Reader, I have inhabited this dear planet for 37 years thus far, yet I’m still puzzling over what fairness really is. As someone who is interested by neuro-linguistic programming, and a super-fan of positivity, I want to like fairness. It has great NLP and sounds like something splendidly aspirational. I love the idea of balance; in fact, you’ll even see a set of scales as the motif for the Nutrition Plans. The spirit and letter of fairness is identified in many of the things I care about most, preventing or combating discrimination, prejudice or injustice.

The trouble is, (and it really is a trouble), the way many of us experience things to do with fairness in these times of myriad media, fervent and FOMO friendships, is via fairness’s angry antonym, unfairness.

I’m a big believer that the energy and attitude you emit, gets reflected back to you. So this preponderance of unfairness vibes is not something I particularly want to be a staple of my daily digest. But I turn on the television, and unfairness is screening on every channel. The reality show, wherein people feel their life prospects will be greatly ameliorated by changing the colour of their teeth or skin, or the size of various body parts. And the unfairness of a world where that pressure to look different to what the x and y chromosomes fashioned when you were created, turns my stomach. And then, because I am a self-proclaimed pseud, the unfairness that some people can afford to change in these ways, and some can’t, conflates the issue. By now, as you can see, I’m already mired in existential angst, and all I’ve done is turn on the TV set and happened to catch a couple of minutes of a reality show that I wasn’t going to watch anyway. So fairness, you’ve got a lot to answer for.

Eagle-eyed fans of plans will have noticed that we here at Make Me A Plan are keen on things working well. The qualities of work and fairness are also inextricably interlinked.

Conjure up in your mind’s eye, the most recent things in your own life, that you’ve felt were not fair. Chances are, these will include things where you made your best endeavours, put in an amount of work that you estimate should have produced a better outcome. And so fairness’s angry associate, unfairness, once again cajoles you into judging, perhaps even resenting, fellow humans. Why does so-and-so always get an easy ride? S/he doesn’t deserve that decent outcome.

Something that sounds pretty straightforward, but is actually incredibly hard to execute, is to spend one whole day, not being bothered by unfairness. I simply call this a Positivity Day. A day where I try and reclaim the innocent, original power of fairness.

You have to start this from the moment your alarm goes off on the morning of your Positivity Day. No chimp-like reaction that it’s not fair you have to get up and go to work when you’d rather stay in bed. No irate, isolationist responses on your commute if someone cuts you up.

Opening up to thinking the best, and re-friending fairness.

Try it, and let me know how you get on.

I’ll be musing On Gender next fortnight – get in touch with any particular aspects of that topic you’d like me to write about.

Happy Planning.