Focus On This When Change Is Out Of Your Control

Change equals difference. That’s a basic definition, but it’s honestly what the change is. Something is different than it was before. This could be your job, a relationship, Mother Nature, or anything else. Where change is concerned, you come to grips with it before you’ve lived very long on this planet.

Almost all change is out of your control.

Even the most obsessively compulsive person who strives every minute of every day for control is taunted by this fact. Try as you may, your world will largely spin in any direction it wants. It doesn’t stop and ask you what reality you’d like to experience.

You can try to influence it, and you might be successful in some ways. For instance, you can work really hard to get promoted. You go out of your way to find out what your boss needs from you, and then you make sure that happens. You outwork your coworkers, take extra courses that help you move up the corporate ladder, and nail a big promotion.

While patting yourself on the back for your hard work and how it paid off, remember one thing: your boss or someone above him still had the final say in whether you got promoted or not.

That’s pretty humbling when you think about it.

Take a look at any area of your life. You’ll see that you don’t always have as much influence as you previously thought you did. The best you can do is work on yourself, your relationships, and your environment to create a favorable reality.

Then, when life steps in and throws some negative change in your face, remember to ask yourself this question.

“What Can I Control?”

Imagine that you are going for a walk. It’s a beautiful day. The world has treated you to a spectacular experience with sunny skies, birds chirping, and stress-relieving nature all around you.

Then, immediately in your pathway, a brick wall appears out of nowhere. It wasn’t there, and then it was there. It’s only a few feet wide, so you can easily walk around it. Instead, you repeatedly try to walk through it.

You can’t control that this change has happened. What you can control is your response to it. Claim your sphere of control. Do what you can do, which is to move around the wall and continue your enjoyable walk.

Life will give you a lot of change you’d rather avoid. When this happens, don’t waste a second of your time trying to influence something you have no control over. Determine what you can influence and what you can’t. Then take action to turn something negative into the best possible outcome.

Focus on what you can control when you experience negative change. Trying to influence things that are blind to you is pointless. It wastes your time, cranks up your frustration, leads to anxiety and stress, and all of that can be avoided. You take away the power of negative change when you use your sphere of control to put it behind you as quickly as possible.