Relationships Dynamics

A potential breakdown
In December for the first time (as we had spent quite a lot on our trip to Australia) Heather my wife said "Why don't we not give each other presents for Christmas this year?" Excellent idea, I thought as I always find it quite difficult to buy for her and I hate shopping anyway. To be fair Heather loves shopping, and as said before she is totally organised and so she gets all the gifts for all the family and the extended family, without me having to do any of it. The only person I have to buy for is Heather.

A dream for most men?
So her birthday is on 6th January and so after mucking it up a couple of times in the early years I now get her birthday presents the week before Christmas along with her Christmas presents. Good planning you might think- and yes it works.

So no presents last month threw out the system and that's when it all could have gone horribly wrong. I didn't buy her birthday presents before Christmas thinking there will be some big sales this year and I can get them on the 5th January the day before. So I scheduled the afternoon off to go and buy the presents and I made sure I knew what she wanted. No problems so far.

For various reasons I got out of work late and then hurried off to the main shopping mall in Watford about 30 minutes drive away. No real traffic, not many people around, straight into the shop to buy a ring she wanted. Excellent, this planning lark.

I give the shop assistant the bit of paper with the description and catalogue number of the ring and off she goes to get it. When she gets back with it I have a look and say - "Yes looks good - not on sale but that's OK". The very nice shop assistant then says something that generates my thoughts for this post. "Yes it's nice - we sold a lot of these and it's the last one in stock".

So my thoughts are although I had planned to get it done and thankfully it got done, I could potentially have got it badly wrong -
? What if they had sold out? I had no time to get to another shop.
? What if there had been a traffic accident and I had not been able to get to the shops on time?
? What if I had forgotten my wallet or the credit card had not worked (On this one I have a few)

With only one present to get this year how could I have faced her on her birthday without a suitable present?

So despite planning for it, having reminders in place and it going perfectly - what I had not done was to have any contingency plans at all. I was within a whisker of causing an upset because I had left it until the last minute and so had not allowed for anything going wrong!

Now all this may sound obvious, but let's be honest - how many of us leave things until the last minute? In fact the purpose of setting deadlines on goals and projects is that we are guilty of this too often. Then if it goes wrong we say -Oh the train was late, I hit traffic, somebody else didn't do what they should have done - excuse, excuse, excuse. Really there is no excuse we either kept our word or we didn't.

If we really cared about keeping our word and thus our integrity we would make sure we plan for the unexpected.

What I learned

Always do it early if possible as you never know what the last minute will bring

Always have a plan B and potentially a plan C

The planning is not done unless both of the above have been properly dealt with.

What do you think?
How do make sure you plan properly including allowing for the unexpected?

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