When Facing the Road Ahead, Just Do The Next Right Thing

Here’s a challenge for you: adopt “Just Do The Next Right Thing” as your mantra. Does the road ahead look a little bit dark, a little bit tangled, and feel a little bit scary to you? There’s a phrase that came to me a couple of years ago, and over time it’s grown to touch a lot of things in my life that I never expected. I’ve shared it with friends who were facing overwhelm, and some have adopted it as their mantra.

Just Do The Next Right Thing.

We first toured St. Michael Catholic – what would become Sarah Kate’s high school – back on Veteran’s Day in 2016. The school opened that August, and a few years earlier Mr. Andi and I contributed what we could to the capital campaign to build it, but the cost of tuition simply wasn’t in our budget. I ran into Mr. Bill, Sarah Kate’s former adaptive PE teacher, one day at the middle school and he strongly encouraged me to check it out because he felt the environment would be ideal for Sarah Kate.

Against all logic and reason, I scheduled a visit. 

When we pulled into the parking lot of the campus, Mr. Andi was irritated that I’d scheduled something on the afternoon of one of his treasured days off, Sarah Kate was rolling her eyes about having to get dressed up on a school holiday, and I was frustrated with both of them for their petty hostility to my plan. An hour later, we were All In for St. Michael, but with no idea how we would make it happen.

And when I say no idea, I really do mean NO IDEA.

I’m an INTJ personality type, so I have a tendency to treat life like a game of chess, always considering what the potential outcomes will be of the choices I make, and it’s a skill that benefits me often. But the same tendency leads me to obsessively analyze situations in my life that aren’t within my control. I pay a lot of lip service to trusting God, but then I look down the road and decide that a situation is impossible or I let fear overtake me because I’m certain that I simply won’t be able to bear the expected outcome when it arrives. But on this day I decided that I needed to trust Him – for real, this time.

I resolved to not worry and just do The Next Right Thing.

Starting the admissions process was The Next Right Thing. Sarah Kate took the placement test, forwarded her transcripts, and sent in her application. Over the next two months, a series of events transpired that we could never have imagined – not all of them pleasant – and those events put Sarah Kate’s tuition payments within reach. Eight months later, she got out of my car in her uniform, schedule in hand, and walked into the building as a freshman at St. Michael Catholic High School. I trusted God, and he took care of the rest (it’s a really good thing I didn’t know then that we would also need to buy her a car sooner than expected!).

We did The Next Right Thing until we reached the destination.

Two weeks after that visit to St. Michael, my dad was thrown from his horse while riding in the woods. On the MRI they performed to gauge his injuries, doctors found a “spot” on his brain – either a bleed or a tumor – but at the time he wasn’t well enough to be treated, or even to be checked out further. We could only wait until he improved to find out for sure what was going on.

Two months later, he sat in his wheelchair in a windowless exam room while the doctor informed him of what we already suspected – he had a brain tumor. My stepmom and I sat nearby in hard plastic chairs while Mr. Andi and my stepsister listened in by speakerphone. I first remember using the phrase that became my mantra on that day: “Daddy, we just have to do the next right thing. And after we do that thing, we’ll do the next right thing after that one, and then the next.”

For the next twelve months, we kept doing The Next Right Thing.

One year and five days after we sat in the doctor’s office and I said those words about The Next Right Thing to my dad, I stood next to his bed as he died. It was a terrible blow, but a lot happened in those twelve months. In the beginning, I couldn’t wrap my head around the possibility of a world without my dad, but when the end came for him, I understood that it was time for him to go. There are still times I miss him so much it takes my breath away, but I survived the event that seemed impossible to comprehend only a year earlier.

Because I just kept doing The Next Right Thing until we reached the end of the road.

You would think that giving birth to two children with special needs – and wildly different needs, at that – would have quashed any illusions I had about control, but it didn’t. The event that finally forced me to surrender was the challenging, but not devastating, task of sending Sarah Kate to St. Michael. Living through my dad’s illness reinforced the idea in me that I don’t need to keep jumping ahead all the time; I only need to do The Next Right Thing. Once I realized this truth, I began to see how it could have helped me in the past if I had just embraced it earlier.

I still research, plan, prepare, and “game out” scenarios, because that’s what I do.

It’s how my mind makes sense of the details of life. I am not comfortable with flying by the seat of my pants. On the outside, it may look like I’m doing things the same way I’ve always done them, but on the inside…I’ve changed. I don’t worry as much anymore, because it’s not helpful to dwell on what might happen someday. 

I’ve read countless pieces instructing me not to worry about the future, and in the past I never really understood how to get from the point of worrying to the point of not worrying. I’m a worried by nature: HOW do I not worry about the future? I realize now that it’s actually about choosing a different focus.

Not worrying about the future is actually a choice: to focus on the present instead.

I wasted a lot of time when the kids were younger worrying about the things I shouldn’t have been worried about – that Sarah Kate would be bullied because of her disability and that Nathan would have no friends, to name a couple. Neither of those things have come to fruition, so those worries were wasted anxiety. I should have simply been doing the things that needed to be done for them each day, week, month, and year to help them reach the potential that God gave them. 

So here’s my challenge to you: adopt “Just Do The Next Right Thing” as your mantra for awhile. When your mind tries to jump ahead and anxiety for future outcomes starts to creep in, bring it back to the present and the decisions that are right in front of you.

When your mind tries to jump ahead and anxiety for future outcomes starts to creep in, bring it back to the present and the decisions that are right in front of you. Share on X

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I don’t recall where I first heard the phrase “The Next Right Thing”. When I sat down to write this post (well, actually, to re-write this post, because I started a version of it not long after the two above events occurred), I assumed it was from Emily P. Freeman’s podcast, but when I did a little research I found that the podcast didn’t launch until August of 2017 – many months after I adopted it as my mantra. Maybe she got it from me? 😉 Probably not.

If you’d like to do a deeper dive into the concept of doing the next right thing, you can find Emily’s new book, The Next Right Thing, here. The books focuses on decision making, which isn’t quite the same as what I’ve written above, but our views are largely in sync. (Note: it’s unlikely that Emily has any idea who I am and she definitely did not ask me to promote her book. Having said that, I am an Amazon affiliate, so if you buy the book they will drop a few pennies into my account).