“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
Albert Ellis (1913-2007)
Psychologist and psychotherapist
Defining Control
Control is the power to influence or direct people’s behavior and/or to direct the course of events. Traditionally, it is seen as an effortless and invisible process. While control isn’t a problem, the process of gaining and maintaining power and control can be a problem.
Personal vs External Control
There are two types of control: personal control and external control. Personal control focuses on those things you can control or at least have an influence over. Then there is external control, situations that are more global, things you have little control over.
- Personal control: what you eat, your activity level, hydration, etc.
- External control: the behavior of others, the results of an election, a sporting event
People who have difficulty losing gracefully are the people who allow external control to have more of an impact on their lives than is healthy.
What You Can Control
While it may feel there are things you have no control over, there are many things you can control, more than just what you eat and drink. This provides people with someone or something to blame when things go wrong as opposed to looking internally. An example would be identifying all the reasons why you didn’t receive a promotion as opposed to looking at how much effort you did or did not put into your job.
What you have control over:
- Attitude: You have control over your positive or negative attitude. Focusing on your own attitude eliminates a lot of distractions and negative influences. If life is going well, it is easy to have a positive attitude. It is much more difficult to have a positive attitude if you have experienced a sporting, political or life loss.
- Work ethic: Your work ethic involves the amount of effort and preparation you put forth. Success rarely comes to those who sit back and wait for it to happen. You must put in effort to make things happen. If you are playing sports, it doesn’t matter whether you are playing the best or worst team in the league; your preparation should remain the same.
- Actions: You always have control over your words and actions. This holds true no matter what sport you play or organization you find yourself in. You only have control over the role you play. Do not spend any time focusing on the responsibilities of your teammates.
Sadly, many people will place more emphasis on what is out of their control than what is in their control.
What You Cannot Control
There are a few things that you have absolutely no control over:
- Age: You cannot control that you are getting older every day. You can exercise and eat in a healthy manner, but your body is aging.
- Sex: You cannot control the sex you were born with. You may change your sex later in life, but it doesn’t change the sex you were born with.
- Family and medical history: You cannot control your family’s medical history. If there is a history of diabetes or cancer, you may be at increased risk of diabetes or cancer.
While there are many things you can do to challenge the effects of these factors, nothing you can do will change them.
Negative Impacts of Focusing on What Is Outside Your Control
Spending the majority of your energy focusing on things outside of your control is exhausting. It’s like trying to swim against the current. You are pushing and pushing, but you go nowhere. This may result in some serious emotional effects:
- Anxiety: You may know trying to control people or situations is not within your power. It just causes you to feel anxious. The more you realize you can’t control other people or situations, the more anxious you may become. It’s a vicious cycle that feeds on itself.
- Anger: When you feel you cannot control someone or something, you may be consumed by anger. First, you may become angry at a person or situation. And then you get angry at how little control you have over a person or situation. No one likes to feel powerless.
- Mental exhaustion: Putting effort into attempting to control the uncontrollable is tiring and can feel overwhelming. When you focus on controlling other people or your surroundings, you will be drained of massive amounts of energy. All that energy loss leads to mental exhaustion.
Trying to control other people and the environment is a fruitless act. You have no control over these areas of life, and putting effort into them will only produce negative results.
Summary
You can focus on what you have control over in life (yourself), or you can focus on what you have very little or no control over. Knowing the difference could mean the difference between a frustrating life and a satisfying one.
If you would like more information about controlling what you can control, please refer to my book, The Win-Lose Book: 20 Tips for Winning and Losing Gracefully in Sports, Politics and Life.
With warmest regards,
Thank you so much for reading this blog. If you enjoyed the content, please check out other blogs at:
RelationshipsRelearned.com
RVingNomads.com
In addition to blogs and articles, I have written a series of self-help books called The Personal Empowerment Series and a fictional series named The Charlotte Novella Series. To view my books and novellas I have written, please go to my Amazon Authors Page.
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