Plans Rarely Go As Imagined: What a 17-Hour Travel Day Taught Me About Leadership

It's 5:00 AM. I'm standing in the Ithaca airport with my kids, boarding passes in hand, ready for the first leg of a three-flight journey to Montana. I had a plan. I'd built in buffer time. Then the text came: the middle leg of our trip was cancelled.

The plan meets reality

We flew to DC anyway and were rebooked onto a flight five hours later, with no seat assignments. After waiting at the gate all that time, I learned we weren't actually confirmed; the flight was overbooked. We were the first people at the gate that day and the last to board.

In Chicago, the jet bridge broke, and we sat watching our connection window shrink. We ran terminal to terminal, just made the gate, then sat on the tarmac for another hour. Still, we arrived the same day, only four hours late. Exhausted after 17 hours of travel, but together, safe, and in beautiful Montana.

What this has to do with leadership

As leaders, we need to plan. Planning is the foundation that makes adaptability possible. But the plan is a hypothesis about the future, and the future rarely cooperates. What separates leaders who navigate disruption well is what happens in their body and mind the moment the plan breaks.

Your nervous system is a real leadership tool

Every moment that day was an invitation to spike into fight-or-flight. I noticed the pull: the tightening chest, the urge to raise my voice at a gate agent who didn't cause the problem. Viktor Frankl reminds us, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." So I leaned into that space. I breathed out longer than I breathed in. I felt my feet on the floor. I told my kids, "Yes, this is frustrating, and we're going to find a way through it," because I needed to regulate myself in order to help them regulate too.

You can't eliminate uncertainty or plan for every failure. The work is building the internal capacity to stay clear and calm enough to make the next good decision, and then the one after that.

Leading from the runway, not the itinerary

My kids won't remember the original itinerary. I hope they'll remember that when things fell apart, I didn't fall apart with them. Not because I'm unshakeable, but because I've built the somatic awareness and reflective practices that help me find my footing when the ground moves.

Think back to your own broken jet bridge: the stalled partnership, the lost funding, the plan that fell apart in front of your team. What did your body do? If this story stirred something in you, reach out. I'd love to talk about building somatic practices into your leadership.