When Things Don't Work Out
© 2026 Lane Wallace
Aviation for Women magazine, January/March issue, 2026
For almost eight weeks this fall, I dedicated time every evening to help my niece study for an exam that was going to have a huge impact on her career. She’s an embryologist, which is impressive in its own right … even if I can’t imagine spending hours ever y day looking through a microscope, working with nanoparticle-size elements to create healthy embryos for couples who’ve struggled to have children. But to advance to the next level in her career, she needed the certification she could only get by passing this test. Trouble was, the test is unbelievably hard, has a ridiculously high failure rate, and if you fail it three times, you can’t take it again for several years. And she’d already failed twice. Not by much but, as with a checkride, the only metric is you pass, or you don’t. And anyone who’s ever faced a checkride with a big career goal on the line knows the kind of stress that comes with that kind of make-or-break test.
My niece had been studying since last spring. In addition to the final weeks we spent working together, she’d already taken an online course, attended an intensive weekend seminar, read textbooks and study guides, and made her own study slides to try to master the overwhelming cellular-level detail, breadth of knowledge, and recall the test required. And yet she left the test site with such a headache, and feeling so unsure about her performance, that instead of taking herself out to dinner, she took some aspirin, crawled into her hotel bed, and pulled the covers over her head. Most of us have known that feeling at some point or another in our careers. But to make it worse, she had to live with that gut worry for the next six weeks until she got her test results.
The only good part about that delay was that I had some time to try to prepare her for the possibility of things not working out the way she wanted. Because the fact is, no matter how high achieving we are, there are going to be times in our lives and careers when things don’t work out. We’re not perfect, we don’t hold all the cards, and we can’t overcome every problem or eventuality. We don’t get the job or promotion we should have gotten; we don’t pass the test, checkride or interview; the career track we’ve set our hearts on dissolves in a changing world of mergers, reorganizations, or economic and industry fluctuations.
So what do we do about that? The best coping mechanism I’ve found has two main components to it. The first is gaining some perspective on the situation. There’s only one instance in which failure is truly catastrophic, and that’s a literal life-or-death outcome. Anything else, we can come back or move on from. So the first thing to do is ask: “What’s the worst outcome here? Does anyone die?” If we realize the answer is “No,” it helps tamp down the all-or-nothing disaster fears in our heads and hearts—or at least keep them in check.
The second step is formulating an acceptable “Plan B,” in case things don’t go our way. Anyone who’s ever had the rug pulled out from under their life plans and lived to tell the tale knows that even if we thought there was only one path forward, or there really was one ideal path it would have been nice to have available to us, we figure out other options when we’re forced to. Humans are remarkably adaptable, when we have to be. It’s why we’ve survived this long. But thinking about alternative paths ahead of time is helpful for a couple of reasons.
Most importantly, it helps us gain some essential resiliency and balance, making us better prepared to absorb the disappointment and rebound more quickly if things don’t go our way. That alone is a stress reducer. But realizing that life will not end if things don’t work out also helps us perform better at the tasks and tests that stand between us and our goal.
One of my coaching clients called me because she was so stressed about an interview and checkride at the one and only airline she’d ever wanted to fly for that it was negatively impacting her daily functioning. “But I HAVE to get that job!!” she said. I asked her to start by imagining other possible options or alternate paths to her goal. “But there aren’t any!” she insisted. “I promise you, there are,” I replied. “And if you want to relax enough to be able to breathe, sleep, and perform well at that interview, we need to figure them out.” It took a little time, but we eventually came up with a couple of workable Plan Bs. And having those backup plans in her pocket helped her relax a bit … and do well enough at the interview that she ended up getting that dream job after all.
The second reason it’s important to think about alternatives is that sometimes, although not always, that alternate path turns out to be better for us, or just better, than the one we had our heart set on. As the philosopher Joseph Campbell famously wrote: “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” My niece absolutely loves being an embryologist. But she didn’t set out on that path. She was hell-bent on becoming a doctor. She stumbled onto embryology while getting a master’s in biomedical sciences she hoped would improve her chances of med school admission. And she took a job in an IVF lab only as an interim/back-up plan when she didn’t initially get into any U.S. med schools. A month later, however, she realized she was so happy in embryology that she forgot all about med school.
There isn’t always a silver lining, of course. I’ve had more than one failure that didn’t have any upside. Things just didn’t work out. But my happiness and life didn’t end up ruined by it, either. And that’s important to remember.
As for my niece, she called me a few nights ago. She was crying too hard for me to understand her clearly, but I heard the words “test results” … and my heart sank. But then I heard something that sounded, oddly, like “passed.” I still couldn’t understand her clearly, so I said, “Are you happy crying? Or sad crying?” “HAPPY!” she answered. “So you passed?” I asked, just to make sure. “YES!” she screamed in jubilation.
Go figure. In the end, she’d done such a good job at focusing on a Plan B and finding peace with the possibility of failing, that the outcome she wasn’t prepared for was success. But in a way, that’s the point of the exercise. To be so ready for any outcome that it’s if things DO work out that we’re caught emotionally off guard. I’ll gladly take that kind of surprise—along with any tears that accompany it—any day of the week.