By Amanda Scott-Telford, IPHM Certified, Trauma-Informed, Mental Wellness & Recovery Coach
When you can’t get to sleep because you’re going over the same things in your head again and again, it can be really draining.
The three circles
The center circle is the circle of control. These are things that you can do, things that you can change, things that you can influence, things that you can manage. This is where you put your effort.
The second circle of control is the circle of influence. This is the area of your relationships, your reputation, your perception by others. You have a vote in this circle but not a veto.
The outer circle represents the things we cannot control – other people’s choices, the past, the weather, disease and how things will turn out. We can care about all of these things, but we cannot change them.
Stephen Covey identified the outer two circles of influence and concern in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey, 1989). Psychologists have been studying this phenomenon for decades, calling it our locus of control (Rotter, 1966).
Why we reach for the outer ring
When we are worried about things that are out of our control, we can spend a lot of time and energy trying to sort them out. We can go over things that have happened in the past, worry about other people’s feelings, and try to sort out things that have not yet happened. We can find ourselves getting exhausted by trying to sort out things that we cannot change.
This is a learned response to anxiety. It can feel like we are trying to manage fear of the unknown by worrying about everything possible. If we can worry about everything, then we can feel in control of everything. This is a very tired way to live and is not producing the desired result.
The shift
To move the energy from the outer ring to the inner ring of control.
Once we identify where something is, we can deal with it. If it’s something we can control, we can take action on it. If it’s something we can influence, we can do our best to influence it and let go of the result. If it’s something we cannot control, we can acknowledge it, grieve it, name it, and then put it down.
You can’t control most of what happens to you. You can control where you put your hands. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.
What this isn’t
Let me be clear on a couple of things first: This isn’t toxic positivity, and it isn’t denying that hard things happen to us. The things that happen to us in the past are real, and they can be very painful. The people we love are struggling, and the diagnosis is very real and very frightening. Sorting something into “out of my control” doesn’t make it any less painful. It just stops you from wasting your energy on trying to change it.
As for other people, you cannot think, love or boundary someone else into changing. That is not in your circle. Your circle is how you respond, what you accept and the life you keep building while they find their way.
Where this leaves you
Most peace comes from spending the control that you have on the things that are yours to control.
Download the free Circle of Control worksheet below to sort out your own knot and name the thing that is weighing on you, sort it into the three circles and decide on the next thing to do.
References
Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28.
