did this come from? And I had gone to my son's and had dinner with them and stuff, but then when I got home, it all just hit. And basically, it was me questioning everything that I ever believed about God the universe, the why we're here. Where did my husband go? There were so many questions, and I was like, "Does any of it-- Is any of it true? When she finally stopped moving, a year of When she finally stopped moving, a year of suppressed grief showed up all at once, and it didn't come with a knock on the door. Angela's grief coach gave her an analogy that might help you see what happened. She said she was holding in an emotion. It's like holding a beach ball underwater. Yeah, you can do it. You just have to keep your hand on it. But eventually, your arm is gonna get tired, and you get distracted or the water moves, and the beach ball doesn't gently float up. It flies out of the water, and it hits you in your face. That's what Mother's Day was for Angela, a whole year of busyness finally letting go I think because grief comes with all these emotions that are just, they feel like they're gonna kill you. I, um, the sadness is just so deep. The jealousy is there, and you just wanna resist that too, because we've always been told not to be jealous. The guilt, there's always guilt involved with that. It's because those emotions-- And anger, I will bring that one up too, because a lot of people... Well, we've always been told we shouldn't be angry. It's not a, it's not right. It's not proper to be angry, right? So all these emotions are coming up, and I remember thinking, "Well, I shouldn't be jealous." And so you push that aside. "Well, I shouldn't be angry," so you push that aside, and you don't feel any of that. And eventually, what happens is you store all of that. We don't just avoid pain because it hurts. We avoid it because we've been taught that certain feelings aren't acceptable. Jealousy, anger, sadness, guilt. When we feel any of those, it kind of feels wrong. It's like a feeling that we need to move through as fast as we can. So we do whatever we can to push it aside and to act like it's really no big deal. But when we do that, we're not leaving it behind. We're packing it up and taking it with us. If you've listened to my previous episode titled The Body Keeps Score, you heard Darby, my guest in that episode, talk about how our bodies are filled with all these unprocessed emotions. They might show up as a pain in your knee or an ache behind your eyes, for example. The energy of what you felt when you have a negative emotion you don't process just sits there under the surface of your skin until eventually it has to escape. And we push that off because we think it's going to be scary or painful, like a monster hiding in the closet when we were kids. But just like turning on the light showed you there wasn't a monster, facing your fears and processing pain shows you it was all a figment of your own imagination I felt like I could feel my husband's essence. I could feel him with me. And I was like, "Where is this all coming from?" And I realized that, you know, what we call God, the universe, it- that's what it is. It's this energy. It's this spark that's within us, and I think some people call it a light that's within us, that's really supporting us. It is us. And as I started to realize this and realize that there's a lot more to life than what we're living right now I just felt like it doesn't matter. Every... I'm gonna be okay no matter what. We're social creatures at our core. Our relationships matter because we're so lonely without them. Most of us are conditioned to believe we're only whole when we're with somebody, two halves make a whole kind of thing. So our parents, our partners, our kids, our friends, you take any of them away and we feel like part of us is missing. When Angela's husband died, that's where she was, a person missing a piece, and she was trying to fill it with being busy until it came crashing down on that Mother's Day. And then on the other side of that dark night, she noticed something. The support she was reaching for wasn't coming from outside of her. The energy she was sensing when she said she could feel her husband's essence, that wasn't hovering in the room. It was in her, and it was her The same spark that animates every living thing, that was the thing she'd been looking for her whole life, and it had been inside of her the entire time. That's the experience mystics have been trying to point at for thousands of years. All the mystical texts, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist sutras, they all point to our individuality not being the deepest truth. Sure, we have individual identities, but those are just surface level. The books point to a shared participation in one ultimate reality, which we label as spirit or God or the universe. The texts, they all have a different name for it, except for the Tao, which says if you can name it, then you're missing the entire point. The point is access. How do we get under the layer of identity and separateness to feel the one ultimate reality I talked about a minute ago? In my own experience, you usually have to go through a path of discomfort, surrender, and then a loss of ego control. That's the most accurate way I can describe the process of going through ayahuasca ceremonies, which is where I had a direct interaction with spirit. That was definitely an uncomfortable experience, and I was suffering during parts of it. But there's a specific kind of suffering that breaks us open instead of breaking us apart. And when it finally does, what we find on the other side, it's not a new belief system. It's a new relationship with ourselves. Consider what Angela was wrestling with before that moment on Mother's Day when she finally let her grief in. Everything she believed about God up to that point was gone. Everything she believed about why she was here, that was gone, too. Everything she thought the next thirty years of her life would look like, gone. And what's left when all that's stripped away? Just her and whatever is actually true. And here's what I find most interesting about it. Angela didn't come out of her experience with more rules. She came out with less. She wasn't handed a new doctrine or a new church or a new book. What she was handed was a different perception, a sense that the thing supporting her wasn't out there somewhere watching from a distance. It was inside her, and it was her. Angela didn't try to name it. She just started feeling it, and that feeling showed her the person she thought was missing a piece turned out to have been complete the whole time. That revelation was so powerful, so visceral, that it changed her feelings about her husband's death. She had to go through the pain to get there, but she's gotten to a point where she's actually grateful for it There's a part of me that is and that's really hard, I think, for a lot of people to hear uh, because I see things so much differently now that I would have never had we stayed, had we been together. I-- Sure, if I could have kept living that life, I would have totally lived it. Uh, we would have traveled, we would have followed our grandkids, and there's still times I wonder, you know, what it would have been like to have that. Um, but I know that he's here experiencing it all with me, and I feel like it was maybe his sacrifice for me to experience this life that I wouldn't have experienced otherwise, and it's brought me so much meaning. What she just said, that might make you uncomfortable because she's suggesting that the worst thing that ever happened to her, that might also be the best thing. I imagine if you said that yourself, it might feel like a betrayal to the person you lost, like you're saying their death was a gift. But that's not what Angela's saying. She's saying, and what I believe too, is that you can hold two things at once. You can miss the person and wish they were still here, and you can be grateful for who you became because they weren't. Those two things, they don't cancel each other out. They both get to be true if you can surrender to it and just allow it, it's not so hard when you're not fighting it. Um, there's meaning in it. Sometimes I get a little bit curious about where these emotions are coming from, and then I get a message, you know, and it's usually a pretty profound one, you know, like about where I need to go or what I need to learn or, or just enjoying the moment no matter what it is. Hmm. That's I wanna come back to where we started this whole thing. I opened this episode by talking about how much of our lives we spend trying to avoid the things we don't wanna happen to us, and I made the claim that we actually don't control any of it. I still believe that, but here's what Angela's story added onto that for me. We can't control what happens, that's true. But we can control whether we fight it or surrender to it, and those two responses, they produce completely different life experiences. I used to think the best thing somebody could be is strong because that would allow them to fight their way through the resistance of life. But now I've come to believe the best thing somebody could be is flexible because it allows them to surrender to life. The person who surrenders is going with the flow of life on life's terms. They're like water. Life just moves through them, and those people discover that they're still there on the other side, maybe even more of themselves than they were before. Sure, Angela's husband died, and Angela, at least the person she was before the diagnosis, she died too. What's left is somebody who has a joy that doesn't depend on exterior circumstances and a faith that isn't borrowed from anybody. She has a sense that she's being supported by something she can't name, but she can feel it. And of course, she would have never chosen this path. But if you listen carefully to what she said, she's not sure she would give it back either. So here's what I wanna leave you with. The next time life hands you something that looks like a curveball that you've been trying to avoid, consider that it might not be punishment. It might not be bad luck. It might not even be a mistake. It might be the exact thing your soul has been waiting for, the doorway you've been standing in front of for years finally opening. And what's on the other side? That might be the truest version of you that's ever existed. Thank you so much for investing your time in listening to today's episode. As always, it is a joy to put these things together. I'm really passionate about it. I hope that comes through in the scripting and the storytelling that goes down in the video. Thank you also to Angela for being a guest on the show and sharing such a vulnerable story. If you're interested in connecting with Angela, I'll drop a link in the description to her website, and you can learn all about her and potentially work with her on the grief that maybe you need to confront yourself. That's it for this episode. I'll see you guys on the next one