Control

In every situation there are parts we can control and parts we can’t. Our quality of life and our ability to make positive change, comes from which of those two sides we put our focus and effort. Some things we have no immediate control in but we could have eventual control in. Some things have lots of pieces that can be controlled immediately and only a small amount that is out of our control. Regardless of how big or small the issue, we do have some control, even if it is only our mindset or the decision to focus on something else.

Think of it in terms of power, because your time and energy spent is your power. Where can I use my power in a way to make me feel better or more hopeful instead of stressed or hopeless? Our thoughts and focus have the ability to create either feeling from any situation. Continued thought and belief in either direction is what dictates the actions we take (or don’t take) that could make things better.

This week I have an important meeting coming up. I have done everything I can do to prepare and now it is in someone else’s hands to make a decision about something extremely important to me. I have no control right now about what happens. Last night after the kids went to bed and the house was quiet, my mind started to wander to what would happen if it didn’t go the way I want it to. I have spent decades practicing worry, so even after all the work I’ve done, that little sucker still creeps in a fair amount out of habit. Thankfully I could notice how shitty it felt when I thought about it and I started to re-evaluate. There was no action I could take last night to affect anything in either direction, so I looked at my choices for that moment.

Am I going to worry about this thing that is now out of my hands? or am I going to marvel at the moon?

Am I going to stay in the thoughts of worry and fear? or am I going to get a nice hot cup of hot chocolate and take some deep breaths to let my body relax?

Am I going to keep thinking about all the things I need to do tomorrow on loop and stress myself out? or am I going to write them down and let them be free from my mind now?

This is a situation that I now have zero immediate control to change. I still have incredible power to change how I feel about it and power to change the state of my mental health and the power over how this affects my days in the meantime. That is no small thing. In other words, am I going to give my power to this thing I can’t control? or am I going to take my power back and chill out? It seems obvious when you put them side by side. It seems obvious when it’s someone else who’s doing it. Worry and stress are habits and it can take time to break habits of thought that don’t help us. My point is we always have a choice. Every single time we make a choice to take our focus away from what can’t be controlled and put it on something that can, we take our power back. This is how we build faith in ourselves to handle anything that comes our way and our ability to create anything we want. Choice of focus by choice of focus.

Purposely focusing on what you have control over and giving less air time to what you don’t is how you build faith that you actually do have control in your life, because no matter how it feels in any given moment, you do. This isn’t just about idle worry either. Be aware of how you are talking. Do you hear yourself talking to anyone who will listen about this thing you can’t fix? I used to do it constantly. I talked about how this person treated me, I talked about my injury and what I wasn’t capable of, I talked about all the things I couldn’t do because of finances. It took a lot of prodding in strong groups of women, to shift my thinking into how I’m going to respond to how someone treats me, to talk about the ways that I am mentally capable, to think about all the wonderful things I’ve accomplished with not making a huge salary. Focus matters. Focusing on things that you have control in or that are going well is a game changer. So if the things you are saying and thinking are making you feel like crap, you might want to try talking about something else for a while.

Feeling like you have no control is a really shit place to be. There have been many times in my life I felt like I had no ability to change my situation and it didn’t lead to anything good. In some cases that exact thing is what lead to complete depression. I was in a car accident back in 2007 at the tail end of my first year of college. It meant that I was no longer able to work while going to school. It meant that I couldn’t work full time over the summer at my coffee shop job. It meant that I had to take out student loans instead. I didn’t worry about those things then. I wasn’t heartbroken about leaving the coffee shop because I had planned to leave anyway. I also believed that when I graduated college I would have a great career that would easily look after any debt I was incurring then. In other words, I felt like I had the ability to control the outcome, even though it would take a while. Hope alone is a powerful thing. Fast forward two years to when I graduated and got my first full time office job. I was not in a good state. I earned the same amount at my coffee shop job as I did in my new office job. It also turned out that working 40 hours at a desk is about the worst thing I could do for my injury, even worse than lifting heavy coffee pots hundreds of times in a day. Without hope, I was depressed. Full on.

It is only now, a good many years later that I feel like that injury is irrelevant to how much I can make and how I can look after myself. Even in something as unchangeable as that, there are parts I can control. I can control the chair I sit in while I work and the ergonomics of my work space. I can control how often I exercise and strengthen the muscles in my shoulders and therefore affect how quickly they tire and hurt while working. I can control my level of stress and tension which is actually a huge factor in how that injury flares up or doesn’t. Now I work in a way that I can choose my hours and I take regular, big breaks to move my body. Now I work in a way where I charge much more per hour so I can work less hours and not hurt myself.

It is an entirely different way of looking at the injury now vs. when I believed I had no control. The injury itself didn’t change. I changed my thinking and therefore ways of acting in response to it. When I thought I had no control, I worked jobs that physically hurt me and consequently spent a tonne on physio and massage to try and compensate. I spent a lot of my off time lying with my heating pad, which let me tell you is not a fun way to spend a day. I drank to try and relax. I felt hopeless and stuck in many other areas of my life too because of my perceived ability to earn. I was not living my best life and there is a clear line between how I felt and the level of control I felt like I had to make my life better in the face of this injury. This is a very obvious idea, but focusing on what I couldn’t control made me feel like I didn’t have agency in my life. Focusing on what I could control gave me freedom to create whatever I wanted.

If you are stressed about a change in money coming in, shift your focus to the money going out for a while. If you are stressed about a cost increase in one area, find another part of your spending to focus and change. The cost of gas and groceries is going up. It is what it is. It is something we can’t immediately control. Are we going to keep talking about what we can’t change? or are we going to make some choices about something else to offset it? One option will make you feel better and more in control and one will make you feel helpless and miserable. There are choices.

I want you to think about any area where you are feeling stuck, helpless, or hopeless. I challenge you to find something about that situation that you can control and to put your focus and effort there. Then watch how much better you feel and watch how much more helpful your actions become in going around what you can’t control. I can tell you it feels really, really good to sit in your power and know you can make your life feel better no matter what happens. That is the ultimate level of control that we all want.

Lots of love

Dawn