21. The High-Achiever’s Guide To Letting Go of Control
Are you a control enthusiast? If you’re tuning in, chances are you're a high-flying achiever with your sights set on the top. But let's be real: that drive for excellence can sometimes turn into an iron grip. Maybe you’ve realized your expectations are a little... intense. And perhaps you’ve caught yourself trying to mold everyone around you into your mini-me. Sound familiar?
Maybe you recognize that your expectations tend to be unreasonable, unforgiving, or even damaging. Perhaps you often wish the people around you would change, or you find yourself going crazy trying to get them to strive for the same level of excellence you expect. These are just a couple of ways you might be unwittingly trying to exert control where you have none, and you already know that it doesn’t feel great… nor does it produce the outcome you want.
Join us this week to learn why high achievers crave control so much, and what happens when you try to control the uncontrollable. We break down the differences between internal and external control, how the desire to control can manifest, and most importantly, the freedom that comes from letting go.
Join us for our How to Stress Less and Have More Time masterclass, happening on Monday, July 29th 2024 at 11am Mountain Time. Click here to register!
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why we constantly and unwittingly seek control.
How fear drives our controlling behaviors.
The different ways a desire for control can manifest.
What happens when you look to control things that are outside of your control.
How attempting to control other people fuels your unhappiness.
The differences between external and internal control.
What manuals are, and the problem with expecting others to operate by yours.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Kelle: Are your high expectations creating unintended barriers for your team, your family, your people, maybe even yourself?
Nina: Yeah, well, they're a key driver of your success. Are your expectations a tad unreasonable, unforgiving, maybe even damaging?
Kelle: Are you unwittingly trying to control something you can't control with your opinions and thoughts about the way things should run, should work, exist, and be?
Nina: Join us as we explore the balance between striving for excellence, not perfection, and fostering a healthy and productive environment at work, at home, and beyond.
Kelle: Keep listening, because understanding this balance could be the key to unlocking your choices and potential as a leader.
Nina: And simply as a calm and balanced human. An ambitious-ish one at that.
Kelle: Okay, on that note, let's get going. This is Ambitious-ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I'm Kelle.
Nina: And I'm Nina. Before we get started today, we wanted to let you know about a masterclass we're hosting on Monday, July 29th at 11 a.m. mountain time, and it's all about how to do stress better and have more time.
Kelle: Yeah, this is one of our most popular talks. We get requests for this all the time. In this 45-minute masterclass, we'll show you the two main reasons why no matter how much you've accomplished you still feel stressed and anxious.
Nina: Yeah, what causes you to feel like you need to continue to prove yourself, why you're afraid to fail, and why you second-guess yourself.
Kelle: You'll learn three simple steps you can implement today to rewire your brain so that you can calm down, feel better, and get more done in less time so that you can show up more empowered and actually enjoy the life you worked so hard to create.
Nina: And we'll offer free coaching if you join us live. Of course, there's a replay available, but try to join us live. We love these masterclasses. We love getting to interact and coach with you all, so think about joining us.
Kelle: All right. Again, it's Monday, July 29th at 11 a.m. Mountain Time. We'll put a link in the show notes to register.
Nina: Okay, so fun. Please join us. Again, Monday, July 29th, 11 a.m. Mountain time. That's 2024 in case you're not joining us live. So back to today's episode. Today, we're talking about one of the most common topics we coach clients on. This is probably in the top three, wanting to control or change other people.
Kelle: Yes, the biggest impact you can have on your happiness, you have to stop trying to control other people to really manage your expectations of them, and your need to have them change, especially when they don't want to.
Nina: Yeah, you'll never be happy if you expect other people to change so that you feel better.
Kelle: That's the truth. Isn't it? You want them to change so that you can feel better, right?
Nina: We're here to tell you trying to control other people is completely out of your control. We're just gonna say it and we're guessing you don't really like the sound of that, right? But wait, don't bail on us yet.
Kelle: Yeah, thinking you can change, fix, or control another human is a cognitive distortion, an error in your thinking. It's a trick your brain's playing on you because you feel like control means safety. Our brains freaking love safety.
Nina: That's it. Let's underline that. Why do we do this constantly and maybe unwittingly seek control? Why do we want to control? It's because of our brain. It's always because of our brain.
Kelle: So any self-proclaimed control enthusiasts out there, we see you. Give yourselves a break. We all seek safety in our own special ways. Control comes in a lot of different forms.
Nina: Yeah. Perfectionism, denial, staying quote unquote busy, overworking, overperforming, under eating, even yelling.
Kelle: On the other side of control is just a feeling. A feeling we're trying to avoid, a painful feeling because our brains seek comfort, safety and pleasure, right? And uncomfortable emotions like disappointment, loneliness, rejection, failure, uncertainty, sadness, and even trust and acceptance are coded as unsafe by our big, beautiful human brains. They're too risky, trust especially for some of us. These emotions might require too much effort or cause us to feel too much pain.
Nina: Yeah, control means safety and certainty. Our brains love this. When the brain has the perception it's in control, it feels safe and safe means survival, which is the main function of the brain.
Kelle: But in the modern world, today's world, this primitive part of the brain unmanaged, it creates big problems.
Nina: Yeah, this shows up in our perfectionist tendencies, right? We talked about in episode 16, or when we withdraw or yell, these survival mechanisms from our youth turn into, you know, character defects or what we might call flaws later in life when we no longer need them to survive.
Kelle: Mm-hmm. We try to control things that are out of our control, like our kids, outcomes, colleagues, spouses, other people's opinions, their narratives, their emotions, our schools, the government leadership, should I go on?
Nina: I just went for a walk with a friend and she has major issues with her brother right now. We can't control our siblings either. Anyone's dysfunctional behavior, we can't control it. It's all in the name of whatever we're doing, our underlying good motivation, right? It all sounds lovely to us."
Kelle: Because we think it'll make us feel safe, make us feel better, and safety, it's survival.
Nina: All of these things fall outside of your control. And when we tell ourselves otherwise, we need to fix, control, or change them, this way of thinking is totally disempowering. You feel confused and everything becomes unmanageable.
Kelle: Right, we actually fall out of control.
Nina: It feels miserable. I totally get this. I used to focus on so many things that were out of my control, and I'm still working on this now.
Kelle: Listen, we all are. We can suggest, offer, collaborate, influence, guide, and teach other people, but we cannot control the other people.
Nina: And that is scary. Fear drives our controlling behaviors. And when our actions are fear-based, they aren't productive or useful. We disempower ourselves by letting this primitive part of our brain run the show instead of the executive functioning part. We're basically in survival.
Kelle: We coach on this topic all the time. Oh my god, I think maybe 10 times this week alone. I have so many examples popping into my head right now.
Nina: Yeah, how our amazing clients want to control or change others in an effort to “help other people,” and how that wreaks havoc on their lives. We show them how to stop wanting other people to change.
Kelle: It's not to let other people off the hook. That's not at all what we're saying. But because you're attempting to control other people and constantly wanting them to be different than they are, it's a recipe for your own unhappiness.
Nina: Let's make a distinction between external control and internal control. This is the big difference.
Kelle: Okay, external control, it's a lie. It's when you try to control other people, what they say and do, don't do or don't say, what's going on in society, in our world. External control is out of our control.
Nina: Yeah, on the other hand, internal control is what you have control over. It's who you want to be, how you want to think about something, feel, and what actions you want to take.
Kelle: Yeah, focusing internally on what you can control is empowering because that's where your agency lies.
Nina: So for example, you want your assistant to be more punctual, show up on time, right? If you focus on making them show up on time, you will likely make yourself crazy and miserable because they have agency there. You have agency over your thoughts, feelings and actions, but not theirs.
Kelle: So when we teach this, clients often go to all or nothing thinking. We talked about this in episode 15, how all or nothing thinking is holding you back. If you want to check that out for more background, just in case. So in this example, the client will go, okay, so I'm not supposed to care then? I'm supposed to just do nothing?
Nina: Oh, no, no, that's not what we're saying. But the options are not just, I control you or do nothing at all, right?
Kelle: No, no. We want to care, of course, and yet we do that in integrity with ourselves without trying to control the other people and make ourselves miserable in the process. So we come back to what can I control?
Nina: Yeah, and in that example, the assistant is late and we've made requests, right, of them to show up on time. You might decide to think, okay, so when my assistant doesn't show up on time, who do I want to be? How do I want to be? How do I want to think and feel here?
Kelle: We've talked about this before, but we don't want to take action first, without doing the thought and feeling work, because we end up showing up from that place of control, frustrated and annoyed.
Nina: Like, maybe we'll try to get even, you know, in this circumstance, we'll think, I'm just not going to get her coffee when I go out later, or I'm just going to avoid her for the rest of the day, be passive aggressive or something, right? Instead, shifting internally to who you want to be as a leader and manager, you don't have to be thrilled that they're late, but you don't have to go to the other extreme where we try to control them.
Kelle: Again, we can collaborate with, influence, guide, and teach other people, but we can't control the other people. We let other people be themselves, which is just so lovely of us, right? To be who they are. We accept them and what we might call their flaws. Although all that's up for debate most of the time.
Nina: Yeah, some people call this like surrender, this concept of letting go of control, of letting people be who they are. But that feels kind of airy-fairy or like, sometimes I feel like someone's asking me to throw in the towel, right? Or concede. What I see as surrender is letting go of my ego and leaning into the present moment where I can allow life to happen instead of trying to control it with white knuckles most of the time gripped and clenched, right?
Kelle: We accept reality, the facts, instead of denying them. We let the people around us be who they are. We stop creating all this chaos in our minds and environments when we stop trying to change other people so that we can have a better quality of life.
Nina: But this isn't what we're taught, right, Kelle? Are we gonna talk about manuals?
Kelle: Oh my god let's do it. But essentially, we will walk around with what our coach calls manuals.
Nina: Like instruction manuals that come with your Monopoly game or the new drone my son just got, right?
Kelle: Yeah, these manuals contain a whole list of rules that we want other people to operate according to. Our manuals are our expectations, our secret expectations we have for all the people around us.
Nina: Yeah, we don't share them. We just file them away, these manuals. We just assume people should know, right? And when people don't comply with our secret mental manual for them, we get upset and frustrated. What happens is the way we think the world should be has been upset. And so in order to right what we see as wrong, we try to get other people to behave according to the manual we have for them.
Kelle: We think they should be doing something and they're not. And so we feel frustrated because we think that they should be doing it differently. And then in order to feel better, we want them to be different, so as to fall in line with the rules we have written for them that they may or may not even know about.
Nina: The problem here? People don't like doing that. I would hate it if someone handed me a manual, right? A lot of the time what we want people to do isn't what they want to do.
Kelle: All right, think about this for a sec. We're positive someone in your life has a manual for you, expectations of you, right?
Nina: Yeah. Your expectations are simply not what the other person is doing, regardless of anyone's wants, right? They're acting a certain way, and we want them to act differently, so we end up arguing with reality, which creates so much unnecessary suffering.
Kelle: And resentment. Cue the resentment right here. Expectations and manuals are resentment waiting to happen.
Nina: Yeah, it's so interesting. We think we know what's best for everyone, right? We think we know what's best for them, so it almost seems like it's coming from the right place. We just want them to course correct and do the right thing.
Kelle: Then everything would be great, right?
Nina: The problem? We all have different opinions of what's best or what's right.
Kelle: But even if we all agreed, people don't always get to do what's best or what's right. We all have free will. We all get to do what we actually want. So right and wrong aren't facts. Unlike math, math has right or wrong answers, right? Even though we question that as well. We'll do that in another episode. But the way people work or communicate or get their shit done doesn't have a right or wrong.
Nina: Yes, very unlike math. Math isn't something I'm particularly good at. I have a hard time getting the right answers. What does that say about me? Okay, I digress.
Kelle: Okay. But when things are done the wrong way, we get upset. We basically get upset with ourselves because we're holding this opinion that they should be doing it differently. We have expectations that things should be a certain way.
Nina: Yeah, we're upsetting ourselves with our high expectations, maybe even unreasonable expectations, and trying to control something we can't control. And we get super frustrated and disappointed.
Kelle: Yeah, trying to control other people will send you to frustration land.
Nina: And victim land.
Kelle: Yes, that victim mindset for sure. You see, we start to blame the other person for our frustration, which is a lie, right? This is the one simple truth of our coaching practice, and you hear us talk about it a lot. Your thoughts create your feelings.
Nina: So when you tell yourself they are annoying you or frustrating you, it's actually not true. Your thoughts about them and their work ethic or their follow-through is what's causing you to feel frustration.
Kelle: Yeah, we have a whole episode on blame that you have to check out if you haven't. It's such a good one. It's one of my faves. No one can blame you for their feelings and you can't blame them for yours. It's episode 14. Check it out.
Nina: Blame is really disempowering in a nutshell, in case you don't go back. In a nutshell, it's one of the aspects of what we call emotional childhood. You're in an emotional childhood when you aren't taking responsibility for your feelings. This might look like requiring something to change that's out of your control so you feel better, like other people. Blaming other people for your emotions, and this is basically a victim mentality, right? Or assigning responsibility for your emotions to other people.
Kelle: Yeah, emotional childhood is literally the way your son or daughter in elementary school behaves. We say that lovingly, of course. We have those in our lives. It's a really limiting and disempowering mindset that we typically grow out of when you work with a coach.
Nina: Emotional adulthood, on the other hand, is when we accept reality and take responsibility for our feelings, knowing they are created by our thoughts, our perspective, our lens.
Kelle: So going back to that example, it's not your assistant's lack of follow through or tardiness that's stressing you out or making you feel unsupported. I know you don't exactly believe me when I say that, right, but it's true. Your assistant didn't finish the project on time and you have thoughts about that and it's making you feel stressed out or unsupported.
Nina: And we're not saying your thoughts and feelings aren't valid here at all, we're just saying you're responsible for how you experience the facts, the math of your assistant's work.
Kelle: And what's rad here is that we can create the feeling of being supported or unsupported anytime by changing our thoughts, by thinking a better feeling thought.
Nina: This is all about letting people be who they are and editing your perspective. To change the way you're thinking about a person and circumstance so you feel more empowered and less frustrated instead of trying to control them or change them.
Kelle: Because that's impossible.
Nina: When you can interrupt those default thoughts, the ones that make you feel stressed out, for example, and think on purpose, you can feel so much better.
Kelle: Especially when you're waiting for someone else to change, that's a really shitty way to go through life. Complaining and blaming someone else for your emotions, and listen, we have all done it.
Nina: Let them be them. Accept the reality that they start and finish things differently than you do. Stop complaining and blaming them. This is where you can uncover the choices you have.
Kelle: Yeah, where you can be solution-focused and change the things that are in your control. Your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions. Perhaps set a boundary, leave the job, discuss consequences with that direct report. All kinds of choices.
Nina: Yeah, and this is all called thought work. It can be your superpower high achiever. It's the cure to your resentment rash. Seriously.
Kelle: Yeah, resentment is totally optional when you start to practice emotional adulting. You manage the expectations you have for yourself and everyone around you.
Nina: Because that's a big part of it, right? The expectations you have of yourself are evidenced in the expectations and manuals you have of others. The way you do one thing is the way you do most things, high achievers.
Kelle: And we love that you have big dreams and goals. I mean, you're ambitious-ish, right? And if you've been a listener here for a while, you'll get it when we say sometimes the pain in your life is an opportunity to check in.
Nina: Yeah, what is your contribution here? What might you be contributing? Are the expectations you have of yourself unreasonable? Damaging? Unforgiving? Let's start there.
Kelle: As we do this work of examining our inner world, it's unfair for others to expect us to be perfect and for us to expect others to be perfect.
Nina: In a world full of imperfect people, patience and forgiveness become so important. That's what happens when we drop our manuals and the expectations we have of ourselves and learn to accept it all.
Kelle: All right, let's walk through an example here. The first that comes to mind is from a client we worked with a few years ago, who's a 40-something gastroenterologist, GI doc. She works in a practice with three older male counterparts and felt like she was constantly having the argument that the practice needed to modernize. But her partners were really passive. No one wanted to step up and be confrontational when it came to hiring and firing. They didn't want to be the bad guy. She was frustrated because she felt like a bitch most of the time.
Nina: Yeah, ruminating on how things should be, always looping on why, why, why? Like, why is she the only one willing to take ownership? Her partners set goals, but didn't follow through on them, and they weren't all signed on for what needed to change in the office, and they were having efficiency issues.
Kelle: Yeah, she was the only female in this male-dominated environment, and felt like she had to please everyone around her. She was consistently overworking to prove herself, and was exhausting herself in the process.
Nina: Yeah, she just felt really out of control. She was bringing her work rage home, which turned into mom rage and home rage. She really wasn't proud of how she was showing up for the people that were most important to her.
Kelle: Yeah, she was frustrated that she was always on call, that the older partner's seniority assumed their exemption for nights and weekends. She was young with a young family, and her responsibilities were so much different than theirs.
Nina: Yeah, it was like the only deep breath she could take during the day was when a patient canceled. So she sort of had her fingers crossed that patients would cancel all day.
Kelle: Yeah, I can totally relate to that feeling, like wanting meetings to miraculously cancel so that you can have just a little bit of breathing room.
Nina: Yeah, she felt disrespected and overworked. She felt like she was being taken advantage of.
Kelle: Which we know is optional, right listeners?
Nina: She kept repeating this shouldn't be happening. She had very specific and secret expectations and opinions of how work should look and feel.
Kelle: Yeah, and when we coached her on all the different circumstances she brought to session, we questioned if she was arguing with reality, because everything was happening the way it was happening.
Nina: Instead of wishing her partners were younger, or less male, or even less Yale, more open-minded or more action-oriented, she learned to accept them for who they are.
Kelle: Yeah, to sort of stop letting them surprise her or activate her.
Nina: Yeah, it was more like, that sounds like your boss being your boss, are we right, we'd ask.
Kelle: Instead of expecting them to show up differently to surprise her, right, according to the manual she had written for them, which made her feel disappointed and annoyed, she stopped expecting anything other than more of the same, and she stopped feeling disappointed
Nina: And the disrespect she felt at work, that constant disregard and resentment about being on call, she realized her thoughts about being on call were actually creating the feelings of resentment and disrespect, not her colleagues' actions.
Kelle: Okay, here's some thoughts that she had. No one steps up but me. If I don't do it, no one will. They never raise their hand. I'm the default since I don't have as much experience. I have to put my time in. I have so much to prove.
Nina: Yeah, these stories created that feeling of disrespect and made her feel taken advantage of.
Kelle: And she realized she could stop arguing with how they were running the practice, thinking it was wrong because she was actually the one who was wrong. They could absolutely run the practice the way they were running it because they were. That was the reality.
Nina: Yeah, while the practice wasn't running well, it was running. This was a subjective issue. We all have our own tolerance levels for what other people do or don't do. And she realized, oh, they can run the practice this way because they are. When she stopped arguing with them, this is where she realized she had a lot of choice. When we move into acceptance and stop arguing with reality, resisting it, we find we have a lot of choices.
Kelle: Yeah. She could stay at the job and make peace with the way the practice was run and the way her partners operated in the biz.
Nina: Maybe. Alright.
Kelle: Okay, she could also stay and keep feeling miserable, continue to blame her older male colleagues for all the pain that she was feeling, and keep hoping her patients would cancel on her.
Nina: Kind of victim mentality, right?
Kelle: Yeah. Or the third option, right? She could leave. She could find a new job that was more in alignment with her values and what she wanted out of a work environment. They get to be them, her colleagues, and she could be her. And that's when she realized her choices. She could stop complaining and focus on all the things she couldn’t control.
Nina: Yeah, so when you're wanting someone to be different than they are, so that you can feel more at ease or safe or better, it's an opportunity to check in.
Kelle: Yeah, just asking that question, where am I wanting someone to be different than they are? And why?
Nina: It interrupts you from that knee-jerk, secret-expectation scenario, right? From creating pain for yourself by requiring the people around you to operate according to your manual.
Kelle: Yeah, the other humans. They get to be them, and you get to be you. And you have choices. This is where we stop complaining, which just totally sucks if I'm being honest. Complaining feels shitty. And focusing on things you can't control also feels shitty.
Nina: When we meet people where they are, allow them to be seen and heard. It is such a gift. We check in on the sometimes unreasonable, unforgiving, and damaging expectations we have of ourselves, and by extension, the other people in our lives, so we can feel less pressure and overwhelm and more ease and calm.
Kelle: After all, we are all wounded ducks, right? We're all doing the best we can at any given moment. Even though it feels like that might not be true, it's actual biology. Our cells fire at their highest level in any given moment. So just give this perspective a try.
Nina: Yeah, for this client, back to this example, she realized her unrealistic expectations were actually creating a lot of her disappointment and resentment. We helped her double down on her own standards instead of her high expectations of herself and her colleagues to show up [differently] at work, to see it all through a more neutral lens.
Kelle: Your standards are sort of your non-negotiables, your values. So we help this client get clear on what was most important to her at work, practice self-compassion, which helps us all manage our own unrealistic expectations of ourselves, right? To give ourselves a break and the attention and validation we crave from others, and start to communicate her needs at work from a place of curiosity and collaboration and trust.
Nina: She's still working in the same practice, but taking action and showing up every day from a completely different mindset. This is where we begin.
Kelle: Yeah, instead of burning everything down right away, we check in on what we're trying to control and come back to ourselves first. We can't change the people around us, but we can change how we respond to it all, how we approach it all, how we show up.
Nina: Yeah, let us know what comes up for you here. That was a lot. This concept is not what we're taught. So let us know what comes up. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks all, that's all for today.
Kelle: All right, thanks all, see you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we'll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday. Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity, and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly, free email coaching when you're on our list. You're the first to know about trainings, events, and other free coaching opportunities. Just go to KelleandNina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
Nina: Yeah, well, they're a key driver of your success. Are your expectations a tad unreasonable, unforgiving, maybe even damaging?
Kelle: Are you unwittingly trying to control something you can't control with your opinions and thoughts about the way things should run, should work, exist, and be?
Nina: Join us as we explore the balance between striving for excellence, not perfection, and fostering a healthy and productive environment at work, at home, and beyond.
Kelle: Keep listening, because understanding this balance could be the key to unlocking your choices and potential as a leader.
Nina: And simply as a calm and balanced human. An ambitious-ish one at that.
Kelle: Okay, on that note, let's get going. This is Ambitious-ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I'm Kelle.
Nina: And I'm Nina. Before we get started today, we wanted to let you know about a masterclass we're hosting on Monday, July 29th at 11 a.m. mountain time, and it's all about how to do stress better and have more time.
Kelle: Yeah, this is one of our most popular talks. We get requests for this all the time. In this 45-minute masterclass, we'll show you the two main reasons why no matter how much you've accomplished you still feel stressed and anxious.
Nina: Yeah, what causes you to feel like you need to continue to prove yourself, why you're afraid to fail, and why you second-guess yourself.
Kelle: You'll learn three simple steps you can implement today to rewire your brain so that you can calm down, feel better, and get more done in less time so that you can show up more empowered and actually enjoy the life you worked so hard to create.
Nina: And we'll offer free coaching if you join us live. Of course, there's a replay available, but try to join us live. We love these masterclasses. We love getting to interact and coach with you all, so think about joining us.
Kelle: All right. Again, it's Monday, July 29th at 11 a.m. Mountain Time. We'll put a link in the show notes to register.
Nina: Okay, so fun. Please join us. Again, Monday, July 29th, 11 a.m. Mountain time. That's 2024 in case you're not joining us live. So back to today's episode. Today, we're talking about one of the most common topics we coach clients on. This is probably in the top three, wanting to control or change other people.
Kelle: Yes, the biggest impact you can have on your happiness, you have to stop trying to control other people to really manage your expectations of them, and your need to have them change, especially when they don't want to.
Nina: Yeah, you'll never be happy if you expect other people to change so that you feel better.
Kelle: That's the truth. Isn't it? You want them to change so that you can feel better, right?
Nina: We're here to tell you trying to control other people is completely out of your control. We're just gonna say it and we're guessing you don't really like the sound of that, right? But wait, don't bail on us yet.
Kelle: Yeah, thinking you can change, fix, or control another human is a cognitive distortion, an error in your thinking. It's a trick your brain's playing on you because you feel like control means safety. Our brains freaking love safety.
Nina: That's it. Let's underline that. Why do we do this constantly and maybe unwittingly seek control? Why do we want to control? It's because of our brain. It's always because of our brain.
Kelle: So any self-proclaimed control enthusiasts out there, we see you. Give yourselves a break. We all seek safety in our own special ways. Control comes in a lot of different forms.
Nina: Yeah. Perfectionism, denial, staying quote unquote busy, overworking, overperforming, under eating, even yelling.
Kelle: On the other side of control is just a feeling. A feeling we're trying to avoid, a painful feeling because our brains seek comfort, safety and pleasure, right? And uncomfortable emotions like disappointment, loneliness, rejection, failure, uncertainty, sadness, and even trust and acceptance are coded as unsafe by our big, beautiful human brains. They're too risky, trust especially for some of us. These emotions might require too much effort or cause us to feel too much pain.
Nina: Yeah, control means safety and certainty. Our brains love this. When the brain has the perception it's in control, it feels safe and safe means survival, which is the main function of the brain.
Kelle: But in the modern world, today's world, this primitive part of the brain unmanaged, it creates big problems.
Nina: Yeah, this shows up in our perfectionist tendencies, right? We talked about in episode 16, or when we withdraw or yell, these survival mechanisms from our youth turn into, you know, character defects or what we might call flaws later in life when we no longer need them to survive.
Kelle: Mm-hmm. We try to control things that are out of our control, like our kids, outcomes, colleagues, spouses, other people's opinions, their narratives, their emotions, our schools, the government leadership, should I go on?
Nina: I just went for a walk with a friend and she has major issues with her brother right now. We can't control our siblings either. Anyone's dysfunctional behavior, we can't control it. It's all in the name of whatever we're doing, our underlying good motivation, right? It all sounds lovely to us."
Kelle: Because we think it'll make us feel safe, make us feel better, and safety, it's survival.
Nina: All of these things fall outside of your control. And when we tell ourselves otherwise, we need to fix, control, or change them, this way of thinking is totally disempowering. You feel confused and everything becomes unmanageable.
Kelle: Right, we actually fall out of control.
Nina: It feels miserable. I totally get this. I used to focus on so many things that were out of my control, and I'm still working on this now.
Kelle: Listen, we all are. We can suggest, offer, collaborate, influence, guide, and teach other people, but we cannot control the other people.
Nina: And that is scary. Fear drives our controlling behaviors. And when our actions are fear-based, they aren't productive or useful. We disempower ourselves by letting this primitive part of our brain run the show instead of the executive functioning part. We're basically in survival.
Kelle: We coach on this topic all the time. Oh my god, I think maybe 10 times this week alone. I have so many examples popping into my head right now.
Nina: Yeah, how our amazing clients want to control or change others in an effort to “help other people,” and how that wreaks havoc on their lives. We show them how to stop wanting other people to change.
Kelle: It's not to let other people off the hook. That's not at all what we're saying. But because you're attempting to control other people and constantly wanting them to be different than they are, it's a recipe for your own unhappiness.
Nina: Let's make a distinction between external control and internal control. This is the big difference.
Kelle: Okay, external control, it's a lie. It's when you try to control other people, what they say and do, don't do or don't say, what's going on in society, in our world. External control is out of our control.
Nina: Yeah, on the other hand, internal control is what you have control over. It's who you want to be, how you want to think about something, feel, and what actions you want to take.
Kelle: Yeah, focusing internally on what you can control is empowering because that's where your agency lies.
Nina: So for example, you want your assistant to be more punctual, show up on time, right? If you focus on making them show up on time, you will likely make yourself crazy and miserable because they have agency there. You have agency over your thoughts, feelings and actions, but not theirs.
Kelle: So when we teach this, clients often go to all or nothing thinking. We talked about this in episode 15, how all or nothing thinking is holding you back. If you want to check that out for more background, just in case. So in this example, the client will go, okay, so I'm not supposed to care then? I'm supposed to just do nothing?
Nina: Oh, no, no, that's not what we're saying. But the options are not just, I control you or do nothing at all, right?
Kelle: No, no. We want to care, of course, and yet we do that in integrity with ourselves without trying to control the other people and make ourselves miserable in the process. So we come back to what can I control?
Nina: Yeah, and in that example, the assistant is late and we've made requests, right, of them to show up on time. You might decide to think, okay, so when my assistant doesn't show up on time, who do I want to be? How do I want to be? How do I want to think and feel here?
Kelle: We've talked about this before, but we don't want to take action first, without doing the thought and feeling work, because we end up showing up from that place of control, frustrated and annoyed.
Nina: Like, maybe we'll try to get even, you know, in this circumstance, we'll think, I'm just not going to get her coffee when I go out later, or I'm just going to avoid her for the rest of the day, be passive aggressive or something, right? Instead, shifting internally to who you want to be as a leader and manager, you don't have to be thrilled that they're late, but you don't have to go to the other extreme where we try to control them.
Kelle: Again, we can collaborate with, influence, guide, and teach other people, but we can't control the other people. We let other people be themselves, which is just so lovely of us, right? To be who they are. We accept them and what we might call their flaws. Although all that's up for debate most of the time.
Nina: Yeah, some people call this like surrender, this concept of letting go of control, of letting people be who they are. But that feels kind of airy-fairy or like, sometimes I feel like someone's asking me to throw in the towel, right? Or concede. What I see as surrender is letting go of my ego and leaning into the present moment where I can allow life to happen instead of trying to control it with white knuckles most of the time gripped and clenched, right?
Kelle: We accept reality, the facts, instead of denying them. We let the people around us be who they are. We stop creating all this chaos in our minds and environments when we stop trying to change other people so that we can have a better quality of life.
Nina: But this isn't what we're taught, right, Kelle? Are we gonna talk about manuals?
Kelle: Oh my god let's do it. But essentially, we will walk around with what our coach calls manuals.
Nina: Like instruction manuals that come with your Monopoly game or the new drone my son just got, right?
Kelle: Yeah, these manuals contain a whole list of rules that we want other people to operate according to. Our manuals are our expectations, our secret expectations we have for all the people around us.
Nina: Yeah, we don't share them. We just file them away, these manuals. We just assume people should know, right? And when people don't comply with our secret mental manual for them, we get upset and frustrated. What happens is the way we think the world should be has been upset. And so in order to right what we see as wrong, we try to get other people to behave according to the manual we have for them.
Kelle: We think they should be doing something and they're not. And so we feel frustrated because we think that they should be doing it differently. And then in order to feel better, we want them to be different, so as to fall in line with the rules we have written for them that they may or may not even know about.
Nina: The problem here? People don't like doing that. I would hate it if someone handed me a manual, right? A lot of the time what we want people to do isn't what they want to do.
Kelle: All right, think about this for a sec. We're positive someone in your life has a manual for you, expectations of you, right?
Nina: Yeah. Your expectations are simply not what the other person is doing, regardless of anyone's wants, right? They're acting a certain way, and we want them to act differently, so we end up arguing with reality, which creates so much unnecessary suffering.
Kelle: And resentment. Cue the resentment right here. Expectations and manuals are resentment waiting to happen.
Nina: Yeah, it's so interesting. We think we know what's best for everyone, right? We think we know what's best for them, so it almost seems like it's coming from the right place. We just want them to course correct and do the right thing.
Kelle: Then everything would be great, right?
Nina: The problem? We all have different opinions of what's best or what's right.
Kelle: But even if we all agreed, people don't always get to do what's best or what's right. We all have free will. We all get to do what we actually want. So right and wrong aren't facts. Unlike math, math has right or wrong answers, right? Even though we question that as well. We'll do that in another episode. But the way people work or communicate or get their shit done doesn't have a right or wrong.
Nina: Yes, very unlike math. Math isn't something I'm particularly good at. I have a hard time getting the right answers. What does that say about me? Okay, I digress.
Kelle: Okay. But when things are done the wrong way, we get upset. We basically get upset with ourselves because we're holding this opinion that they should be doing it differently. We have expectations that things should be a certain way.
Nina: Yeah, we're upsetting ourselves with our high expectations, maybe even unreasonable expectations, and trying to control something we can't control. And we get super frustrated and disappointed.
Kelle: Yeah, trying to control other people will send you to frustration land.
Nina: And victim land.
Kelle: Yes, that victim mindset for sure. You see, we start to blame the other person for our frustration, which is a lie, right? This is the one simple truth of our coaching practice, and you hear us talk about it a lot. Your thoughts create your feelings.
Nina: So when you tell yourself they are annoying you or frustrating you, it's actually not true. Your thoughts about them and their work ethic or their follow-through is what's causing you to feel frustration.
Kelle: Yeah, we have a whole episode on blame that you have to check out if you haven't. It's such a good one. It's one of my faves. No one can blame you for their feelings and you can't blame them for yours. It's episode 14. Check it out.
Nina: Blame is really disempowering in a nutshell, in case you don't go back. In a nutshell, it's one of the aspects of what we call emotional childhood. You're in an emotional childhood when you aren't taking responsibility for your feelings. This might look like requiring something to change that's out of your control so you feel better, like other people. Blaming other people for your emotions, and this is basically a victim mentality, right? Or assigning responsibility for your emotions to other people.
Kelle: Yeah, emotional childhood is literally the way your son or daughter in elementary school behaves. We say that lovingly, of course. We have those in our lives. It's a really limiting and disempowering mindset that we typically grow out of when you work with a coach.
Nina: Emotional adulthood, on the other hand, is when we accept reality and take responsibility for our feelings, knowing they are created by our thoughts, our perspective, our lens.
Kelle: So going back to that example, it's not your assistant's lack of follow through or tardiness that's stressing you out or making you feel unsupported. I know you don't exactly believe me when I say that, right, but it's true. Your assistant didn't finish the project on time and you have thoughts about that and it's making you feel stressed out or unsupported.
Nina: And we're not saying your thoughts and feelings aren't valid here at all, we're just saying you're responsible for how you experience the facts, the math of your assistant's work.
Kelle: And what's rad here is that we can create the feeling of being supported or unsupported anytime by changing our thoughts, by thinking a better feeling thought.
Nina: This is all about letting people be who they are and editing your perspective. To change the way you're thinking about a person and circumstance so you feel more empowered and less frustrated instead of trying to control them or change them.
Kelle: Because that's impossible.
Nina: When you can interrupt those default thoughts, the ones that make you feel stressed out, for example, and think on purpose, you can feel so much better.
Kelle: Especially when you're waiting for someone else to change, that's a really shitty way to go through life. Complaining and blaming someone else for your emotions, and listen, we have all done it.
Nina: Let them be them. Accept the reality that they start and finish things differently than you do. Stop complaining and blaming them. This is where you can uncover the choices you have.
Kelle: Yeah, where you can be solution-focused and change the things that are in your control. Your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions. Perhaps set a boundary, leave the job, discuss consequences with that direct report. All kinds of choices.
Nina: Yeah, and this is all called thought work. It can be your superpower high achiever. It's the cure to your resentment rash. Seriously.
Kelle: Yeah, resentment is totally optional when you start to practice emotional adulting. You manage the expectations you have for yourself and everyone around you.
Nina: Because that's a big part of it, right? The expectations you have of yourself are evidenced in the expectations and manuals you have of others. The way you do one thing is the way you do most things, high achievers.
Kelle: And we love that you have big dreams and goals. I mean, you're ambitious-ish, right? And if you've been a listener here for a while, you'll get it when we say sometimes the pain in your life is an opportunity to check in.
Nina: Yeah, what is your contribution here? What might you be contributing? Are the expectations you have of yourself unreasonable? Damaging? Unforgiving? Let's start there.
Kelle: As we do this work of examining our inner world, it's unfair for others to expect us to be perfect and for us to expect others to be perfect.
Nina: In a world full of imperfect people, patience and forgiveness become so important. That's what happens when we drop our manuals and the expectations we have of ourselves and learn to accept it all.
Kelle: All right, let's walk through an example here. The first that comes to mind is from a client we worked with a few years ago, who's a 40-something gastroenterologist, GI doc. She works in a practice with three older male counterparts and felt like she was constantly having the argument that the practice needed to modernize. But her partners were really passive. No one wanted to step up and be confrontational when it came to hiring and firing. They didn't want to be the bad guy. She was frustrated because she felt like a bitch most of the time.
Nina: Yeah, ruminating on how things should be, always looping on why, why, why? Like, why is she the only one willing to take ownership? Her partners set goals, but didn't follow through on them, and they weren't all signed on for what needed to change in the office, and they were having efficiency issues.
Kelle: Yeah, she was the only female in this male-dominated environment, and felt like she had to please everyone around her. She was consistently overworking to prove herself, and was exhausting herself in the process.
Nina: Yeah, she just felt really out of control. She was bringing her work rage home, which turned into mom rage and home rage. She really wasn't proud of how she was showing up for the people that were most important to her.
Kelle: Yeah, she was frustrated that she was always on call, that the older partner's seniority assumed their exemption for nights and weekends. She was young with a young family, and her responsibilities were so much different than theirs.
Nina: Yeah, it was like the only deep breath she could take during the day was when a patient canceled. So she sort of had her fingers crossed that patients would cancel all day.
Kelle: Yeah, I can totally relate to that feeling, like wanting meetings to miraculously cancel so that you can have just a little bit of breathing room.
Nina: Yeah, she felt disrespected and overworked. She felt like she was being taken advantage of.
Kelle: Which we know is optional, right listeners?
Nina: She kept repeating this shouldn't be happening. She had very specific and secret expectations and opinions of how work should look and feel.
Kelle: Yeah, and when we coached her on all the different circumstances she brought to session, we questioned if she was arguing with reality, because everything was happening the way it was happening.
Nina: Instead of wishing her partners were younger, or less male, or even less Yale, more open-minded or more action-oriented, she learned to accept them for who they are.
Kelle: Yeah, to sort of stop letting them surprise her or activate her.
Nina: Yeah, it was more like, that sounds like your boss being your boss, are we right, we'd ask.
Kelle: Instead of expecting them to show up differently to surprise her, right, according to the manual she had written for them, which made her feel disappointed and annoyed, she stopped expecting anything other than more of the same, and she stopped feeling disappointed
Nina: And the disrespect she felt at work, that constant disregard and resentment about being on call, she realized her thoughts about being on call were actually creating the feelings of resentment and disrespect, not her colleagues' actions.
Kelle: Okay, here's some thoughts that she had. No one steps up but me. If I don't do it, no one will. They never raise their hand. I'm the default since I don't have as much experience. I have to put my time in. I have so much to prove.
Nina: Yeah, these stories created that feeling of disrespect and made her feel taken advantage of.
Kelle: And she realized she could stop arguing with how they were running the practice, thinking it was wrong because she was actually the one who was wrong. They could absolutely run the practice the way they were running it because they were. That was the reality.
Nina: Yeah, while the practice wasn't running well, it was running. This was a subjective issue. We all have our own tolerance levels for what other people do or don't do. And she realized, oh, they can run the practice this way because they are. When she stopped arguing with them, this is where she realized she had a lot of choice. When we move into acceptance and stop arguing with reality, resisting it, we find we have a lot of choices.
Kelle: Yeah. She could stay at the job and make peace with the way the practice was run and the way her partners operated in the biz.
Nina: Maybe. Alright.
Kelle: Okay, she could also stay and keep feeling miserable, continue to blame her older male colleagues for all the pain that she was feeling, and keep hoping her patients would cancel on her.
Nina: Kind of victim mentality, right?
Kelle: Yeah. Or the third option, right? She could leave. She could find a new job that was more in alignment with her values and what she wanted out of a work environment. They get to be them, her colleagues, and she could be her. And that's when she realized her choices. She could stop complaining and focus on all the things she couldn’t control.
Nina: Yeah, so when you're wanting someone to be different than they are, so that you can feel more at ease or safe or better, it's an opportunity to check in.
Kelle: Yeah, just asking that question, where am I wanting someone to be different than they are? And why?
Nina: It interrupts you from that knee-jerk, secret-expectation scenario, right? From creating pain for yourself by requiring the people around you to operate according to your manual.
Kelle: Yeah, the other humans. They get to be them, and you get to be you. And you have choices. This is where we stop complaining, which just totally sucks if I'm being honest. Complaining feels shitty. And focusing on things you can't control also feels shitty.
Nina: When we meet people where they are, allow them to be seen and heard. It is such a gift. We check in on the sometimes unreasonable, unforgiving, and damaging expectations we have of ourselves, and by extension, the other people in our lives, so we can feel less pressure and overwhelm and more ease and calm.
Kelle: After all, we are all wounded ducks, right? We're all doing the best we can at any given moment. Even though it feels like that might not be true, it's actual biology. Our cells fire at their highest level in any given moment. So just give this perspective a try.
Nina: Yeah, for this client, back to this example, she realized her unrealistic expectations were actually creating a lot of her disappointment and resentment. We helped her double down on her own standards instead of her high expectations of herself and her colleagues to show up [differently] at work, to see it all through a more neutral lens.
Kelle: Your standards are sort of your non-negotiables, your values. So we help this client get clear on what was most important to her at work, practice self-compassion, which helps us all manage our own unrealistic expectations of ourselves, right? To give ourselves a break and the attention and validation we crave from others, and start to communicate her needs at work from a place of curiosity and collaboration and trust.
Nina: She's still working in the same practice, but taking action and showing up every day from a completely different mindset. This is where we begin.
Kelle: Yeah, instead of burning everything down right away, we check in on what we're trying to control and come back to ourselves first. We can't change the people around us, but we can change how we respond to it all, how we approach it all, how we show up.
Nina: Yeah, let us know what comes up for you here. That was a lot. This concept is not what we're taught. So let us know what comes up. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks all, that's all for today.
Kelle: All right, thanks all, see you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we'll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday. Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity, and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly, free email coaching when you're on our list. You're the first to know about trainings, events, and other free coaching opportunities. Just go to KelleandNina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
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