Introduction

Isn't life so much fun when everything is going your way? In those times, when everything just works and life seems to be on your side, it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling invincible. And whilst I hate to break it to you, after every high there comes a low.

In this blog post, we explore the idea of creating an emergency strategy system to protect us from these crushing game breakers so that we can live free of fear and do the things that matter.

This post covers...

1. ❓ What is an emergency strategy system?
2. 📈 What are the benefits?
3. 🛠️ How to set it up
4. 🌍 Conclusion

What is an emergency strategy system?

An emergency strategy system is a system that allows us to identify points in our life where things can go wrong and helps us develop strategies to better cope with these situations. Fundamentally, it consists of three different levels.

The first level is made up of areas of your life. This includes for example your physical health, your material wealth and your social network.

The second level is made up of imaginative but possible negative scenarios of you being negatively impacted in those areas. This could for example be the scenario you loosing all of your money, loosing a good friend or being sued. At this level, we don't look at the potential causes of these scenarios yet. We just look at these situations isolated from whatever potential causes may be at the root.

Only on the last, the third level, we take a look at (1) potential causes for these negative situations, (2) ways we could prevent both the causes and or the situations themselves and (3) ideas for how to cope with these situations should we fail or should it be impossible to prevent them.

What are the benefits?

The benefits of creating an emergency strategy system come down to satisfying our basic human desire for safety so as to free us from the imprisonment this biological need enforces on us.

The following are the four key benefits we gain from creating an emergency strategy system

• 🛰️ Overview - Creating an emergency strategy system is a great way to give you a bird's eye perspective on your life and an overview over what different areas you have to take care of, if you want to prevent unnecessary breaking points in your life. Sitting there and mapping these things out will show you that loosing your phone is by far not the worst thing that can happen to you! Which leads me straight to...
• 👁️ Confrontation - By creating an emergency strategy system, you are forced to think through even the most devastating and horrific negative potential situations that can occur in life. And whilst these may differ from person to person, in any case, it forces us to look our biggest fears straight in the eye and ask ourselves: "Am I going to avoid this monster hiding in the shadow until the day it decides to make a run for me? Or am I going to kill it right here, right now before it grows too strong for me to handle?" This confrontational approach often helps reduce the fear of bad things, too, since they aren't completely unknown territory anymore. A monster in the shadow is far more frightening than a monster that sits there butt-naked in a lighted room.
• 🧘🏼‍♂️ Confidence - Look, creating an emergency strategy system is not about saying that there won't be any seriously challenging situations in life. In fact, it is quite the opposite! But it's about allowing yourself to build the confidence that even in the most devastating times, whatever those may look like for you specifically, you don't have to be entirely lost knowing you have already done the work and prepared yourself for these challenges. By not waiting for the burdens of life to come crashing down on you all at once, but by lifting some of that weight voluntarily beforehand, you can create a non-judgmental relationship with life and accept its game calmly.
• 🙏🏼 Gratitude - Stuck in our tunnel-view of the world, we quickly forget how seriously privileged and lucky we are to even be alive and to be able to breathe. By creating an emergency strategy system and thus practicing this negative visualization (a method used by the ancient stoics, too), we allow us to see this privilege more clearly in everything we get to have, get to do and get to be on a daily basis.

How to practically set up an emergency strategy system

Setting up an emergency strategy system can be done in different ways.

Down below you can download a template I created with a good friend of mine which is the one I am using to map out the strategies to secure my life.

The template is split up into four different sectors so to help identify the different areas of your life in which you may want to develop emergency strategies. Once you have chosen an area such as physical health for example, you then move on to mapping out different bad scenarios such as being diagnosed with a terminal disease for example. From there on, go through (1) possible ways to prevent this scenario from becoming reality, (2) possible ways to reduce damage and (3) ideas or principles for how to cope with the scenario should it actually become your reality.

In this whole process, it is easy to feel overwhelmed considering the endless list of bad things that can happen and the endless list of causes for these situations. Should you feel this, stop.

Take a step back and focus on the big picture. Where can you create actual value for yourself, by putting in the effort to develop emergency strategies. Leave everything else be or go back to these other areas later on.

But always remember, the time you get hit by the lightning is not the time to ask yourself how to protect yourself from it. Be smart and think longterm. Where is the real value hidden? Loosing your phone or ensuring longterm health? Maybe both? Make your choice.

To kickstart your new project and to give you a bit more guidance, here are a few more examples of areas in which you may want to develop emergency strategies:

• 🏃‍♂️ Physical health
• ☯️ Mental health
• 🧠 Personal knowledge & memories
• 🤝 Social network
• 📱 Physical belongings (house, phone, wallet, laptop, keys, ...)
• 💸 financial & material wealth
• 🔐 Digital privacy & security
• 👔 Work & career
• ...

To clarify what an isolated emergency strategy may look like, here are examples of specific scenarios for which emergency strategies can be real life savers.

• 💰 Loosing your phone or wallet
• 🍞 Loosing your job
• 💶 Loosing access to your funds at the bank
• 😫 Feelings of regret
• 🏚️ Loosing your home
• 🖤 Loosing a partner, a friend, a family member
• ...

Conclusion

Life can be bliss, life can be harsh and sometimes life can be both in the span of a single day. The idea of an emergency strategy system is to proactively prepare ourselves for the difficult moments in life by mapping out what challenges and risks potentially await us in the future and asking ourselves how we can reduce their negative impact. This way we can confidently walk towards the future knowing are swords are sharpened for the battles ahead.