The art of gratitude for things that didn’t work out

I am someone who believes in hard work. Despite the fact that I co-founded a company called HeartWork 😉 

When I have purpose in work, I will show up with effort, discipline, and …. a spreadsheet.
In my professional life, that has meant projects with detailed timelines, well written reports where facts, milestones and intentions all line up, neat and congruent.

In my personal life, it has meant turning the same discipline inward:

• noticing a behaviour that’s counterproductive,
• making a conscious choice to soften or interrupt it,
• watching myself in the very situations that usually trigger me,
• and doing my best not to give in to first impulses.
  

It’s a trait that fits perfectly into modern corporate culture, which is deeply invested in getting the maximum out of its people. My inner engine runs on:

“If I work hard enough, plan well enough and stay on top of things…
things should go the way I want.”

And of course, they don’t.

That’s where this story really starts.

When hard work becomes a trap

Amongst the many tasks in my project roles, I’ve often been the person who builds and maintains the risk register:

• listing everything that might go wrong,
• adding mitigation actions,
• assigning owners and deadlines,
• following up in weekly meetings,
• linking those risks to key deliverables and reports that need to go out on time.
  

I’ve set up rhythms where risks are reviewed, escalated, and translated into concrete actions. The idea is noble: no surprises.

But here’s the pattern that used to kick in when things did go wrong anyway:

• A milestone slipped.
• A report came out half-baked.
• A critical action in the risk register quietly died in someone’s inbox.
  

My response?

Either I would:

1. Fix it myself: staying late, re-doing someone else’s work, quietly resentful.
2. Confront people: asking what happened in a way that felt accusatory, critical, or subtly shaming.
   

The underlying belief was:

“We agreed on this. You didn’t do it. Therefore, you are the problem.”

But reality is almost never that simple.

Opening the lens: maybe nothing “went wrong”

These days, I’m learning to have a very different conversation.

Instead of assuming someone messed up, I ask:

• Were there outer circumstances I didn’t know about?
• Did another manager jump in with conflicting priorities, pulling people and attention elsewhere?
• Did another department intervene and change the rules mid-flight?
• Did people not really understand the task, even though they nodded in the meeting?
• Were they not properly trained, and too embarrassed to say so?
• Did they have something heavy going on in their personal life that I never saw?
  

And then the uncomfortable one:

Could I have explained and structured things better?

I’ve sometimes skipped using the very tools that exist to make collaboration clearer:

• Obeya rooms to keep a shared visual overview of what we’re doing.
• A3s to clarify problem, root causes and actions.
• PDCA cycles (Plan–Do–Check–Act) to iteratively learn instead of assuming we’re right from the start.
• Daily or weekly rhythms where it’s safe to say, “I’m stuck,” before it blows up.
  

Looking back, I can see moments where I underestimated the challenges people faced in their roles and overestimated how clear I’d been.

Did I ask enough open questions?
Did I really check my assumptions?
Did I create enough safety for someone to say, “I don’t get it”?

Very often, the honest answer is: no.

Why I skip steps (hello, Aries energy)

Part of the reason is my temperament.

I have strong Aries energy:

• I like to get going.
• I prefer action over deliberation.
• I’d rather start and adjust on the fly than sit in long alignment conversations.
  

So when I skip a clarifying step, it often comes from a genuine (but impatient) desire to move forward.

But there’s another, subtler reason:

• I sometimes avoid asking the hard questions because I’m worried about confrontation.
• I can feel when people are uncomfortable with a more rigorous process that surfaces tensions and misalignments.
• And because I have deep empathy, I often feel what others are feeling before they’ve even named it themselves.
  

That empathy can make me hesitate:

“If I push this, they’ll be stressed, defensive, maybe even upset. Do I really want to go there?”

Ironically, in trying to spare everyone discomfort now, I can create much bigger discomfort later.

So what am I supposed to do instead?

I don’t want to give up on hard work and discipline. Those are real strengths.

But I also don’t want to keep living as if I alone – or the project plan alone – control reality.

So the practice I’m slowly learning is this:

Do the work. Use the tools. Ask the hard questions.
And then let the rest belong to the field. Or to life, the universe, whatever word you prefer.

This is where quantum physics sneaks in for me. Not as a strict proof of spirituality, but as a surprisingly poetic mirror of how reality seems to behave.

A tiny quantum detour: why the future isn’t fully pre-written

Entanglement: everything is more connected than it looks

In quantum physics, entanglement is the phenomenon where two (or more) particles become so deeply linked that their states can’t be described independently, even when they’re far apart in space. A measurement on one is strongly correlated with what you see on the other. (Wikipedia)

That’s not just a metaphorical bond; it’s a precise, experimentally confirmed feature of our universe.

Experiments based on Bell’s theorem show that if you try to explain these correlations with simple “hidden variables” that were fixed in the past and that obey locality (no faster-than-light influence), you run into contradictions with what we actually observe. (Wikipedia)

Roughly speaking:

Any theory that says “everything is already decided in the past, and nothing truly new happens” just doesn’t fit the data if you also want to keep some basic ideas like locality and classical realism.

The Kochen–Specker result: context matters

The Kochen–Specker theorem adds another twist. It shows that you can’t assign fixed, pre-existing values to all quantum properties in a way that’s independent of how you choose to measure them. Any hidden-variable theory that tries to do that, in a context-free way, breaks down. (Wikipedia)

In other words:

Even at the deepest levels we can probe, nature refuses to be a simple spreadsheet of pre-filled answers.

The Conway–Kochen Free Will Theorem

Then there’s the Free Will Theorem, developed by John Conway and Simon Kochen. It says, very roughly:

• If experimenters truly have some freedom in how they choose which measurements to do (their choices aren’t fully determined by the past),
  
• then, under some reasonable assumptions from quantum mechanics and relativity, the particles’ have the same freedom and cannot be determined by past behaviour.
  

The outcomes aren’t just reading off a hidden script from the beginning of time. (Wikipedia)

That doesn’t prove some grand metaphysical picture, and physicists debate what it means, but to me the emotional takeaway is:

Reality isn’t just a mechanical machine grinding through a pre-loaded program.
There is real openness in how things unfold.

I find that hugely comforting.

When a project collapses or a life plan derails, it’s not necessarily because I failed to control all the variables.
Maybe there are no “all the variables” in the simple way my planning mind imagines.

The corporate mind trap: arguing with reality

Corporate culture, however, often runs on the opposite assumption:

• If we just plan hard enough,
• monitor closely enough,
• and hold people accountable intensely enough,
  

then reality must bend to the will of the spreadsheet.

Anything that doesn’t fit – burnout, pollution, broken relationships, ecological damage – gets treated as an externality: something outside the model.

But externalities don’t actually live “outside”. They just live outside our convenient frame.

Take the combustion engine example:

Car exhaust contains toxic gases like carbon monoxide (CO). In enclosed spaces, CO from car exhaust can reach lethal levels in minutes. (The Zebra)

If we routed the exhaust directly into the passenger cabin, we’d be dead very quickly.
So we route it out the back instead. Problem solved? Not really.

The harm doesn’t disappear; it just disperses into:

• the air people breathe,
• the climate,
• the long-term health of communities and ecosystems.
  

The same happens in organisations:

• We route pressure outward into people’s private lives.
• We route stress into teams, families, and bodies.
• We route the cost of “success” into people who quietly absorb it.
  

From the system’s view, everything is “fine”.
From reality’s view, there is a slowly accumulating bill.

So when projects fail or initiatives collapse, maybe it’s not a bug.
Maybe it’s a feedback signal from reality saying,

“This way of working is not in alignment. Something has to give.”

The antidote, for me, is learning to trust:

Things sometimes need to be exactly the way they are.
Including the part where they don’t go my way.

And that’s where the art of gratitude for what didn’t work out comes in.

Case study 1: The sustainability project that wouldn’t behave

I once worked on a sustainability project for carbon sequestration that I poured my heart into.

I wanted to:

• help the organisation reduce its footprint,
• embed sustainability into strategy rather than PR,
• connect operations, finance and HR into a shared story about long-term value.
  

On paper, it was beautiful: multidisciplinary, purposeful, nicely structured in the risk register, with milestones and steering committees.

In reality:

• budgets were cut,
  priorities kept shifting,
• some leaders liked the optics but not the implications,
• the project kept getting scaled down and diluted.
  

I tried harder. I worked more hours. I wrote more convincing reports.

It still didn’t become what I wanted it to be.

For a long time, all I could feel was frustration:
“Why can’t they see how important this is?”

Only later did I see:

• The organisation’s culture simply wasn’t ready for the level of transformation I was pushing for.
• Some of the resistance was protecting people from being overrun by yet another “strategic initiative”.
  The project, even in its reduced form, planted seeds: new relationships, new language, a few small pilots.
  

Now, when I look back, I actually feel grateful it didn’t fully succeed on my original terms.

If it had, I might have stayed longer in an environment that looked green on PowerPoint but wasn’t willing to change at its core.
Instead, I was nudged to move on to contexts where sustainability and inner development could be more genuinely integrated.

Case study 2: My startup iThrive, the beautiful, sinking ship

Then there was my startup, iThrive.

We had a vision: supporting people’s wellbeing and growth, helping them thrive rather than just survive. I invested:

• money,
• endless hours,
• energy, creativity, and belief.
  

I poured blood, sweat and tears into it.

Then COVID hit.

Suddenly:

• markets froze,
• clients went into survival mode,
• our investor pulled out to save another startup in their portfolio.
  

On paper, that was the moment the ship hit the iceberg.

If I’m honest, though, the ship had already been taking on water:

• The collaboration in the founding team wasn’t going well.
• People had different ideas and intentions for where iThrive should go.
• Our alignment looked better in pitch decks than in real conversations.
  

But I couldn’t bear to face that.

I couldn’t imagine letting go of everything I’d invested. So I kept trying to keep a sinking ship afloat and patching leaks, telling myself that a little more effort would fix it.

When it finally stopped, I felt devastated and ashamed.

How could something I believed in this much just… die?

Only with time and a lot of processing could I see:

• The investor leaving was a mercy, not a betrayal. It forced a decision I was too entangled to make.
• Staying in that misaligned setup would have drained me for years.
• The end of iThrive freed me to grow in new ways — personally and professionally — that I would never have pursued otherwise.
  

Today, I can say:

I’m genuinely grateful iThrive didn’t “work out”.

It doesn’t mean the grief wasn’t real.
It means the grief no longer has the last word.

Case study 3: The second child that never came

This one is very personal and vulnerable. And close to the heart.

I wanted a second child.

It felt like the natural next chapter. The idea of two siblings growing up together, of a “complete” family. I cherished that picture since I grew up as an only (and lonely) child.

But the marriage wasn’t working.

Underneath the daily routines were:

• unresolved tensions,
• patterns we couldn’t shift,
• a sense of stuckness and exhaustion.
  

Adding another child would have added:

• more pressure on my ex,
• more pressure on me,
• more pressure on my mother (stepping in as support),
• and more emotional turbulence around my daughter.
  

At the time, not having that second child felt like a loss.
A quiet, persistent ache.

Now, when I honestly imagine what our lives would have looked like:

• two adults struggling in a relationship that drains them,
• two children absorbing an atmosphere full of tension,
• more logistics, more financial stress, less emotional bandwidth,
  

I can see the kindness in what life arranged instead.

My daughter gets a less chaotic home base.
My ex and I get to untangle and rebuild our lives in ways that are healthier.
My mother is not pulled past the edge of what she can carry.

I still hold tenderness for the child that never came.
But I also hold gratitude for the stress and suffering that were never added to an already fragile system.

Practising the art of gratitude (in real time)

I would love to say I now sit in graceful acceptance whenever something doesn’t work out. I don’t.

What has changed is the sequence:

1. First reaction: frustration, fear, self-blame, or blame of others.
2. Pause: “OK. This hurts. This scares me. And… what if this is not a mistake?”
3. Inquiry:
   
   • What might this be saving me from?
   • What might this be making space for?
   • What feedback is reality giving me that my plan didn’t account for?
     
4. Action:
   
   • I still clean up my side: apologise, adjust, learn, improve my explanations and systems.
   • But I also consciously practise gratitude, even if at first it’s just the tiniest:
     
     “Maybe, one day, I’ll be thankful for this.”
     
     

It’s not passive resignation. It’s a dynamic mix of:

• showing up with my hard work and discipline,
• using the best tools and conversations I have,
• and then releasing the idea that the only acceptable outcome is the one I first imagined.
  

In quantum terms: I stop pretending there’s a single predetermined trajectory I must cling to.

In human terms: I let myself live in a world where surprises, endings, and “failures” can be part of a deeper rightness.

Trusting that things need to be the way they are

The older I get, the more I see that the projects, relationships and dreams that didn’t work out have shaped me at least as much as the ones that did.

They have:

• humbled my belief in total control,
• softened my judgement of others,
• deepened my sensitivity to systems and externalities,
• nudged me toward paths I never would have chosen voluntarily.
  

Gratitude here doesn’t mean pretending it was all easy or “meant to be” in a sugary way.
It means recognising:

Life is more entangled, more contextual, and more open than my mind likes to admit.

Sometimes, the most loving thing reality ever did for me
was to quietly, firmly say: no
to the very thing I thought I couldn’t live without.

And the art – the ongoing, imperfect art –
is to meet that “no” with curiosity, humility,
and eventually, a genuine thank you.