When Things Don't Go To Plan
Hello!
So the first week of uni is done and all my start of year choir committee duties are done and I am pretty damn exhausted. Today I want to talk about anxiety around planning things and the crushing feeling of failure when things don't go exactly to plan.
This week was the first Renaissance Singers rehearsal with our new additions so it was down to me to arrange the icebreaker games and social afterwards. Now, I get pretty into planning things and I am a total perfectionist so I wanted the evening to go as smoothly as possible. Time was tight as I'd been standing in for more senior committee members over freshers week (hence my absence here) and I had a lot to sort out.
Now, I've set up a system where I say happy birthday to members of the choir on our social page and at the end of the month sing happy birthday to everyone who had a birthday that month. So, the first rehearsal was going to be the place to sing Happy Birthday to all our summer birthdays and have cake that I'd provided as we did ice breaker games. I'd planned to have half an hour to do everything but of course, presidential announcements and other things ran over time so I only had 15 minutes. I was going to start off with an ice breaker where people tell me their name, voice part, and the strangest thing that had happened to them in the past week. I was then going to do a vocal name remembering game so we could all get used to singing with each other and hearing each other's sound. In my head, it would go perfectly, people would keep their stories relatively short and would do things the way I'd planned. Of course it didn't go that way.
In the end, we didn't have time for cake in the rehearsal and we only got to do one of the ice breakers. I think because I was so exhausted from the week before and the level of pressure I'd put on myself, I felt like I'd failed and that people were going to think badly of me. I was worried that people wouldn't recognise the level of work I'd put in over the past couple of weeks and it all just felt like a flop. I actually ended up in tears by the time we got to the pub which actually seems very silly now but that was just how I saw it; a failure.
From another perspective, it wasn't a failure at all. I'd managed to get those new people into the choir; I'd got name badges with a choice of three colours to write their name in; I'd managed to negotiate a pub discount deal for us; I'd booked a table for that night and managed to get everyone in that rehearsal to go; I'd provided cake and arranged to have it brought out with candles on by the restaurant we went to when we didn't have time to have it in rehearsal; and I still managed one of the ice breaker games. If I'd truly failed, I wouldn't have done anything.
Now I get that it can feel incredibly disappointing when things don't go exactly to plan but lets be honest, when do things ever go exactly to plan? If you constantly hold yourself to the standard of absolute perfection, you're always going to be disappointed. So instead, I suggest putting yourself in the shoes of the people experiencing the event that you planned. If you were experiencing that event, would you feel catered for and would you feel that an effort had been made? Also, try to listen to the feedback you received. I got multiple well dones for that rehearsal as well as thank yous for giving them such a lovely time. I'm trying to focus on that now because I know that I tried my absolute best.
I know a lot of you will be in similar positions at this time of year so I hope this makes you feel better if something you planned didn't quite wok out in the way you wanted it to.
Lots of Love,
Sarah xxx
