Releasing Control and Becoming an Active Participant
In many areas of our lives, the idea of control is an illusion because it suggests that through enough training and discipline and focus, we’ll have the ability to restrain or direct or command anything that we want. It suggests that there is a place we can arrive at where we can regulate or influence every single outcome, if we get good enough at exerting control.
But we know from experience that that’s not possible because life is a mix of things we can influence and things that influence us.
We’re “participants” in a very natural push and pull.
The illusion of control sets us up for failure because there will always be something outside of our sphere of influence that impacts our reality and disrupts the illusion.
Instead of control, we can shift to a mindset that’s focused on Active Participation.
Active participation is the idea that you move through life with the ability to impress your innate influence upon things you can influence, and at the same time you are participating in and adapting to things that happen that you do not have the ability to influence.
In this episode, we discuss why being an active participant is such a powerful way to approach your day to day, and I’ll give you a few action steps you can use to start to flip from someone who’s focused on control to someone who’s looking for opportunities to actively participate instead.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
In many areas of our lives, the idea of control is an illusion because it suggests that through enough training and discipline and focus, we’ll have the ability to restrain or direct or command anything that we want. It suggests that there is a place we can arrive at where we can regulate or influence every single outcome, if we get good enough at exerting control.
But we know from experience that that’s not possible because life is a mix of things we can influence and things that influence us.
We’re “participants” in a very natural push and pull.
The illusion of control sets us up for failure because there will always be something outside of our sphere of influence that impacts our reality and disrupts the illusion.
Instead of control, we can shift to a mindset that’s focused on Active Participation.
Active participation is the idea that you move through life with the ability to impress your innate influence upon things you can influence, and at the same time you are participating in and adapting to things that happen that you do not have the ability to influence.
So in this episode, we’ll discuss why being an active participant is such a powerful way to approach your day to day, and I’ll give you a few action steps you can use to start to flip from someone who’s focused on control to someone who’s looking for opportunities to actively participate instead.
Here we go.
Main:
Let’s talk about control. And specifically, I want us to take a look at how we not only think about the idea of control, but how we have the illusion that having control makes us powerful, and that it helps us to achieve what we want to achieve.
And I want to suggest to you that instead of control, there’s a better framework that we can substitute for the idea of control, and that framework is how we can seek to be active participants instead.
I want to start by having you think about how often you move through a day with the intention of trying to exert control.
So think about this in the context of controlling an outcome at work, controlling how other people act or respond, controlling behaviors, controlling your own emotions, controlling the direction of your career, controlling your health, or any number of other circumstances.
And we have this idea in our mind that we can control what happens to us and around us because (1) the idea of control is in many ways attractive because we believe that through control we can get what we want, and (2) in our culture we’re told that control is attainable through a certain amount of willpower or focus or discipline or by buying a certain product or by using certain techniques or language to get people to do what we want.
We’re taught that we should “take control” of our lives, take control of bodies, take control of the way we think. And in the early days when I first started training people on how to improve their workday, I even used to say in some of my marketing that our courses could help you take control of your career.
But I eventually stopped using the word control and I’m going to tell you why, and I want to invite you today to rethink what it means to have control or whether full control is even possible and whether there’s a more useful framework we can use in place of control.
The reason I stopped using the word control is because to me I’ve come to believe that the word suggests that through enough training and discipline and focus, we have the ability to control anything that we want. It suggests that there is a place we can arrive at where we can direct everything and anything and influence every single outcome, if we get good enough at exerting control.
If I was to describe what control looks like to me, the first thing that comes to mind is someone holding on very tightly to something that wants to get away - almost this idea of grasping at something and clinging to it so tightly, in a way where you’re holding on to it because if you loosen your grip at all it’ll get away.
Control suggests the idea of force, or restraint, and there’s a very restrictive quality to the concept of control.
But I think that our efforts to try to control and the idea of control is the wrong lens through which we should be looking at life.
The problem with the idea of control is that we know from the experience of being human beings on planet earth that that’s just not how life works.
We aren’t able to shape the way everything turns out. There’s no amount of focus or discipline or work or effort that will allow us to have the unabridged, 100% ability to control, and force, and direct, everything that happens to us.
The idea of control is really an illusion. They’re many things that makeup our day to day that simply are outside of our influence.
If you think about what a day looks like and what life is like, it’s really a mix of (1) things that we can influence, and (2) things that we can’t influence but that actually end up influencing us.
What’s really going on is that we’re caught in this natural push and pull. There are certain circumstances where we have the ability to truly influence what happens, and then there are other circumstances where what happens is something we couldn’t have accounted for, couldn’t have planned for, and certainly couldn’t have controlled.
So our attempt to control I think really sets us up for disappointment because if we enter into a day or a relationship or a circumstance or a new life path with the expectation or the hope that we can control it, then inevitably what happens is something outside of our sphere of influence impacts our reality, interrupts the illusion of control we felt, and then our mindset is impacted because it turns out we don’t have the ability to control something that what we thought we did.
So, if the idea of control is an illusion, what can we replace that with?
Instead of control, I like to think about how we can cultivate a mindset that’s focused on what I call active participation.
Active participation is the idea that you are actively moving through life with the ability to both impress your innate influence onto things you can influence, and at the same time you are participating in and adapting to the things that happen that you do not have the ability to influence.
Active participation is moving through life and your day to day with the mindset of someone who is participating in a reality where you are making things happen, but you are also open to the possibility that there are certain things that are outside of your influence - but you’re ready and open and willing to adjust to them and let them shape you when you need to.
So if you want a good visual of this, I like to think of active participation as swimming in the ocean. So if you’ve ever swam in the ocean there are certain things you can account for - you can swing your arms, kick your legs, change direction, go faster or slower, move towards a certain spot you want to swim towards - but while all of this is happening, you’re still subject to the push and pull and ups and downs that the tide brings to you. You can influence the way you swim and the direction you’re swimming and your speed, but it’s all subject to a natural flow that the ocean has that you’ll just never have the ability to influence or control.
And so if you approach life as an active participant, then you can account for this natural push and pull that we experience in life.
It allows you to make room for the unexpected to enter your life and gives you the ability to adapt and adjust because you aren’t confined to the rigidity that comes with trying to exert control.
Being an active participant allows you to grow faster and bigger than you ever could by trying to control something because you’re always taking the direction of the tide and any changes into account and using it to your advantage - instead of fighting it, or being married to what you wanted it to be, you willingly and actively participate in it.
When you’re an active participant, you also become more accepting which frees you up from the burden of trying to fit everything to match your expectations.
Think about how exhausting it is to try to control a situation or other people or to try to predict the future. It’s absolutely exhausting. If you’re an active participant, then you don’t have to exert the energy of always trying to turn something that is outside of your control into something that is.
It allows you to release the illusion of control that you think you have over your day or over a situation or over someone else’s behavior.
I think the way we think about our careers is a really great example of the power of active participation. If you look at your own career trajectory, it probably has been a mix of things you could influence, but also it’s been the influx and outflux of opportunities and challenges and high points and low points - so this really beautiful mix of things you had the ability to influence, but also things that were influencing you that you had to accept in order to move to the next level, right - there’s no way you could have controlled that process from start to finish.
Now I want to point something out here. One of the dominating narratives that we’re familiar with in our culture is the hero narrative. The idea that the hero comes across a challenge, the hero exerts force to overcome obstacles and circumstances, and the hero eventually prevails by pushing through those challenges. And we could point to many examples of that hero narrative in storytelling, in business, innovation, overcoming personal tragedy, pop culture, and many more.
And I think sometimes because of those kinds of narratives, coupled with us wanting to control outcomes and have certainty around outcomes, we think that in order to succeed and be the hero of our own story we have to exert that same type of force or control when we’re confronted with something that’s standing in our way.
We feel like we need to move it. We feel like we need to make it do what we want. We feel like we need to learn how to exert control over it in order to reach the outcome.
But again, I invite you to search your past experiences, and I want you to look at whether your greatest achievements - so the things you persevered through, the things you overcame, the things you accomplished - were the result of you exerting control, or were the result of you influencing the things you could influence and also while at the same actively participating in and accepting the things that were outside of your control
Now I want to be clear that the idea of active participation does not mean you try less, or you back down from challenges, or that when something stands in your path you exert less effort.
It simply means you acknowledge that there are certain things that are outside of our sphere of influence, and that you are open to the possibility of working with those things instead of trying to control them.
It means you get to use your innate abilities to process and maneuver through the push and pull of life with an agility and a confidence that you can never ever achieve through trying to control a situation.
Think about what you could accomplish if you were accepting of the things that your workday or your life presented to you, and what you could do if you had the ability to use those things to your advantage instead of trying to control them?
So I want to leave you with some actionable steps that you can take to start to transition away from the idea of control to the mindset of an active participant.
First, I want you to call to mind a circumstance in your life where you think you are trying to control something - maybe an outcome, another person, your own emotions, a change you want to make in your life. And I want you to consider how you’ve been thinking about this particular dynamic. Maybe you’ve been spending your good energy being frustrated about the things you can’t control, or maybe you’ve been spending your time trying to figure out how you can control something that you can’t influence.
If you’ve been doing this, that’s ok, but let’s acknowledge that and shift our focus away from these frameworks because they’re not the right questions to be asking.
Second, instead of thinking about this situation or circumstance through the lens of control, I want you to consider asking the question: How can I actively participate in what happens next? In other words, what can you do to account for and allow the natural push and pull to guide you instead of working against it.
So if you encounter a rough patch at work that you can’t control, what can you do to flow with and influence the aspects of that situation that you can influence?
If you have a startup or your own business and you have a money crunch, or you’re struggling to figure out how to grow, what things are outside of your control that you can release so that you can focus on the things that you can influence?
If you want to make a career change, how can you actively participate in what happens next - instead of being a passive participant and waiting for something to happen to you, what’s a single action step you can take to kick start that process.
I want to leave you with this. I truly believe we each have an incredible ability to influence and manifest and seek out and attract and call in all sorts of things like opportunity, and relationships, and health, and wellness, and wealth, and we can do that by focusing on things like how to strengthen our mindset and our attitudes, and spending time envisioning what we want from life, and spending time learning how to unlock our individual power.
And I believe that the best way to do that is to stop looking outside of us for those answers and the things that are outside of us that we believe we can try to control, and instead flipping our focus, and learning as much as we can about ourselves so that we can fully and actively participate in what happens next.
I believe that that’s our work, and that it can be the most challenging work - which is why we sometimes shy away from it. But I also know that ultimately it’s the most rewarding work we can do.
So I hope you’ll keep this mind and consider giving yourself the gift of learning how to draw those innate qualities forward, the ones that are already inside of you, and using those things to design your path forward.
Go have a great workday.