I recently had a really fun session helping someone choose a grad school. (And yes, they had checked all the boxes in my “Should You Go to Grad School” quiz!) As usual, I had them do an exercise where they sketched out what they’d like their life to look like in a year. They read me the list of things making up their ideal scenario. Along with financial stability and free time was NO NEW PROBLEMS.

I laughed out loud. Not in a mean way! I just really liked this. This client had been through a lot in the past few years, had worked through a bunch of tough stuff, and just wanted a bit of a break. I thought “no new problems” was great, and a good thing to hope for. “I just want to not be working through so much shit,” they told me. “Or working through shit in a different way.”

And, OK, we can’t guarantee no new problems. Some problems are going to pop up out of nowhere, and there’s not much we can do about them when they arrive. But there are a few things we can do to prepare ourselves.

Here are three ideas for minimizing future problems!

1) You can set your future self up with lots of options

I’m a broken record on this. What can you do now to make sure your future self has lots of choices, and isn’t compelled to take jobs they don’t want, live in a place they hate, or be unable to afford healthcare? What decision could you make today that would be a gift for Future You? Maybe that’s making a contribution to a retirement account, taking steps to build a circle of friends who live nearby, starting a community garden….use your imagination! Future You says thanks for taking care of this problem in advance!

2) You can prepare the ground for the best possible outcomes

I get a whoooooole lot of clients who are on the cusp of committing to a Plan B when their Plan A is still an option. It’s a fear response, I think, and I get it! But let’s not hamstring ourselves unnecessarily. Try shifting your perspective and thinking of the BEST case scenario instead of the worst, for a change! And you know what? The best case scenario is probably a lot more likely to happen than you think, and time spent preparing for that is likely better than taking a sub-par option that feels safer.

If you make a decision that’s not what you really want, preparing for the worst out of fear and talking yourself out of the thing you really desire, you’re literally creating a future problem for yourself!

Let’s try not to do that.

3) You can think about how you tackled hard problems in the past and use that as a template for those inevitable future problems!

Think about previous problems you’ve fixed, and how you fixed them. What strategies did you use? Who helped you—a friend, a partner, a decision coach? Those are tools that can help you in the future, and it’s useful to remember that they’re there—it can take away a bit of fear, and add some reassurance. And use the fact that you’ve done hard things to remind yourself that you know how to do hard things: you have evidence that proves it!