But what do you do when you’re accountable for the result and you can’t control the process? How do you shift your attention then? Do you need to? Can you?
A sales team leader asked me this at a Mindset Gym workshop I did yesterday, where we learned some cognitive skills to deal with life's challenges better.
“YOU have to hit the numbers. But the work that drives those numbers isn’t done by you.”
That’s a tough one in life.
You want to raise a child well but you can’t control what the child does.
You want your business to grow but you can’t control the market, the customer, or even your team.
You’re responsible. But not in control.
So what do you do then?
You shift your attention to the only place where your power lives:
your ability to change your attitudes, your effort, your actions.
If I can’t control the outcome directly, I upgrade the inputs I can influence.
You learn how to motivate better.
How to teach more clearly.
How to delegate with clear expectations.
How to model the behavior you want to see.
You can get better at reading the market.
Better at listening to customers.
Better at building systems that make the right action easier for others.
Instead of burning energy being frustrated that people, markets, and children don’t follow your plan.
Frustration feels justified.
Focus on doing better is more useful.
I’ve helped many clients lose weight after years of struggle. One of the biggest shifts we accomplished wasn’t discipline. It was attention - what they stopped focusing on and what they started working on instead.
There’s no point getting angry at the scale.
No point getting angry at yourself for not following “the perfect plan.”
A better question is:
What can I learn?
What can I adjust?
How can I redesign my systems so next week works better than this one for the person I am and the life I have?
When you can’t control the entire process, you work on improving what you can, while letting go of the rest.
That’s harder work.
It demands skill building, reflection, humility, acceptance of the imperfect self and the imperfect world.
And it’s exactly what accelerates your growth🌱
Shifting your focus to what you control doesn’t reduce responsibility.
It increases it.
Because now the question becomes:
If you can’t change them, how will you change what you do?
Over to you, dear reader,
Where are you still spinning your wheels, frustrated at outcomes and people, when you could be upgrading the actions and systems that can shape them (and you)?
