How to have more control in life
Have you ever explored how to have more control in life because you are looking for reassurance? Why do you think you need to feel you have more power? How closely have you looked at why losing control scares you? If you are not in control, what does it mean about you?
If you haven’t figured it out yet, this post is about why you started reading about how to increase control in your life. It’s about examining the drivers at the root of your need to maintain power. It’s here that you’ll find the key.
When you uncover the roots of the role control plays in your life and sift through your patterns, you have the power to change your relationship to control.
How do you feel about yourself when you sense that icky-out-of-control-guilty feeling that tells you that you are not doing enough or not doing it right? How is your ability to manipulate yourself and your environment tied to your self-worth?
When you feel that powerlessness, you assume it means you are lacking: you are not capable, not good enough, unworthy. You frantically try to force, push yourself into a preconceived framework. You think that if you do this, packing it all perfectly into the box, nothing sticking out, you will be perfect. Or you try to prove you are strong enough, clever enough to make the circumstances fit.
The point of being strong, clever, and perfect, is that if you are these things, you won’t feel fear. You won’t feel weak or uncomfortable. If you are perfect, you will have proven you are enough. You will not be abandoned. You will not fail. You will not feel negative emotions.
The bigger your fear of not being enough, the more you wrestle with yourself, beating yourself into submission, punishing yourself to ensure you fit into the box.
Because not fitting into the box is inconceivable. If you don’t fit into the box, it will mean you are broken. You aren’t enough. You are a failure. You must be unlovable.
So, no wonder self-improvement feels so urgent.
The concept of self-improvement starts with fundamental flaw: it implies that you aren’t wholly and wonderfully made to begin with. It means that you are somehow an error of nature. When you look at an innocent baby, do you see flaws? Do you start thinking that baby has a lot to improve? Of course not.
That line of thinking comes later when the juxtaposition of self and context becomes too prominent, when the universal need to belong proves stronger than identity and selflove.
But when you encountered your first contextual obstacle, why did you decide that you must be broken or wrong? Why wasn’t it the inverse? Why do you persist in trying to improve yourself rather than your context?
The key is in the word feels.
When you encounter something that makes you feel out of control, instead of relaxing and loosening your grip, you tighten your hands on the reins, resisting surrender, because you can’t tolerate the feeling. You try to change yourself to avoid or repress that icky-powerless-shameful feeling. In the moment that feeling pops up, you make a panicky fear-based decision to micromanage, to tense up, to criticize, to force, to quit before you start, rather than endure that feeling.
Because the story in your head associated with that feeling tells you that if you lean into that feeling, you are weak, powerless, incapable, unworthy, not enough, and/or unlovable.
And if you manage to criticize yourself into perfection, then not only are you NOT weak, powerless, incapable, unworthy, not enough, and/or unlovable, you ARE brave, strong, powerful, worthy, and enough.
The temptation to self-improve is a double whammy of emotional addiction.
But it doesn’t actually change the flawed premise that you aren’t whole and wonderful. And it doesn’t change the pattern that you beat yourself up when you most need tenderness and love. Which means that your struggle with control will continue.
So what do you do?
If you saw a small child who was afraid of not being good enough or being left alone, would you criticize them telling them they were weak and powerless? Would you demand they prove that they can do it? Would you tell them to suck it up that they didn’t have the right to feel that way that other people had much worse problems? Would you tell them the best way to succeed is to fix themselves because they weren’t whole to begin with? If you wouldn’t do that to a small child, why would you do it to yourself?
The only way to achieve a healthy sustainable relationship with control in your life – to actually BE in control – is to practice self-compassion.
In self-compassion, you witness the discomfort that comes with feeling powerless. You validate and normalize the feelings. You confirm the “problem” is in the juxtaposition of self and context, not inherent in you. You let go of oversized responsibility to make everything okay. You release the need to be perfect, accepting that you are enough. And you feel relief in the letting go because ironically, in your liberation you are controlling what you can.
Your first step toward learning to let go, release and be, is on me! Schedule a free call today!
