On Pivoting

Because...we have to

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A plan is such a satisfying way to enter the day or start the journey. As one of the more spontaneous people I know, I nevertheless love a plan as a jumping off place from which to enter the flow and create. I may even depend on plans to structure my wishy-washy, waffly, mood-muddled creative spaces.

But.

You know where this is going. “Best laid plans” and all that. Evidence of the limited power of my mortality is never nearer than when I try to leverage a vision into being. Planning isn’t my magical super power.

Pivoting is.

From my early career as a middle school teacher through later stops in research, training, and leading a nonprofit, I became known for detailed, sometimes beautiful plans (I mean, if you’re into color-coding, multi-layered lists and snappy slide decks) But my successes almost always fall askew from my original ideas.

It’s taken me a long time, helped by the gauntlet of parenting, to accept that planning works out better when I ease up on hard core determinism. Flexibility rules.

Acknowledging Big Magic in work / relationships / life trajectories leads us to recognize that kismet may matter as much as intentional training and trying: This window of opportunity, that trick of timing, the other meeting or mentor or muse makes a difference, sometimes even the difference.

And if achieving our goals depends less on what we plan than on the more mysterious alchemy of happenstances and people and things outside our control, why shouldn’t we embrace the magical possibility of the pivot?

Of course, it’s not a new idea…

Thanks Google Marketplace for all the suggestions! I’ve only read the first of these

It can be hard to let go of five-year checklists and “Dream Big” expectations. My lifetime and a half of trying to “make things happen” means I’m still in the same stuck place as the main character in my middle grade novel. Lots of you probably are too. We’re kindred spirits, trying so hard.

When push comes to shove, daily schedules and weekly appointment calendars shouldn’t rule over creative possibilities. The best feature of plans is that they lead us to to put our visions into the world where we can work on them, evolve, and change.

That’s where the pivot comes in.

Forced, a pivot puts us face to face with the limited power of our plans. But when we choose it, pivoting encourages us to explore alternative scenarios. Author, scientist, and creative observer, Jess Keating, challenges creatives to risk departure from their plans to enable possibility - the magic of a pivot is that it just might lead to something better.

I like the way James Clear puts planning in its place:

"Anytime in my life when I have managed to go from a vision to a reality, the vision has not been a plan but a practice.

In other words, what matters is not having a vision, but rather making a habit of returning to and revising the vision. For the big things in my life, I'm always coming back to them week after week—sometimes day after day. As new information arrives, the vision gets updated. The dream becomes more crystallized over time. It's a habit of thinking about where you want to go with an ever-increasing degree of clarity.

You do not need a vision, you need the practice of envisioning."

Rather than relying on plans as guardrails against distractibility and procrastination, what if we leaned into pivot power and adopted an envisioning practice as a way to hold our intentions more loosely? When creativity and/or life offers something other than what’s in our checklists, we can allow ourselves to reframe, reprioritize, and side step without self-defeating criticism.

Particularly useful for this is Oliver Burkeman’s observation that Lists are Menus. As my family and friends all know, I love a menu - choices to greet with anticipation, pick and choose from at will, and commit to, for a time, with pleasure. Instead of proscribing action, a menu offers options. There’s no better tool for vision development.

So, make roomy plans - containers for choice and possibility. Following them may lead you somewhere exciting. Or you may need or want to change course. There’s magic in building the road as we travel it. Along the way, let’s practice envisioning, celebrate evolving, and pivot. Discovery is the guaranteed result!

I’d love to hear where your pivot powers take you!

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