To take charge of your life, focus on controlling what you can.

As a practical matter, there’s not much you can control. So, you might as well control what you can.

You cannot control:

• How other people treat you
• How other people respond to you
• What other people say
• The weather
• Company policies (for many people)
• Laws (again, for most people)
• etc.

You can control your own words, actions, reactions, and interactions.

That’s it.

When I discuss this idea in training, I often say that of the 6+ billion people on the planet I can only control one of them. And he doesn’t always cooperate with me.

Still, controlling myself is all I’ve got.

For example, I can’t control whether or not people read this blog. I can control how often I post.

I can’t control if people treat me with respect. I can control if I treat them with respect.

And, the list goes on in like manner.

The point is this:

By focusing on what I can control, I become less concerned with what I cannot control.

With this as my focus, I can take charge of my life. You can choose to do the same.

As I reflected on what he had to say and I considered some of the questions I receive in workshops, seminars, teleseminars, and coaching calls, I realized that part of what I hope to accomplish with my work is to help people get free of thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors that trap them in bad situations — bad work relationships, bad personal relationships, bad partnerships, etc.

So, I’m starting a series of articles targeted at specific things you can do to take charge of your life. I haven’t mapped out a detailed plan at this point. The series might be 6 articles or 16. I don’t know right now. I’m just going to write them and keep adding to the series until it is finished.

The general principles that come to mind as I start are:

• Control what you can
• Influence who you can
• Forget about the things and people you can neither control nor influence
• Stay focused on what you can do rather than what you can’t do
• Take responsibility for your situation.

I might think of some others as the series progresses. I would certainly be open to input on what to include on this list. Please let me know if you see a core, guiding principle for taking charge of your life that I missed.

The general principles are sort of like the airplane control panel in the picture above. They give you a way of looking at and evaluating your life to see what you either need or want to change. I’ll be exploring each of them individually and some related ideas in future articles. I hope you’ll stop by again and check the series out as it unfolds.

In a previous post on exercising your power of choice to get conflicts under control, I mentioned some specific actions to consider using to de-escalate conflicts.

In this post, I’m expanding on three of the actions with some additional thoughts on how to put them to work in your conflict resolution repertoire.

Here are three things you can do in virtually any conflict situation to improve the outcome.

1. Apologize

I seldom see conflict situations where all of the miscommunication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation of intentions rests entirely on one person. You might not be totally at fault for the challenge that led to the conflict. Odds are, there is something you contributed to the early stages that helped it to escalate. Whatever that behavior, word choice or tone was, apologize for it.

Don’t apologize for how the other person feels or how they interpreted your actions. You can apologize for the action itself.

Apology is a powerful way to de-escalate conflict. When you apologize, remember that apologizing for your contribution does not mean that you have to take all of the blame. Just own your contribution.

2.  Forgive

Just as you should apologize for your contribution, be ready to accept their apology or ownership of responsibility. Resist the urge to take advantage of their show of vulnerability. Just forgive graciously.

In practice, you don’t even have to wait for an apology to forgive. You can forgive simply because you chose to do so. (And you can do it without holding it over the other person. Remember the gracious part.)

3.  Listen

As a general rule, people feel less angry or frustrated when they feel understood. When you listen without interrupting, correcting, or debating, you can help the other person feel understood. When you help them feel understood, you improve the odds of de-escalating the conflict.

I don’t propose that these actions are necessarily easy to do when emotions are high and the conflict is escalating. While they might not be easy to do, they are possible to do. And they are powerful steps you can consciously apply to help conflicts move towards resolution.

Earlier this week, I was in Chicago leading a Bud to Boss Workshop. During the workshop, I told a story I often tell about a situation in my life where, as a leader of a team, I was confronted with large scale changes that impacted me in ways that I could not change or control.

Without going into all the details here, the main point of the story came from a decision I made and I encouraged the other members of my team to make. The decision was to do a “cost-benefit analysis” of our new situation.

Did it offer us more positive or more negative?

If it was more positive, we needed to go forward without complaining about the negative because we had chosen to accept it into our lives for the moment.

If it was more negative, we needed to develop a plan to leave the situation. And, having made the decision to leave, we needed to quit complaining because we were taking action to fix our frustration.

In my case, I chose to stay. I decided to fix what I could. Attempt to exert positive influence on those things that I couldn’t directly change. And to forget about the rest.

Another person asked for my help in finding another job. I did that, and he was happy.

After telling the story, one of the workshop participants shared a variation of the thought that she had read elsewhere. If I knew the original source, I would give credit. Since I don’t, I will simply acknowledge that this terminology didn’t come from me even though I really like the simplicity of it.

Here’s the thought.

When confronted with a frustrating situation (job change, buy-out, merger, etc.), do your “cost-benefit analysis” and choose one of these options:

Take It

Accept the change with all of its good and bad components, and realize that it is your choice to stay.

Leave It

If the negative outweighs the positive for you, get out. Life is too short to stay (for very long) in a situation you hate.

Change It

Take action to fix the things that you can fix or change. Do everything in your power to make the situation better while recognizing the difference between those things that you can control, the people that you can influence, and everything else that you can neither control nor influence.

After you make your choice, quit complaining about it.

My experience with this approach has taught me this: I still might not like parts of the environment, but the choice to take responsibility for being there rather than blaming others for my situation greatly reduces the daily stress and frustration I might feel from being in the environment.

In this time of Olympic competition, I wonder about these sorts of questions.

Evan Lysacek beats Yevgeny Plushenko by playing the scoring system to its fullest, and he wins. Then Plushenko plays the victim. In my opinion, he lost – end of story.

Maybe Plushenko is more daring. Maybe he is the better physical skater. Maybe the scoring system should reward the quad more highly than it does. Maybe the system should be changed to better reward risk and daring.

These issues are far beyond my knowledge of skating. I don’t know how to address the systemic issues. I do know that Lysacek understood the rules of the game he was playing better than Plushenko. Lysacek applied the rules to his program, and he was the victor.

Now Plushenko plays the victim and cries foul. Well, he’s a poor sport as far as I’m concerned. Plushenko blames, criticizes, and ridicules Lysacek. Is it Lysacek’s fault that Plushenko didn’t know how to play the game? I don’t think so.

It’s not Lysacek’s fault that Plushenko didn’t plan his program to take full advantage of his athletic ability to gain as many points as possible. The fault is Plushenko’s.

What, you might ask, has any of this got to do with the topic of this blog?

The answer: it’s about personal responsibility.

When we blame our circumstances or outside factors for our behaviors, we abdicate responsibility for our actions. We give away the only control we really have – the control over our words and actions.

Earlier today, I read a post by my friend and colleague Kevin Eikenberry titled: Who Is Responsible, Really? In his post, he calls it a rant, he makes an argument for why we need to take personal responsibility for our actions. I could not agree more.

Do outside events affect us and drive our behaviors to a certain extent? Of course they do.

Do other people’s behaviors affect us and our emotions? Of course they do.

Do we often overlook the influence of environmental factors when evaluating the behaviors of others (Fundamental Attribution Error)? Absolutely we do.

None of this takes away from the point of this post: If we want to win, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. If we want to be great communicators, leaders, parents, spouses, friends, family members, and co-workers; we have to take responsibility for ourselves.

Playing the victim, blaming others, and looking for others to fix our situation are futile efforts. As I heard in the Navy, you need to “man up” if you want to win.

Just for comparison, take a look at the definitions of victim and victor:

vic·tim (n.)¹

1. One who is harmed or killed by another: a victim of a mugging.
2. A living creature slain and offered as a sacrifice during a religious rite.
3. One who is harmed by or made to suffer from an act, circumstance, agency, or condition: victims of war.
4. A person who suffers injury, loss, or death as a result of a voluntary undertaking: You are a victim of your own scheming.
5. A person who is tricked, swindled, or taken advantage of: the victim of a cruel hoax.

vic·tor (n.)²

One who defeats an adversary; the winner in a fight, battle, contest, or struggle.

External events can happen outside my control. Other people may treat me in ways that I cannot control. Economic turmoil and business conditions are usually beyond my control. Winning or losing a particular event, situation, or circumstance might be beyond my control.

Thinking like a victor or a victim is in my control. Victors defeat adversaries. Victims have no control. In the battle to become a better parent, leader, spouse, and co-worker; the battle is with myself. The battle is to overcome my own self-limiting thoughts and emotional responses.

There is no Fundamental Attribution Error when I evaluate myself. There is either the honesty to confront my failures and to learn from them or the dishonesty of blaming others when I didn’t control myself.

Plushenko didn’t learn the rules of the game well enough. He did what he wanted to do rather than what would bring him victory. Lysacek played the game based on the rules as they were given to him.

In working with people, we can either try to change human nature, or we can learn to work with it. We can say that people shouldn’t behave the way they do, or we can learn to understand the way they do.

I cannot control how other people behave. I cannot control many circumstances and events. I can control how I respond to them.

In working with people, you can take the Plushenko approach (this is how it should be) or the Lysacek approach (this is how it is). Plushenko lost. Lysacek won.

In the battle to make yourself a better person, you can be either a victim or a victor. You can’t be both. The choice is yours.