Episode 3: The Law Of Preparedness - Why Plan A or Nothing Is BS!

In the spiritual world and commonly, in the start-up business space, you hear “There is no Plan B” used as a badge of honour.

It is often lauded as the reason for an entrepreneur’s success (it isn’t the reason – I will go into why in future episodes). There is a whole load of ingredients that feed into someone’s ability to create what they want.

Commonly, I have seen that where it does work and someone brings into being their Plan A, it can come at a cost.

In this episode, I talk about:

•  The Law of Preparedness (and how it increases your chances of success and   fulfilment of your Plan A).
•  The crucial second step people often miss when they create a Plan B or   consider worst case scenarios
•  The neuroscience behind why it’s a good idea to have a Plan B
•  The interaction with the Law of Opposing Forces

I want to hear your thoughts, comments and questions. You can send them to me at

sara@sarasabin.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, Sarah Sabin here in the Mind, Body, Spirit Accelerator podcast, and I am excited to be on episode three today. And in today's episode, I am going to be talking about something called the law of preparation and how it actually helps you to create more of what you want, despite what the startup world or the spiritual world might have told you about this topic. And I am going to go into exactly why the law of preparation is so helpful for you psychologically, emotionally, and energetically. So I'll start with what the law of preparation is, and then I'm going to go into some of the myths that are out there and some examples of how people don't tend to prepare and how that's actually seen as a good thing, even though it's not. So the law of preparation states that if you're ready for a worst case scenario, it doesn't happen. So in being prepared, you're actually reducing the likelihood of this thing happening at all, this plan B or worst case scenario, whatever you want to call it. So this is very contrary to what we've been told in some spheres. So you may have heard in Startup Land, it's planning or nothing, it's do or die. That's my uh startup pro voice for anyone wondering what that was about. It's it's a very common thing that we hear, not so much anymore, thankfully. Um, some people take a more sensible approach nowadays, but it is something that you still tend to hear out there. You also hear it in the spiritual world, so uh spiritual teachers will say, focus on your plan A and put everything else out of your mind. I'm not very good at accents or voices, as you may have gathered. But again, it's the same kind of thing. Visualise what you want and put aside any negative thoughts or doubts or emotions that you have, just lock them away. You can't actually do that a lot of the time. It's it's very, very hard to do that. You're working against yourself, really. Um, and it also encourages this whole toxic positivity vibe. I have to force myself to be positive all the time, otherwise, I won't manifest my plan A and my desires. So it tends to show up in these kinds of contexts, this whole it's plan A or nothing, and it's actually very destructive. Either because you actually never end up bringing into being your plan A at all, and then you're like, Well, I'm the biggest failure in the whole world, and it's all my fault because I don't know, I wasn't positive enough, I didn't do enough. That a lot of the time is not the reason why you've actually failed to bring plan A into fruition. Or the other way that I've seen this go is that you do bring plan A into fruition. So there have been some extremely successful startup founders who have purely focused on plan A, gone all hell for leather, and they've managed to create this thing, and maybe they then get acquired and they make, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, whatever it is. And they find themselves very, very empty. At the end of all of this, they have succeeded in what they thought they wanted, but they've done it in a way that has sacrificed a lot of other things. So they've sacrificed spending time with friends, with family, with partners, with children, they've sacrificed their physical health, their mental health, fill in the blank, only to find that it caught up with him eventually, anyway. As in they found either found this strange emptiness at the end, or their physical health ended up getting them. For example, Steve Jobs created so many amazing things and then ended up dying of cancer. The thing is that if you approach plan A in a more balanced way, what you find is that you tend to get to plan A. Maybe you don't do it as quickly, but you do it more sustainably, you do it with higher levels of passion, higher levels of fulfillment, higher levels of balance so that you in general have this sense of balance overall. Because, as we all know, just because you're successful doesn't mean that you're happy or fulfilled. In fact, a lot of the time it's exactly the opposite. So, to recap, either you don't get to plan A, and I'm gonna explain why in a sec, or you do, but it's come at some other great cost to you. And actually, this is a story that people tell themselves quite often about why they're not successful. They're like, Well, I didn't want to sacrifice everything, and they thought that that was absolutely necessary to success. There are multiple ways to skin a cat. I know that's not a particularly nice phrase, but my point is you can get to plan A in more sustainable and pleasurable ways. So, why have I brought the law of preparation into all of this? Because in applying this law and this process that I'm going to go into, what you're doing is reducing your level of emotional neediness around plan A happening. And why is that a good thing? Because of another law. There's always a universal law. Um, because of another law at play, the law of opposing forces. The more you push something or push for something, the more that you actually end up pushing it away. So, and another way I've heard it described is needy is creepy by one of my favourite coaches. If you're needy, if you're super pushy, all you do is end up pushing whatever it is that you're trying to do away. It's like when someone is telling you what to do, and they're like, You have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, you're going to be less inclined to want to do the thing, or you might do the thing once and then be like, Right, I'm done with this now because I'm done with this person telling me what to do. So you kind of get the point here. The law of preparation is basically in two parts. The first part is you're going to identify your worst-case scenario or plan B, and you're going to have a solid plan for it. The greater the degree of planning that you go to, the more likely it is that you cancel out this scenario from even happening. So it's important to plan in detail, not just have some kind of vague plan of, well, if I don't get this investment money, I'll do something, or I'll just go elsewhere, it's cool. No, you want something that is very specific. So I will put this into an example since I've been talking about startups a lot. I will talk about investment. So let's say you have decided you need investment of let's say a million dollars for the sake of argument, and for that million dollars, you are prepared to give away 10% of your company. And you have decided that you are absolutely dependent on getting this investment, and maybe you've even identified a particular investor that you're going to get the investment from, and you're like, failure is not an option. If I don't get this investment, I am completely fucked, and that's the end. So you can imagine how much pressure that puts on the plan A, you getting investment happening. You can imagine how much neediness you have towards it. You can imagine how much emotion and hope you put into this thing happening. And then what starts to happen is you're starting to push that outcome away. So what would plan B potentially look like in this scenario? Well, plan B would be like: right, here are a list of potential investors that are already vested by me, that are already warm, that I know that I can go to if this particular deal doesn't go through. Or I've decided that if I don't get investment, I am going to strip the company down. By strip down, I mean work out how to operate as leanly as possible. I'm going to look at bringing in other revenue streams, and I've already identified these other potential revenue streams. I have looked at specific bank loans. I have, I don't know, fill in the blank. Maybe you've thought about a crowdfunding campaign. Whatever it is, you have your plan B and you have as much detail as possible around it. Now, there is a part two to this, and the part two very often gets missed out because I encourage everyone that I've ever worked with, entrepreneur or otherwise, to always think about worst-case scenarios so that you can bulletproof risks, so that you can plan if the worst happens, etc. But there is a part two, and that part two is you need to actually get comfortable with that plan B or worst case scenario happening. And a lot of times people are just not cool with that. So they will be like, Yeah, I've got this big plan, but oh god, I just if this happens, it will be the end of the world. I'm gonna feel like crap, like my life is over. Basically, no, that doesn't shift your energy and it doesn't shift your emotions. You need to then get comfortable with either and or what's the all the benefits of your plan A not happening, or what are all the benefits of your plan B? So if we go into this kind of investment case scenario, you might say, Oh my god, if my uh plan A doesn't happening happen, it's gonna be amazing because I've got all of these other investors that I can go to, or I can crowdfund, which actually is going to be really good for us because we're not going to be beholden to a VC or private equity firm later down the road, because I will tell you from personal observations, far too many startups take money from VC firms and end up becoming an employee in their own company and actually getting pushed out of their own company. Um, so that's also a potential benefit of plan A not happening. You reduce the likelihood that somewhere down the road you are going to be screwed over in that respect. Um, you could also say, well, actually, if plan B happens, it's gonna be this amazing story, there's gonna be this amazing learning experience. Um, I actually will then have the incentive to really understand how to operate the company more efficiently, which is gonna be amazing for me long term. Um, I'm gonna have identified new revenue streams because I had to get creative and whatever. Fill in the blank. You get the point. You want to get to the place where you're like almost like, well, if plan B happens, I am gonna be happy. So some in the spiritual world might say, well, no, because you're acknowledging the emotion, and that's bad, and you shouldn't let doubt come into play at all. Um, it's not as easy as that, anyway. It's not like you can say to your brain, yeah, just don't doubt anything, it's fine. Um, there is no harm in acknowledging the emotion because it is preparing you, and it doesn't count as settling either, so you're not settling for a lesser option, which brings up its whole a whole other range of issues, which is another big topic that I will go into in later podcasts. It's emotionally balancing yourself, and in so doing, you are dropping from your electromagnetic field, your creator field. I will also go into what that is in a different podcast. But what I'm talking about here is in terms of creating, you're dropping from your field any element of neediness or desperation. And just to be clear here, that lack of neediness and desperation is really important to create what it is that you want. So it's actually one of the ingredients of real manifestation, as opposed to your higher self just bringing in something to teach you a lesson because it's part of a soul plan. So the second that you have that plan, your brain and your intuition goes, Great, awesome, we've got a plan. There's no emotion creating any negative outcomes anymore, and it's kind of like an off switch. So it's gonna stop all of those. That's a kind of fear emotion, it's gonna stop those kind of emotions, and that's gonna be good for you, actually, just from that perspective, because you're gonna feel a lot better. You're essentially turning off that emotion of hope. And this is another thing in the spiritual world. Again, it's portrayed as hope is a good thing, but actually hoping something will happen and knowing something will happen are two very different things. And hope just tends to create more hope. And what you want is what you want is the thing that you're desiring to create to actually come into your reality, not continuing to hope that that thing comes in. So just to recap here, why should you always have a plan B so that you can be more emotionally balanced towards plan A? And in you being more emotionally balanced, that's energetically good for you because you're removing any element of neediness out of your field, out of your energy, but also on a very practical note, the less emotion you have, so the more emotionally neutral you are towards something, the more rational you will be, right? So if you're highly emotional, you can't be highly rational at the same time because of the interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. And when you are highly emotional, you are hampering your access to your intuition as well, and all of that means that you are likely to show up to let's go back to the startup example, any kind of meeting or negotiation in a state where you're already feeling off on the back foot, and that is likely to also impact your communication as well. Not only your verbal communication, but your non-verbal communication. So do a plan B, get happy with a plan B. Your plan A is more likely to happen. I hope you enjoyed this episode today and will go off and apply it immediately and see the results for yourself. I mean, again, just psychologically being cool with stuff it immediately makes you more optimistic anyway. But also that you start to see the effects of this in bringing to fruition some of the things that you're going after. One other point to note a lot of times we will deny that we are being needy about something. So this also involves radical honesty with yourself. If you are like, I have to get this client, otherwise I'm gonna be screwed forever. You are being needy, whether you want to admit it or not. So there is some element of honesty that needs to come into how you approach this. Okay, see you in the next episode. Bye.