“You can’t blame your boss for not giving you the support you need. Plenty of people will say, ‘It’s my boss’s fault.’ No, it’s actually your fault because you haven’t educated him, you haven’t influenced him, you haven’t explained to him in a manner he understands why you need this support that you need. That’s extreme ownership. Own it all.”
Jocko Willink (1971 – )
Internal vs. External
Internal Locus of Control (ILC) – the belief that someone has the ability to influence the events and outcome of their lives
External Locus of Control (ELC) – the belief that the events and outcomes in one’s life is influenced by outside forces
Which one do you think give us real power?
If we believe that everything else is controlling our lives and there is nothing we can about it (a.k.a. having an ELC) then we will easily be able to protect our egos. Since we appear as victims, we may even be able to extract out compassion and sympathy from others despite undeserving it. We lose the responsibility of having to do something about our crappy situations. But, having an external locus on control will always leave us feeling powerless and like our life is not our own.
ILC seems a little upsetting at first because our bad study environments, bad grades, stress and everything else unpleasant about our lives is on us and something we’ve chosen. But with this perspective, at least we can do something about it.
Internal Locus on Control gives us real freedom and power.
We can never change other people or things outside ourselves, but we can always change us. Having an ILC gives us the ability to start to brainstorm different solutions for the problems we encounter.
ILC makes us a hero. ELC makes us a victim.
Try to adopt the ILC perspective even if it may not be true. Sometimes there are external forces that play a hand in the cards we are dealt but looking at our situations from an ILC perspective we have the opportunity to overcome our difficult situations.
Once we complain about duties or other people we instantly enter a victim mentality and give our power up to things other than us.
Let’s take back our power.
