Recognizing What You Can and Do Control
This is the key to less stress and more empowerment.
Many of the ideas in the collective consciousness of the world today are centered around disruption. Lots of people talk about disrupting this, that, or the other thing. Interrupt the pattern, change the status quo, alter the conversation, and the like.
Because change is inevitable, and the one and only constant in the Universe, recognizing, acknowledging, and even embracing this idea of disruption can do some amazing things. However, it can also cause uncertainty, discomfort, distress, and worse. How worse? Because the idea of disruption often spins matters out of control.
Again, this can be good and bad. But when it’s a message used for both good and bad, it creates the equivalent of a tornado or hurricane. A storm that will sweep you and all you know away, removing every ounce of control you have.
To navigate through these storms and both maintain and grow self-sovereignty, you must recognize what you can and do control. This is where you become empowered to ignore, manage, or go with or against change.
Let’s start with the easy part.
What you can’t and don’t control
This can be daunting and overwhelming to recognize and acknowledge. However, doing so is key to opening your mind, body, and spirit to better self-actualization and awareness.
The short answer to the question – What don’t you control? – is this: anything and everything outside of your head, heart, and soul. That, however, is too broad and undefined for the human mind to comprehend.
Let’s start wide. You cannot control the weather, the changing of the seasons, death, or anything of that nature. Zooming in, you start to get to more things you think and feel you should be able to control, but don’t. Traffic, politicians, the economy, competition outcomes, and the like.
Let’s zoom in closer to you. Other people, bosses, coworkers, your children, how fast the kettle boils, and people/places/things you directly interact with, you can’t and don’t control. That’s not to say you don’t affect them and they don’t impact you, but they’re not within your control.
You can’t and don’t control anyone, anything, tangible or intangible, that’s not you.
This can be a bitter pill to swallow. It feels utterly disempowering. To change the narrative, let’s get into the hard part.
What you can and do control
The short answer is: you. A slightly longer answer is your head, heart, and soul. The more specific, detailed answer is your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions.
Because you’re the only one inside your head, heart, and soul, you are the only one in control of what happens inside you. Only you can make active choices about who, what, where, how, and why you are.
To gain this control, all you must do is take a moment to focus on yourself, at this moment, and ask questions like,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What are my intentions?
- Is my approach positive, negative, or neutral?
- What am I doing?
Only you can answer these questions. They can only be answered right here, right now, in the present.
It’s for this reason I can’t and don’t understand why anyone thinks being “woke” – you know, as in awake and aware of yourself – is bad. Yes, “they” prefer you asleep and unaware because then they can push, cajole, influence, and best keep you subconscious and pliable to their control.
Via active conscious awareness – yes, mindfulness – you gain control over your life experience. That control opens the way to making informed choices and decisions for you.
Why does this matter?
Social media, the pushes for disruption both good and bad, instant gratification, and the constant “GO GO GO” of the world are massively distracting. If you’ve ever gone down a rabbit hole of posts on Instagram or found yourself mindlessly doomscrolling, you have been successfully distracted.
It’s all too easy for your subconscious mind to absorb lots and lots of garbage thoughts, ideas, notions, and feelings. Because your subconscious is unaware and sponge-like, it soaks up everything.
To wring the sponge of your subconscious mind out, or look at what it has absorbed, you must apply active conscious awareness. Yes, you must take control of your mindfulness to see what your subconscious is holding onto.
Remember, your subconscious is where your beliefs, values, habits, and memories live. Often, outdated info sits there, unchecked, creating clutter and havoc that wrests away your control. New info being absorbed, unchecked, causes chaos, uncertainty, negativity, fear, and other concepts to become your personal perception of reality.
I’m not saying you should live in a void, ignorant of the world at large. Far from it. What I am suggesting here is that when you take control over what you can and do control, you become empowered. Empowerment allows you to choose and decide how you live and what you do every day.
You have more power than “they” want you to believe. Active conscious awareness is how you gain more control of your self-sovereignty and be who, what, where, how, and why you desire to be.
One last note:
Failure is not defeat
You’re going to have bad days, days when it feels like nothing goes right, and certain circumstances will deny you full control, even of yourself. That’s okay. So long as you’re here, living, breathing, existing, you have new choices, potential, possibilities, and opportunity.
The power of being awake, self-aware, conscious, and mindful, is so much greater than allowing life to pass you by while living subconsciously. With it, you can take the control that’s your ultimate birthright and experience the meaning of life – TO LIVE – and all it has to offer.
Recognizing what you can and do control isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge you alone are in your head, heart, and soul, you can employ active conscious awareness – mindfulness – to take control over how you approach things, be it positively, negatively, or neutrally. Knowing that you can employ mindfulness at any time, you can choose and decide via that control who, what, where, how, and why your life is.
This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. From that broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, that can spread to those around you for their empowerment.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the five-hundred-and-eighty-sixth (586) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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