“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” – Mike Tyson

I’ll never forget the day my husband called me with the news. He was in Houston, Texas. I was in Melbourne, Australia.

We had our plan all lined up — our youngest two kids booked into schools, our older two already at boarding school in the US, and the logistics pointing toward a long‑awaited move back to the U.S.

Then he said, “They want me to move to Singapore.”

Singapore?!?!*?!

It felt like a gut punch. This was not my plan. Not remotely.

To say that I responded with humor and grace would risk my nose growing three inches. Alas, it was also not the most harmonious day/week/year of our marriage either. I’d already sacrificed precious time with my older two for our well laid plan and now, it had collided head on with reality.

As the saying goes, “If you want make God laugh, tell him your plans!” While God was busy laugh that day, I railed. This isn’t fair! After a few days hosting my little pity party and shedding a few ugly tears, I reminded myself of a lesson I’d previously learned yet clearly not well enough:

Every day we spend railing at the cards we’ve been dealt is a day we’re not playing out best the ones we have.

So as I picked myself up, I reframed what I’d been labelling as a derailment (sans expletives) into a “plot twist.”

That one phrase didn’t change the situation, but it changed how i was relating to it. And it freed up my energy to get on with making the very best of this new chapter that was suddenly being inserted into the story book of my life.

Clearly, I’m not the first person whose had a ‘plot twist. Yet paraphrase the great philosopher and boxer Mike Tyson, we’ve all got a plan until life smacks us in the face.

They take many forms. But whether it’s a life change you didn’t sign up for, a diagnosis, a job loss, or an unexpected goodbye, we all find ourselves in terrain we didn’t plan on.

But here’s the paradox:

When you accept that life will be difficult, it becomes less so.

Accepting that plans sometimes turn pear shaped – often in ways that defy imagination – isn’t about throwing in the towel on making any. Rather its about writing them in pencil. Because when you use pencil, it frees you up from fighting with reality (as i did) and redirecting your resources to making the very best of your new one.

Psychologists call this acceptance-based resilience. It’s the process of loosening our grip on how life “should” go so we can more clearly see the opportunities hiding within how it actually is. I’ve seen this again and again – in my own life and in the lives of clients:

When we stop fighting what we can’t control, we bounce back faster and expand our capacity to find purpose and seize opportunity in what is within our control.

And that’s often a lot more than we initially realize. In the final episode of my Courage Works podcast series, I share a few tales of my own journey of moving from resistance to acceptance, from self-doubt to self-trust, and from feeling off-purpose to knowing – with deeply grounded certainty — that those things we think are throwing us off our path are often just revealing it.

🎧 [Listen to the episode here]

Since relocating from Singapore to the US, I’ve increasingly appreciated the gifts that ‘chapter’ held for me – professionally and personally. That experience is a reinforces another truth:

Some of the most meaningful chapters of life don’t get a title until much later.

So if you’ve been feeling off-course or railing at how your plans have unfolded, take the deepest breath you’ve taken all day and ask yourself this:

If this is exactly the experience I’m supposed to have to prepare me for what’s next, how can I help turn it into a win?

As I wrote in You’ve Got This! (which – no irony lost – came out in March 2020 – the exact week that the world’s plans were turned on their head):

Every so often it will hand you a left hook that knocks you flat. But it’s by leaning into life’s curves—its plot twists and punches—that we uncover its hidden gold. More than that, we discover deeper layers of our own humanity: empathy, humility, resilience, grace.

What’s a plot twist in your life that ended up shaping you in ways you didn’t expect?

I’d love to hear what you’ve learned along the way—and my hunch is that by sharing your story, you might just give someone else the courage to get back up after their own fall. After all, we’re all in this wild, wondrous, and sometimes messy adventure called life together.