Control, like any quality in a person, can either help you live or hinder and complicate your existence, if it runs your life instead of you managing it.
Control in balance, or healthy control, is like a bird that controls its wings and direction in order to fly. And at the same time, it glides relaxed, feeling freedom, lightness, and the joy of flight.
In this article, we’ll talk about this quality from several angles, look at different ways of interacting with it, and I’ll explain what to do about it.
When Control is Absent
When I start talking about the absence of control, a metaphor immediately comes to mind: a leaf in the wind. It flies wherever the wind takes it; it doesn’t know what it wants right now, it simply submits to the power of the wind.
Cons of lacking control:
- Everyone around you knows better than you what you should do and how to live. You just go along with it.
- You can’t stand up for yourself or express your opinion.
- You don’t hear yourself from within and aren’t aware of your own desires.
Pros of lacking control:
- Trust in the “flow” that carries you. This could be your own flow or someone else’s will, but the ability to surrender to it is certainly important.
- Development of flexibility and fluidity.
How to Learn Healthy Control
The goal of this developmental path is to find your masculinity, strength within. To realize that you have the power to control a huge range of situations.
Your life will become much more predictable when you understand what it is you truly desire and trust “your” flow.
This also includes the victim state, living in difficult conditions: with a husband who beats you or drinks… Because to realize your influence on the situation, you need faith in yourself and in your ability to cope.
Any addiction to people, things, or work also falls into this category. After all, you are giving something or someone the ability to control your life.
Take that ability back for yourself; it is yours by right. Exchange weakness, obedience, and pliability for the strength that sleeps inside you but is manifesting and making itself known.
Remember moments when you stood up for yourself in the most difficult situations. An avalanche would rise up from somewhere inside, and you would protect yourself or your children.
Use it, direct it towards controlling your life. This will help you find your flow, your purpose, your calling, your path. Step onto it and fly, but at the same time be perfectly clear about where and why you are heading.
See also: How to Get Out of the Victim State
When Life is Under the Control of Control
The tautology is not accidental, because this is that very feeling when you control both yourself and everything around you, and which is constantly contradicted by various events.
You control your spouse, but he (she) doesn’t obey. What do you do after that? Or you firmly decided to speak at the meeting, prepared, but got sick.
Do you get the feeling at that moment that everything is against you? And that you just need to control even more tightly and calculate situations from all sides?
You can’t live without control; it has subjugated and is suffocating you.
Read also: How to Find Peace Amidst Everyday Worries
Pros of control:
- Responsibility for your life is in your hands.
- You’re a great strategist, you can build a corporation.
- You often get exactly the results you expect.
- Excellent willpower.
Cons of control:
- You control not only yourself but the whole world. You forget about other people’s freedom of choice, about acceptance.
- You have too many variables and it seems impossible to control everything — and you’re very afraid of that.
- Lack of trust in the world, in the Universe.
- Constant disappointments in people, stress.
- A feeling of loneliness and omnipotence.
- Your true feelings remain unexpressed.
How to loosen your grip on control
Control is like glue on your hands. You’re just sorting through papers, and each one sticks to you.
You do a million things, control every little detail, and carry the responsibility for everyone on your shoulders. Everything sticks to you, even things that aren’t yours, just things that flew by and brushed against you.
And you step up as the most responsible person.
This case is the complete opposite of the previous one. You have an enormous amount of strength, you know what you want and how things should be, literally for everyone around you.
But you can’t control the weather, nature, or your loved ones.
By controlling yourself your whole life, you are afraid to show your true self. You’re afraid to touch the pain or horror that lives inside.
But when you start to feel, to sense your body, to accept your weaknesses, you will get to know your true self and unlock the huge potential you were afraid to show.
It will become easier for you to understand the people around you just as they are.
You will keep only the responsibility for yourself (and partially for your children) and feel freedom, take a calm breath, and realize that the fate of the world is not under your vigilant control.
Yes, you can help others, but not through lectures and your “right” opinion, but through support, love, and light. And you will understand that this is true wisdom.
To let go and trust requires enormous inner strength and an understanding that the world around you is beautiful.
That the Universe is doing everything possible to help you realize that huge potential you sometimes feel.
And everything happens at the right moment!
Replace control with empowerment: Empowering other people as a way to serve and to find your own strength.
The balance of control and trust
There are no good or bad qualities; each one is good in its own situation and intensity.
Control is an integral part of life, because the most important person (that is, you yourself) needs to be controlled. But to do it with love, helping and creating, not suffocating.
When you are in balance with control:
- You know yourself and express your essence,
- You know what you want,
- You achieve your goals,
- You trust the world and feel free.
When you need to do something step by step, you handle it easily and achieve success. You run a company, gather friends for a celebration, or drive a car.
And when you need to wait or let go of a desire so it can manifest, you trust that the outcome will be the best for you and for those around you.
For example, finding an assistant: you create and post announcements and then let go. The right person will respond.
You are like a creator who builds their own life and helps others, not like a harsh teacher with a rod, nor like a miserable, weak-willed ghost.
Control is very important in the social world, but it should help you live, not hinder you.
You can learn to manage it yourself, because it is a part of each of you, like an arm or a leg. Explore, accept, and love everything in yourself that makes you who you are.
Download the booklet “How to Learn to Trust Yourself” and use the recommendations that will help you stop tormenting yourself with doubts and learn to understand your intuition.