Locus of Control: Who’s Running your Life?
No matter where we are in life, what we want, who we are, there’s some factors which will always remain unchangeable. We all face our struggles, our doubts, our fears, and have our failures and setbacks. Even those who we may perceive as indestructible and untouched by such emotions or circumstances, whether it’s athletes, a celebrity, or modern day innovators like Elon Musk, we all deal with these very human parts of life and experience. The difference mostly, is in how we perceive our own failures and challenges, and also how we view ourselves.
If you were to stop reading right now to pause and reflect on yourself, how would you feel in the following areas;
- How driven do you feel when it comes to pursuing goals and what’s important to you in your life?
- How focused and clear do you feel in terms of what you want in your life, and in what you want to work towards and build?
- When you think of your ideal life, how near or far are you from it, and do you think that you are putting in the equivalent work and effort to make it your reality?
- Do you feel that you are in control of your life, or do you feel that you are a victim of circumstances and that outside influences hold more of an effect towards the outcome and quality of your life?
These are important questions to ask yourself and go back to every so often, no matter where you are in life. Because if we are honest with ourselves when answering these questions, it helps us to become much more clear on the areas we may need to focus on, where we may need to balance out, and it can also help us to see errors in our own thinking, judgment, and perceptions in regards to not only our beliefs about ourselves and our own abilities, but also in how much we may place on the world outside of us.
You may have heard of the term Locus of Control, if not, no worries, as I’m going to go into it a little bit as it has a lot to do with the ways we go through and experience life!
I first learned about theLocus of Control when I was in school for psychology. And to put it simply, the Locus of Control is all about what we believe about ourselves and our place in the world. It’s broken into two categories; Internal and External Locus of Control.
When we have an Internal Locus of Control, we believe that we are in control of our lives, and when it comes to our successes and failures, that it is up to us; we are the ones in charge, and the focus is within ourselves and our own abilities to handle whatever life throws at us. When we have an External Locus of Control, we will believe the opposite, we believe that forces outside of us have more control on our lives; whether we attribute this to luck (good or bad), fate, or simply that circumstances and events hold more power and force on our lives than we do.
This concept of where we focus our sense of control has longstanding implications towards the type of life we live. Because once you start breaking it down, we’re looking at many important factors and traits which have to do with not only our own happiness and success in life, but also the quality.
Much of how we come to think and interact with the world and with ourselves is formed early in childhood. The dynamics of what we experience in our homes and the patterns, habits, and beliefs we form through those earliest and most important relationships with family, are the foundation for much of our later development in life, and whether we are consciously aware of it or not, many of the mindsets, beliefs, and perceptions we have in life stem from our childhood experiences; good and bad.
Going back to Locus of Control, we can think of how the foundation of this can be formed in our childhood such as this; you have a parent who any time something goes wrong, no matter how big or small, they say things such as, “nothing ever goes my way”, “this wouldn’t have happened if…”, “that’s just how it goes”, statements like this tend to put the sense of control on what is outside of us, and when we are young we absorb everything.
The beliefs, attitudes, mindsets of our parents and those closest to us become easily internalizedand eventually the unconscious voice in our minds, which repeats these beliefs to us as if they are our own. Are they? Well, in a sense yes, because it’s what we come to believe about ourselves, our abilities, and the world around us, but at the same time, no, because it is simply learned behavior and patterns of thinking.
One of my favorite aspects of psychology was in learning just how adaptable and amazing our brains are. Even if you have lived almost all of your life believing one thing, if you so decide, you can change it, just like that. We can teach ourselves and learn or unlearn many things, it is always up to us on what we decide we want to hold on to, and what we want to let go of.
Our brain is made up of what is called neural networks, and what happens when we form these throughout our lives, is that they become sort of like giant intertwined maps in our mind. Whenever we learn anything, that becomes formed in our brain through these networks, and so eventually it all becomes effortless, as our brain just sends the signal, our neurons fire off, and there we are going from walking to running, or playing the piano, or even strengthening our own behaviors.
Everything we do, see, and experience in life becomes imprinted within these neural networks. If we experience something which strongly correlates with our already formed thoughts and beliefs, then it will be easier for this experience to strengthen that connection in our brain, therefore strongly reinforcing these beliefs in our mind.
I’m sure it’s easy to see how this can be both a good and bad thing, depending on the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences which we hold. For example, let’s say that you are someone who has an external locus of control. You were raised in a home where when anything went wrong, it was usually blamed on outside forces, perhaps even you.
Imagine this scenario, your mom accidentally ran a red light to then be quickly pulled over by a cop. After this incident is over, she scolds you and says that if you had been behaving in the back seat with your little sister, then she wouldn’t have had to turn her head away from the road and get the ticket she just received. She then continues to say that the cop was a jerk because the light had just turned red, she barely ran it, and if he had been more understanding, she wouldn’t have to now waste an entire day in court for a traffic violation.
Let’s go further and say you are now a young adult. You’re working an ok job somewhere but your boss is always blaming his failing business on the employees, and at times he even comes down on you. You keep going through life experiencing these similar patterns. An authoritative figure who is dismissing their own role within their failures and mistakes, and who at the same time shifts the blame to forces outside of themselves, including you.
If we look at these couple of experiences and what it would look like in our brain it would be something like this; in that early experience with the mom, we are seeing and internalizing how that incident wasn’t mom’s fault, she said so herself, it was because of the cop and because of your misbehavior. Your brain remembersthis experience and it starts to make a little map of this developmental momentfor you, where you learned that when things like this happen, it’s not necessarily your fault, in fact, there is definitely someone else to blame.
You also come to believe because of this, that there isn’t much that you can do when it comes to these types of circumstances, they happen and it’s because of some jerk like that cop or your boss, and clearly if you had any control in these situations, they wouldn’t have ever happened or played out like this. You go through your life now feeling like things just happen to you, and that’s just the way it is. Your self-esteem also takes a bit of a hit in both of these situations as you become the one blamed, so you are now internalizing a sense of helplessness and guilt as you have become the problem and/or reason for these negative circumstances.
The more we experience something of the same, the more it will become ingrained within us. Our Locus of Control isn’t just a belief in our own abilities, it is also our self-esteem, our mindsets, our resiliency, our accountability, and our determination on how we go through life.
When we have a strong, internalized locus of control, we feel in charge of our life. Through the good and the bad, whether we fail hard at something or not, those with the internal focus will tend to think in ways such as, “Oh, well I didn’t think of this before, but now I know” “If I had done this instead of that” “I messed up here, but I can change this or learn now”. There is a strong sense of accountability, responsibility, conscientiousness, and strength in knowing that they can handle any problems life gives them and even in unexpected events, how we go about thinking and approaching them is ultimately what decides the outcome and impact on us.
Those with externalized focuses tend to exhibit the opposite of these traits, there is usually neuroticism, anxiety, lower self-esteem, and issues within taking responsibility and accountability for one’s own failures. I think even behaviors such as perfectionism and procrastination could fall into this area, because there is usually such an extreme fear of failure here, that it becomes easier to either start and never finish, never start, or if it fails, place the blame elsewhere.
Overall, this is a very important aspect to look at and consider in our own lives. It’s easy to overlook because mostly it is very unconscious, it’s already there, mapped in our mind, and so we just go through our days running the script on these behaviors and beliefs. That is what is easiest to do, because it’s already learned. But, learning how to stop, think and reflect on our own behaviors, attitudes and beliefs, is I think one of the most underrated and under utilized types of skills that we can form. Honestly, I think it is essential.
While we may do this to a certain extent in parts of our lives, when it comes to self-development, our own growth, and learning/unlearning behaviors and mindsets in our own life, I feel it is often overlooked and undervalued. But when it comes to our lives, shouldn’t we want the very best? Shouldn’t we strive and push and even demand of ourselves to become better, stronger, healthier, and balanced beings?
