Learn This Difference and Simplify Your Life

An introduction to the circle of control and how you can train to gain control over your own responses.

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Have you ever been irritated by something someone said or did?

Have you been upset over something you saw in the news, or perhaps a post on Facebook?

Have you complained about the weather not being what you wanted?

Have you worried about something that turned out to never happen?

Have you ever done everything you could to reach a goal, only to be disappointed when you didn't achieve it?

What if none of this upset you?

Imagine a daily life where nothing can negatively affect you unless you choose it to?

Wouldn't it be nice to have such freedom?

In this article, I will show you how you can learn this using tricks from ancient philosophers.

What You Can and Cannot Control

Some things are within our power. Others are not.

In our power are opinions, motivations, desires, and fears. In one word; everything that comes from ourselves.

What is not in our power is our body, our possessions, reputation, position, and in short, everything that does not originate from us.

• Epictetus, The Art of Living

By distinguishing between what you can control and what you cannot, you can learn to focus on what you can control and not waste energy on things outside of our control.

This can be illustrated in what I call the circle of control, based on the concept of "Dichotomy of Control" from Stoicism.

This will help you determine what you can and cannot control.

As you can see, it is quite simple to understand.

To learn to apply it in practice requires training.

Don't Set Goals You Cannot Control the Outcome Of

Setting yourself goals that you have failed to achieve can lead to disappointment and loss of self-esteem, something I have experienced myself.

You may have heard how important it is to set SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Ambitious/Attractive
• Realistic
• Time-bound

I have set many SMART goals for myself. Some I have achieved. Others not.

The problem is that I set SMART goals that were not fully within my control.

When it comes to athletic performance, for example, you can never control the circumstances that affect the outcome. There can be judges, weather, competitors, or a range of other factors that will impact the results.

Isn't it foolish to be so focused on an outcome you don't have full control over?

Wouldn't it be better to measure yourself only by what you have complete control over?

Ben Bergeron has coached the world's fittest man and woman to victory in the CrossFit Games. In his book Chasing Excellence, he makes it clear how he wants his athletes to think through an analogy to racehorses.

Racehorses are not biologically capable of understanding what their competitors are doing. They are completely focused on themselves. This is what I want my athletes to be. If an athlete's goal is to win, their focus is not on themselves, and they will not seek to realize their own potential, but to do better than someone else. - Ben Bergeron, Chasing Excellence

Goals that you have complete control over can be called process goals. These are goals that depend only on what, according to the circle of control, is within our control: Our own thoughts, feelings, and mindset.

By focusing on process goals instead of outcome goals, you can focus on doing your best in every situation.

Instead of setting a goal to lift 100kg in squats, you can set a goal to complete 3 training sessions per week according to your training program.

Instead of setting a goal to get an A in math, you can set a goal to study math for 1 hour every day.

Instead of setting a goal to lose 5kg by summer, you can focus on staying within a certain calorie intake each day.

By measuring yourself on things you can control, you will build self-esteem and take back control over your own goal attainment.

You can decide for yourself if you are awesome.

The "magic" of this is that often you can exceed your outcome goals by simply focusing on the process.

The Freedom to Choose Your Own Response

Psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote the incredibly insightful book Man's Search for Meaning after spending several years in Auschwitz during World War II. He remarkably managed to maintain control over his own thoughts under extreme conditions.

Everything can be taken from a man, except one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's own attitude in any given set of circumstances. To choose one's own way.

This freedom is yours too!

No matter what arises around you, you have a choice when it comes to your own response to the situation.

If someone talks behind your back.

If someone cuts in front of you in traffic.

If you step in dog poop just before an important meeting.

You can choose how you respond.

To make a wise choice, you must think carefully and not let yourself be swept away by the automatic response your brain will suggest.

This is quite simple, but far from easy.

How to Stop Worrying

Below I have set up a simple flowchart you can use when you encounter something perceived as a problem:

To determine whether you can do something about the problem, you can use the circle of control.

The flowchart shows that if you have a "problem" you cannot do anything about, there is no reason to worry.

If there is something you can control (your own thoughts and actions), you must do what you can. Then you have a concrete way forward.

After you have done everything you can, you no longer have anything to worry about.

Problem solved.

One challenge is that our brains learn shortcuts and do many things without us being aware.

It is training this ability to become aware of situations that you wish to have greater control over that is key here.

I call this response training, and it is illustrated by training the ability to choose down the bottom arrow in the figure below.

Training Program for Response Training

As always, I want to give you something concrete you can do today to utilize the concepts I write about.

To train your ability to choose your own response in a given situation, you can do the following exercise:

1. Imagine a situation you regularly encounter that irritates you. It can be something other people do.
2. Feel the natural irritation that arises in that situation.
3. Use the flowchart and circle of control to determine whether the situation is something you can do something about.
4. Go back to the situation and replace the feeling of irritation with acceptance. Think that this irritation does nothing for you.
5. Feel how good it feels to have full control over your emotional state. This exercise can be done as often as you wish.

The next step will be to use this technique on actual situations that arise. It will certainly be difficult at first, but start by training to become aware of the unwanted feeling. It can be anger, disappointment, or fear.

Conclusion

You have been introduced to the circle of control, which is a fundamental concept in Stoic philosophy, and seen how it can be used to train control over your own responses.

By controlling our own responses, we become invincible in the face of situations that would have previously troubled us.

Through response training, you can begin the journey to reclaiming control over your own mental state.

If you achieve this, you will become awesome.

Sources of Inspiration

• Epictetus: The Art of Living
• Ben Bergeron: Chasing Excellence
• Jonas Salzgeber: The Little Book of Stoicism ```