What You Can’t Control

Hi there. Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. My name is Natalie Bacon and I’m an Advanced Certified Mindfulness Life Coach as well as a wife and mom, if you’re here to do the inner work and grow, I can help.Let’s get started.

Hey gang, welcome to the podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today. I moved to Chicago. Did you know that? Come check out all my personal updates on Instagram over @NatalieBaconCoaching if you’re into that sort of thing. If not, no worries. But I know that I haven’t given a personal update in a while on the podcast. So we are now living in Chicago where I met Steve and lived for a few years and where Steve’s family, where my in-laws are from. So it’s a lot of fun. Moving has not been fun, but the process, um, is now complete and we are in our home and starting the next chapter, our second baby boy will be arriving in the next couple of months at the end of summer and we are very much looking forward to that.

What’s new with you? How are you doing? How is this summer going to go? Do you feel the fun and the joy coming your way or do you feel some busyness and overwhelm already starting? Either way it’s okay. I got you. That is the power of coaching. We can do all this work no matter where we’re at and help us feel a little bit better and more empowered and more inspired in our lives. I wanna thank you so much for being here. I appreciate all of the messages that I have received, which have all been so kind about my move and about the baby and my life and the work that we’re doing here. Oh my goodness, I feel so spoiled. I don’t have a lot of haters. I have so much support from you all and it’s because of you and it’s a lot because of you specifically listening to this podcast.

This podcast is something I’ve been doing for quite a while now, many years and it’s only possible because week after week you continue to listen. So thank you. I appreciate you. I see you, I’m glad you’re here. And with that, let’s dive into what you can’t control. That’s what we’re talking about today. This is something that I coach on so much and I work on in my own life. I’ve gotten so much better at it. It is something that comes up often. In fact, I was looking up examples for this episode and I went over to our Ask A Coach forum inside Grow You Where Clients Can Write In. There’s 24 7 written support that’s anonymous. So it’s really cool because it’s published in a way where you can read what other people have written in and read the response that I give using the coaching practices and tools that I am trained in.

And it was fascinating. I was looking for examples in that forum and like every other one or every few was related to control. So why is this? Why do we want to control everyone around us? It’s because of our brain. Of course. It’s always because of our brain. Darn it. It’s really the truth though. The brain likes to be in control. Control means safety, control means certainty. And when the brain has the perception that it is in control, it feels very safe. Safety means survival and that is the main function of the brain. And that’s not a bad thing. But in our modern worlds, in modern motherhood, that primitive part of the brain unmanaged creates enormous problems. We end up trying to control our kids, our spouse, our in-laws, our parents, our neighborhood, the schools, the community, the government and on and on and on.

All in the name of of course, whatever the good cause is that we are thinking. So if you’re trying to control your kids’ sleep schedules or whether they are cleaner at home, there is usually this underlying good motivation of wanting them to be clean and tidy and helpful and take care of themselves in the home and and all of that. And it sounds so lovely. And yet when we’re focused on what we can’t control, it’s so disempowering. It feels kind of miserable. If you’ve ever done this, speaking from personal experience, probably did it earlier this week. I’ve gotten so much better. But I used to always be so focused on things that were outside of my control. So I wanna make a distinction here between external control and internal control. External control is focusing on things outside of you. Other people, what they say, what they do, what they don’t do, and don’t say What’s happening in our society and in the world and in our neighborhoods and in our schools, that is focusing on the external.

Internal control is what you have control over. It’s who you want to be. How you want to think about something, how you want to feel about something and what actions you want to take. Focusing internally on what you can control is very empowering because you have the agency to do it. So if you think of an example, let’s say that you want your spouse to come home on time. If you focus on trying to get him to come home at a different time, you will likely make yourself miserable because he is in control of that. You have the agency to think, feel and act however you want, but you don’t have agency over him and you’re not supposed to. Of course. Now often when I teach this, we go to all or nothing thinking. So you’re saying I’m just not supposed to care and I’m not supposed to do anything. That is not what I’m saying.

The options are not I try to control you or I don’t do anything at all. Those are two ends of the spectrum that I think on the one end it’s very disempowering and on the other end it’s just sort of apathetic and unrealistic. Like we want to care about things and people in our lives and yet how can we do that in integrity with ourselves, without making ourselves miserable by trying to control people? It’s the million dollar question. The way that you do it is you focus back on what you can control. So in that example, I’m just making this up, spouse doesn’t come home on time and you’ve made requests of him. What you don’t wanna do is hang your emotions on whether he comes home on time. You might decide, okay, sometimes my spouse comes home on time and sometimes he doesn’t and I’ve asked him to come home on time all the time.

When he doesn’t come home on time, who do I wanna be? How do I wanna show up? How do I wanna think? How do I wanna feel? What do I want to do? Oftentimes we want to do right away, we wanna take action right away without doing the thought and feeling work. And it’s a really big mistake because we end up showing up from that place of control like, well, I’m just not gonna make any dinner or I’m just going to do X, Y, and Z almost to like get back at him for doing this thing that we think is wrong. Instead, shifting internally to who you want to be as your best self as a wife. You don’t have to be thrilled that he’s not coming home at the time that he said. And also you don’t have to go to the other extreme where you’re trying to control him.

And what would that look like for you? I think that this is some of the most empowering work that you can do is just coaching one of my beloved clients who has a six year old and an eight year old and we’re talking about getting out the door in the morning and how one of her kids takes longer and doesn’t get the shoes on and the s on. And she asks her repeatedly. And what I showed her was that she was so focused externally on trying to control her daughter, that that is why she was making herself miserable, thinking the thought she should be listening to me on the first or second or third time. She should move along faster. She should be past this by now. This is going to go on forever. The thoughts when we are trying to control someone else will leave us feeling very miserable because there’s no way we can control eight year old or spouse or anyone else who is not us and we’re not supposed to.

So then the alternative is not okay, well we just don’t go to school. We don’t care. We don’t go out the door. No one wears shoes to school. The alternative is not, we just don’t care at all. The alternative is somewhere in the middle, okay, this is who my daughter is being, this is the phase that she’s in at this age. I thought it would be different right now, but I was wrong and I’m the one, I’m the one who can figure out how we can get out the door on time. And then when you really genuinely want to be that person because you want the outcome of your kids going to school, you will feel so much more empowered to come up with creative solutions. Like maybe you gamify it and turn it into a game or you turn on fun music or you try different ways, different actions that help incentivize your daughter to get the shoes on.

The difference with that versus kind of the yelling and the controlling is not the end result. The end result is daughter goes to school with shoes on either way, but the end result for you in how you show up as a mom is completely different. One is focused on what you can control and who you want to be. And the other is focusing on controlling your daughter. And I can totally relate to this client because I, um, used to be so focused on, on trying to control everyone outside of me. And it wasn’t until I really realized how ineffective it was, number one, and how miserable it made me. Number two, that I saw the upside in thinking differently so I could have things happen. And I have had things happen in my life where someone lies. Let’s say for an example this happened and in the past before doing this work on control, I would act like a crazy person, at least in my mind.

Like I would be ruminating and thinking what did they do wrong or what did I do wrong? Or how did this happen? How did I let this happen? How can I control this person? How can I ever trust them again? And all of these really disempowering thoughts that were focused so much on what I can’t control, which is whether another person tells the truth or not. And fast forward to having done this work and definitely not being perfect at it, but at least getting some leverage over the topic of control. I have been able to navigate hard challenges like someone lying to me and not spun out in my mind, not tried to control that other person deciding on purpose right now. You know, I don’t want to trust that person in this particular area and it doesn’t mean I can’t still have love for that person.

It doesn’t mean that we can’t still have a relationship. It just means that I’m gonna let them be them. Isn’t that so nice of me? Right? I sort of say that and it’s always so funny when I say it and teach it because of course they’re going to be them. Whether someone says something to you, doesn’t say something to you, does something doesn’t do something is always based on what they’re deciding to do or not. Do they have that agency? Now, you might ask, let’s say your spouse, if they can, um, pick up dinner on the way home and your spouse may say yes, and that’s a beautiful thing, that is you making a request and them choosing to do what they wanna do and use their agency to do it. They might say no on a different day. I like to point out these examples because it shows that we can always make requests and influence other people in that way, but we can’t control them.

I mean, the only way that you could be controlled is literally if someone, um, controlled you physically, they could control your actions. If you know you were tied up and like kidnapped basically you couldn’t act or um, you were like brainwashed, right? They could maybe control your mind. But outside of that you have agency to think however you want to feel however you want. Now, of course you have that default brain that’s gonna offer you those, those feelings that are, um, challenging at times, the overwhelm, the frustration and all of that. And that’s okay. You can still work through that and choose how to feel on purpose and of course what you do in the world. So I’m obviously pregnant with our second child and it’s a boy and they’ll be about, I don’t know, 19, 20 months apart in there somewhere. And people will say to me, oh my goodness, they’re gonna be best friends.

And I always think to myself maybe, and maybe not, that is me practicing on purpose ahead of time, not controlling their relationship. If you try to control the relationship that your kids have with each other, you will be ineffective at it because you can’t, again, it’s outside of your control. Now, I do wanna point out that there are areas, particularly when it comes to kids, that you have what I might call a little bit more influence over than another adult. So when you are teaching your kids, I’ll use an example. Let’s say, um, you have two kids and you are teaching them, um, boundaries and respect and you know not to hit each other, and you see your one child hit your other child. Now you can’t control whether they hit, but you can try to stop it. Even mid hit. Like if you see one child get up to hit the other one, you can hold that boundary literally physically.

That’s one way. You can also have consequences. You can work on the skill of not hitting. There’s lots of things that you can do. The focus though is always going to be most helpful when you focus back on what kind of mom do I wanna be to help my child navigate their urge to hit. This just made me think of an example I didn’t even write down, but my son, um, was going through a biting phase and instead of trying to get him to never bite, I told him, you can’t bite mommy. I won’t let you bite mommy, but you can bite your blankie. And so whenever I can kind of tell like there’s some like aggression on his face, I give him his blankie and he kind of just like bites the blankie and gets the urge out. So that is me not making his actions mean anything about me. I don’t think he’s like maliciously intentionally trying to bite me. He’s learning the skill that we don’t bite other people.

So, you know, take it or leave it for that specific example. The point is I’m just focusing on who I want to be with respect to what I can control. I can’t control whether he bites and that is the truth. And I, I think that sometimes we want so much to control our kids, but I think upon further examination we see that a lot of times it’s just to validate ourselves. I was at the playground not that long ago with my son and um, this mom was telling her son that him not listening to her to go down the slide in a certain way was making her sad. And it was just really interesting to witness because when we do that, when we tell our kids that their actions cause our feelings, it creates sort of this like, um, dependency, almost like emotional co-dependency there.

And what can be really powerful is to just separate out what your kids are doing from you, who you are and from your feelings. So if you feel sad or frustrated or you yell or any of those things, it’s because of what’s going on internally for you. If your kids do something, it’s because of what’s going on for them. So if they are, um, throwing their food at a restaurant and you feel really frustrated, it’s because you’re thinking they’re too old for this, they should know better. They shouldn’t be throwing food at a restaurant. And then you feel frustrated and then if you don’t process that frustration or um, you react quickly, you might end up yelling and that’s okay. There’s no shame in that. You can work on that, but it’s all coming from those thoughts. It’s not coming from what they did or didn’t do.

And you can really, um, have this land if you just think about, you know, 10 different families with that exact scenario happening and you had 10 different parents who would all have different reactions. My guess is that none of them would be like really happy and join in on the throwing of the food, but they would say 10 different words, 10 different conversations, 10 different actions, 10 different feelings. And that’s how we know that our kids’ actions don’t create our feelings. So what we wanna do is focus on what we can control, which is who we are being. So I always like to take moments like that. If this was me and out of the moment examine like what was going on for me and if that happened again, how would I want to show up differently, right? Maybe I remove the food from my child’s plate or something like that, or maybe I, um, remove my child from the restaurant.

Yeah, I, I’m just kind of spitballing ideas here, but that’s how you do this work is you don’t try to control other people. You work on controlling yourself because that’s all you have control over. This was life changing for me when my first son was born navigating his sleep, I consistently would apply this and say, I can offer him sleep and I will offer him sleep, but I can’t control whether he sleeps. So I wasn’t surprised when he got up in the middle of the night or when he took a really short nap. I said, oh, this is the part where he’s not gonna sleep. I can’t control that. It doesn’t mean I enjoyed it. It doesn’t mean I was super happy, right? But it, it took some of that resistance off of it. Like the resistance coming from the thoughts. This shouldn’t be happening.

Something has gone wrong. I never tell myself that, okay, sometimes I tell myself that, but very quickly I can get out of it by using these tools.

There are a lot of moms inside Grow You with older children. And this applies to them too. If you have an adult child who is drinking alcohol, you can’t control that. But that also doesn’t mean you don to the other end of the spectrum where you don’t care at all. Instead, you can focus internally and decide what kind of mom do I wanna be with my child who is drinking but they’re over 18, let’s say, well, I wanna be a mom who talks with my child about it and at least lets them know my thoughts about it, my concerns, and who is open to hearing their side of it as well. You get to decide who you want to be, but that’s what that would look like.

Instead of trying to control their actions, I was coaching someone who has, um, adult children and they have a public, um, profile let’s say. And they were talking about, um, uh, their upbringing, and the mom and my client didn’t like what they had to say and I said, well, you can’t control what she says. So let’s sort of get out of that space and that mindset because it feels so disempowering. Let’s also not go to the place where you did something wrong, right? You were doing the best that you could, just like we all are. They’re just skills that we’re learning and let’s focus now on who you want to be and how you want to show up. And it completely shifted the way that she was thinking about approaching her daughter because she was doing it from a place of this is who I want to be, not from a place of should I do X, Y, and Z to try to control my daughter.

Another example that I coach on often is around school-aged kids and their friends. So if you have kids who are in school who have friends and you don’t like the friends actions and the friends’ behavior, the best next question is not how do I fix this? How do I change the friends? Do I need to talk to their parents? It’s not that those are inherently bad questions, they’re just the bad first question, what you want to do is first focus on who you’re being. Am I bringing support and love and connection and understanding and strength first and foremost to my child? And am I respecting them and talking with them and supporting them to help them build the skill of navigating challenging relationships? Or am I trying to make sure that they never have relationship problems that the kids they’re friends with change their behaviors, that they never act like this again and on and on and on, right?

It’s immediately goes into a spiral. Very disempowering because we’re focused on what we can’t control. I was coaching someone, gosh, just the other day about a house in their neighborhood that has a lot of garbage and mess and cars and um, all that good stuff out front. And I loved this example because this is something that she genuinely cared about. And so she didn’t want to not care and yet as much as she had requested the neighbor was not complying, not cooperating with her requests to clean up the yard and clean up the house. Of course, the neighbor has agency to do what the neighbor wants to do, but then what does that mean for you? So I’m not sure if this client was in a neighborhood with an HOA or in um, a neighborhood where there are some rules or anything like that or not, but I will say that showing up, focusing on what you can control doesn’t mean that you do nothing.

It just means that you do the thing you want to do because that’s the kind of person you wanna be. I wanna be the kind of neighbor that cares about her neighborhood and is going to make my best efforts to take proper care of it. And that’s where my responsibility ends. I can’t control my neighbor’s home. Do you see that difference there? I think that focusing on what you can control is one of the most freeing tools and practices that I can teach you. And there are endless examples that I could go through. Um, I’m sure you’re thinking of some in your own life and I would love to coach you on them. Come join me at the next Ask Natalie Anything. All the details are over at momonpurpose.com/asknatalieanything you get to experience coaching, a little taste of it, try it out, see if it really works for you. And I will apply this tool to whatever challenge you are facing to help you move through it in the most empowered way. Alright, my friend, I will talk with you next week. Take care.

If you loved this podcast, I invite you to check out Grow You my mindfulness community for moms where we do the inner work together. Head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.