06. The Law of Control

Under the Laws of Success

You feel good about yourself to the degree to which you feel that you are in control of your own life.

The reverse of this law, of course, is that you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are not in control of your own life or that you are controlled by other people or circumstances.

The psychological profession has long recognized the importance of feelings of control as a critical element in human personality and performance. The term that psychologists use is "locus of control." The locus, or place, of control refers to wherever you feel the control is located in any part of your life. If you feel that you personally make the decisions that determine the direction of your life, you are considered to have an "internal locus of control."

If you feel that your boss, your bills, your childhood experiences, your health, or anything else controls you or forces you to do or refrain from doing what you really want, you are considered to have an "external locus of control."

The location of this place of control in your thinking is the critical element in determining your personal level of health and well-being. People with an internal locus of control, those who feel that they are behind the wheels of their own lives, tend to be low-stress, high-performance personalities. People with an external locus of control, those who feel that what they are doing is dictated by other people and pressures, tend to be high-stress, low-performance personalities.

The field of cognitive psychology is focused on studying how you think and the relationship of your thinking to your health and happiness. More than twenty-five years of research in this field has concluded that a "sense of control" is absolutely essential for you to perform at your best.

The first corollary of the Law of Control is
Change is inevitable.

It is not only inevitable; it is also unavoidable. It is accelerating. It is unpredictable and discontinuous. It is affecting every aspect of our lives.

Change is also scary for most people. There is a deep-rooted desire on the part of most people to avoid change of any kind, even positive change. This is why goals are so important. Goals allow you to control the direction of change. Goals assure that change in your life is predominantly in the direction that you want to go. Goals give you control over the critical elements of your life. Goals give you a greater sense of personal power and well-being.

The second corollary of the Law of Control is
Controlled change leads inevitably to greater achievement than uncontrolled change.

By working every day toward the accomplishment of your most important goals, you virtually guarantee that you will feel better and accomplish more than if you didn’t. You automatically exert a greater sense of control.

The third corollary of this law is
To take control of your life, you must begin by taking control of your mind.

Your ability to think the thoughts you want, and to determine the goals and results you desire, is the starting point of all happiness and high attainment. Successful, happy people make a habit of thinking and talking only about the things they want. Unsuccessful, unhappy people, unfortunately, spend most of their time thinking and talking about what they don’t want. Because of the Laws of Belief, Expectations, Attraction, and Correspondence, whatever you think and talk about most of the time is going to appear in your life.

How you can apply this law immediately:

1. Examine your life carefully and notice the parts of your life that cause you the greatest amounts of stress, anger, or frustration on a regular basis. These are usually situations in which you feel you have little or no control. The starting point of dealing with a stressful person or situation is for you to identify it clearly.

2. Resolve to make a decision in each of these areas, to either get in or get out, to do something or to stop whatever you are doing. Whether it is a job, a relationship, or an investment of time, money, or emotion, the act of making a decision to take an action of some kind will reduce your stress and increase your feeling of personal power almost immediately.

Remember always that you are where you are and what you are because of yourself, because of your own choices and decisions. If you are not happy with your situation, it is up to you to make different and better choices and decisions. And you are always free to choose.

Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).