10/04/2026
A real conversation today between me and my chaplain here at Undisclosed Location. I showed up with an empty plate and a heart full of hope and sat down with a tray full of discouragement and a heart full of… I don’t know what I was feeling, I just know it wasn’t hope lol.
So let’s talk about a Plan B! Plan B is like your safety net – in case one thing that you really want doesn’t work out, you have a backup plan ready to put into place. My Plan B used to be the uncrustables, but we haven’t had them in about a week. Sometimes plans fall apart and you forget to come up with a new one or you’re so busy dealing with the fallout from the first one falling apart, you don’t stop and think about how you need another contingency plan. I haven’t thought about what to do with no uncrustables until today – the second meal in a row where I don’t feel like I can eat anything I see. Hindsight is 20/20, I wish I had a better plan when I realized they weren’t going to be carrying them anymore. But it’s not too late now, I can look at the cereals and the milks.
How does this apply to the military and daily life? At Undisclosed Location, we’re starting to do some Plan As and Plan Bs and Plan Cs of our own in order to make sure that different things we have going on can work out. It’s exciting to be in on this process because I used to be a medical planner before I got into Army social work – not a lot of people know this, but my first six years as an officer had me focusing on plans. I haven’t done anything with that part of my life for almost 10 years, so it is exciting to be here and get back into it now.
Plans provide reassurance, and that’s not just in the military – that’s in all areas of life. If you know that you’re trying to make one thing work, but in case it fails, you have this or that back up, then you know things are going to work out in the end. It would in theory reduce a lot of anxiety. “If I can’t do this, then I can do that”. In my normal role as a social worker, I extend this right over into therapy. If you can’t do this one thing that you want to do then at least you can do this other thing instead and that’s a way that you know you’re going to be OK and get your needs met. Another way to word it is– if this thing falls through it’s not the end of the world because then I can try this thing instead. We’ve had this attitude in the military for generations. This is why all branches of service have contingency plans, and we have them at the lowest unit level all the way up to the highest department levels.
If you bring this attitude towards planning into your personal life, you can plan ahead for almost any possible problem or obstacle and then once your plans are in order, just calmly get moving and see what you can do to make your first plan succeed. If you’re being optimistic, then usually you’re going to envision success. I think it’s important to be optimistic about all the plans though, not just the one that you want to have work at first. If you start off with an optimistic attitude about every plan in every contingency, when you’re not going to be disappointed. The first thing you try, might not work out, but if you already see the good in the next plan and you believe in it just as much as any other plans you make, but I think it’s usually an easy switch into Plan B or Plan C.
You know why this is a little bit harder than it sounds? It means you have to accept the potential failure. You’re not going to put a serious effort into Plan B or Plan C unless you’ve already accepted that there’s no guarantees that Plan A will even work. It might be the easiest thing to do, and it might seem like it has the best rewards – but there has to be a part of you that understands Plan A is not guaranteed. And beyond that, there has to be a part of you that accepts it might fail and is OK with the possibility that it might fail. That actually has to be OK.
That’s where I see a lot of people tripping themselves up. They come up with different plans, but they’re only committed to the first one and then they have a lot to recover from if and when that first plan fails. It might not be a big deal or it might be a big deal – but the difficulty in shifting gears all of a sudden is still there either way. When we are resilient, we’re going to be in our way and I think that makes it easier to get one plan failing and then needing to incorporate another one in its place. And the only way to develop resiliency is to truly face the possibility that things might not work out, but you will find a way to be OK anyway.
Right now, resiliency is telling me I’m going to be fine whether it’s real food every meal or cereal and milk every day instead of some cooked protein item. I know this; I just mildly complain sometimes when they don’t have the uncrustables. On the bigger issues, though, think about what resiliency means to you and how you know you’ll be OK no matter what. I would just think about this in advance before you’re the one staring at some mysterious imitation crab-mayo-broccoli item and rethinking all the life decisions you made that put you in a DFAC in the first place 😉
