Who’s in Control?
Look over the following list of things we often find stressful. For each one, decide if you can control it or not:
- Where you work
- Other people’s opinions
- The things you eat
- Late flights
- What you do with your free time
- The stock market
- Who you spend time with
- Conflicts around the world
- Your choices
- The weather
- Your attitudes
- What time the sun comes up
- Where you go on vacation
- Other people’s dysfunction
- How you respond to other people’s dysfunction
- Job security
- What you have for breakfast
- How long the toaster oven takes to toast bread
We could argue that some of these—for instance, “who you spend time with” or “job security”— could fit in both categories. It’s true that our work situation might seem to dictate those issues, or we could gain new skills that would enable us to make changes in those areas.
But for the most part, the odd-numbered items are things we can control, while the even numbered ones are out of our control.
Have you ever yelled at the toaster oven because it was taking so long, or at the computer because it took five seconds for a website to load instead of two?
Life is filled with examples of things we can and can’t control. Most people have trouble separating the two, and it causes stress.
Our expectations are unrealistic when we try to change the unchangeable.
The Solution
What can we control? Ourselves.
What can we not control? Everything else.
Our frustration comes from trying to control people and circumstances that are out of our realm of control. The key to surviving the people who drive us crazy is to determine what we have control over and put our energy there.
We can’t change others, but we influence them when we change ourselves.
I learned this lesson as a teenager in Phoenix. Like any sixteen-year-old, I was proud of having my license and considered myself to be a pretty good driver. Normally, I tend to be fairly laidback.
But when I started driving, I found a side of my personality I had never seen before.
It started the first time someone cut me off in traffic. With a line of cars in front of me and no one behind me, a car rolled into the lane ahead of me and drove about ten miles per hour, causing me to jam on my brakes to avoid hitting him.
“He’s crazy,” I thought, and I was angry with him.
So like any mature driver, I immediately started tailgating him. I figured he would notice what I was doing and feel remorse for cutting me off.
It didn’t happen.
He didn’t notice.
I encountered a lot of crazy drivers over the next few weeks, and I became more and more upset when it happened. I actually got to a place where I was angry before I started the car. I was thinking, “I wonder who it will be today?”
One day, after a similar incident, I was fuming at another driver and tailgated him as punishment. I pulled up next to him at a signal and glared at him.
But he didn’t notice that I was glaring, which made me even angrier. My horn didn’t work, so I couldn’t get his attention. I got even angrier, since I was trying to punish him and he didn’t know it was happening.
Then I realized what was happening. He was fine. I was fuming.
The only person I was punishing was . . . myself.
I had allowed my emotions to be controlled by the exact person I didn’t want controlling them. I had become his victim and he didn’t even know it.
Have you ever been angry with someone and couldn’t let it go? Maybe you were hurt in a relationship years ago and haven’t seen the person since. But you’re still living as a victim of that person’s behavior.
Holding anger toward someone in that way is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die.
We need to become different people in our responses to others, building character traits that allow us to handle their craziness without becoming victims. When we become different, people will respond to us differently.
But most important, we’ll have the strength of character and the boundaries that allow us to be emotionally healthy, no matter what others do.
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on keep our relationships from hijacking our sanity. (If you missed Part 1, you can find it here.) It’s based on content found in my book People Can’t Drive You Crazy If You Don’t Give Them the Keys. It’s the most popular of my 10 books, and carries almost 1400 positive reviews on Amazon (just under 5 stars). The paperback is on sale on Amazon for $7.69 – but a lot of people grab the audiobook to make it easier to listen to while on the go (and I got to narrate it).