#106: Do you know how much you can control?
Focus your attention on what you can control. That's what the Stoics taught us. But if you're someone who responds to every bad outcome with guilt-filled 'If only I'd ...' thoughts, you might be overestimating how much lies within your control. Don't worry - we can fix that. Grab a cuppa and sit down with your Imperfectionist friend for the first solo episode of 2025.
You can find the Wheel of Life exercise here, and the Core Values exercise here.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, everyone! It’s a while since it’s been just us, isn’t it? Over 3 months, in fact, since I did a solo episode. I’ve been loving welcoming guests to the podcast, and I hope you’ve been enjoying listening to the fascinating conversations that have resulted. But, exciting as that’s been, I thought it was about time that we sat down for a proper catch-up. A bit of a one-sided catch-up, admittedly, because I’m not going to be pausing to let you get a word in edgeways, but that’s podcasting for you. You can just pause me if I go on too much. In this episode, I’d like to draw out a line of thought from the last episode - #105: Professor John Sellars on how to live like a Stoic. Give it a listen if you haven’t already - there’s such a mind-boggling range of stuff out there about Stoicism, so it’s useful to get the lowdown on how Stoicism can help you live better from a dedicated scholar of Stoic philosophy. One of the things John talked about, and a central idea in Stoic thought, is how unhappy we get when we spend time worrying about stuff that we can’t control. We should, the Stoics taught, focus our attention on the things we can control, and ignore what we can’t control. Worrying about the stuff you can’t control doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t change anything. It just wastes our energy and leaves us feeling frustrated and anxious. I like this idea, and it struck a particular chord for me because as it happens, my conversation with John came at a time when I’d recently begun to discover that I can get a surprising amount of peace from recognising that there are certain things that happen to me that are out of my control. Sounds obvious, when I put it like that, doesn’t it? But, in reality, I’ve had a hard time really getting to grips with what’s within my control and what isn’t. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking things like ‘Maybe things would have worked out better if only I’d said or done this instead of that’ as I ruminated regretfully on things that didn’t go the way I’d have liked them to go. One manifestation of this was that until a few years ago, I had a real problem with feeling satisfied that I’d done my best with something. I would never have said, or believed, that I’d done my best. In my mind, there was always the possibility that I could have wrung a little bit more value out of a situation. Maybe if I’d spent a bit more time on a grant application that turned out to be unsuccessful. Maybe if I’d gritted my teeth and pushed through the pain I could have finished that marathon that I dropped out of at 20 miles, which I talked about in episode #65: Reflections on a recent failure. Maybe if I’d been a better friend/parent/neighbour/colleague, X wouldn’t have happened. I know plenty of you have thoughts along these lines too. The thing is, if you end up thinking you can control things that you actually can’t control, you don’t just end up wasting your time and energy and feeling frustrated and anxious - all the things the Stoics warn us about. Your thoughts about what lies within your control also inform your sense of guilt and shame and your tendency for self-blame, which are things that I know lots of you struggle with. Because, if things don’t turn out the way you want, but you’re confident that there’s nothing you could have done to change that, then it doesn’t make sense for you to feel guilty about the way things turned out, and it doesn’t make sense for you to blame yourself. You’re disappointed, but it’s not your fault. But if you think there could have been a better outcome if only you’d made different choices, then you may well end up tormenting yourself with the sort of ‘if only I’d …’ thoughts I described a moment ago. Things would be better if only I’d done X instead of Y. I’m such an idiot. It’s all my fault. I’m disappointed, and I only have myself to blame. Overestimating how much lies within your control is a bad idea. But, for a lot of us, working out what we can control is easier said than done. Do you really know what you can control, and what you can’t? Because, in many cases, and in several ways, it’s complicated. Consider again those ‘if only I’d …’ thoughts I mentioned. At least some of them are probably true. Sometimes things really might have worked out better if we’d done different things. I really might have got that grant if I’d spent more time on the application. And so on. At the same time, though, that’s not the whole story. One important thing those ‘if only I’d …’ thoughts miss is that the way things work out is never solely about our own choices. There are other influences at play. To take the grant application example, even if I’d spent more time working on it, I still wouldn’t have had any control over other important factors, like what the competing applications were like and what the decision panel made of them. But even if we ignore all that, there’s a big difference between what, in one sense, we could have controlled, and what it’s reasonable to expect of ourselves. For example, there’s no reason, in one sense, why you couldn’t have chosen last week’s lottery numbers. You chose the numbers. Those choices were within your control. You were free to choose any numbers you liked, and there was nobody stopping you from choosing the right numbers. If you’d done that, all your financial worries would be over. But, as I hope is obvious, it would be bonkers to blame yourself for not choosing the right numbers. To do that, you’d have needed either a not-even-once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck, or an uncanny ability to predict the future. So, in a different sense - the sense that’s relevant when it comes to deciding whether it’s appropriate to blame yourself for making the wrong call - choosing the right numbers wasn’t really in your control. Now, I’m sure you know better than to feel guilty about not having chosen the right lottery numbers. That’s a glaringly obvious example of hindsight providing crucial information that wasn’t available at the moment you needed it. But other cases are more subtle. Take that thought, ‘If only I’d spent longer on that grant application, it might have been successful’. Depending on the circumstances, that too can be a case of unreasonably expecting your earlier self to have known something that they couldn’t have known at the time. At the time you were working on the application, faced with choices about where to direct your time and energy, there came a point when you decided that you’d probably done enough work on the application, and continuing to work on it wasn’t going to be a good use of your time and energy given your other needs and demands. That’s really all you could have done with the information you had at the time. You had no good reason to do more work on the grant application rather than do other things. If you did have more information - for example, if you’d somehow managed to get a tip-off from an insider on the grant panel that there was more work to be done - then of course you’d have done more work on it, because in that case you’d have had reason to believe that that would be a good use of your time and energy. But without that sort of information, you did what you could in the circumstances. Those judgments about how best to use our time and energy are important, and they’re part of the context that’s often missed by people who are constantly telling themselves that they should be doing more. They should be doing more work. They should be spending more time with their loved ones. They should be exercising more. They should be checking in on that neighbour who’s just had surgery. They should be cooking wholesome meals from scratch instead of eating cereal for dinner. I’ve seen in coaching sessions how it often escapes people’s attention that they can’t do all these things, because they’re incompatible. If they were working more, they’d have less time to spend with their loved ones. If they were spending more time with their loved ones, they’d have less time to work out. And so on. They see this when I get them to zoom out a bit, but unless someone encourages them to do this, they stay focused on the detail and the mutually incompatible guilt judgments, without noticing what they’re doing. Guilt and shame are powerful mute buttons for clear thinking. What’s interesting in a lot of these cases is that I think people really are trying to follow the Stoic-approved principle of focusing on what they can control. Not necessarily because they’re big into Stoicism, but just because that’s what makes sense to them. They want to be doing things to achieve their goals, not just sitting back and letting life happen to them. They’re people who are smart, competitive problem-solvers who pride themselves on working and making sacrifices for what they want. And so, recognising that there’s some stuff that’s within their control and some stuff that’s not, they choose to focus on what they can control, because that’s where they can make a difference. So far, so healthy. But I’ve seen it take an unhealthy turn. Some people kind of forget about the stuff that’s not within their control, or they underestimate or ignore its importance. So, when things don’t turn out the way they hoped, all they see is that what they did wasn’t enough. Focusing on what you can control is a way of gaining some agency, of feeling empowered rather than helpless. But it can backfire if you end up seeing only the parts that you can control, because when you work hard to get the outcome you want and you end up disappointed, then you feel less empowered, not more. The message you receive is: you could have made this happen, but you failed. When in reality, sometimes you couldn’t have made it happen, no matter what you did, because of what else was happening. There’s something else that I’ve seen happen when people focus only on the parts that they can control, too: they miss some of the nuance in what they can’t control. Sometimes, people end up viewing everything that’s outside their control as stuff that simply happens to them and which nobody can really change - as if it’s all stuff like earthquakes and tsunamis and other things that insurance companies call ‘acts of God’. Now, you certainly don’t have much control over whether things like that happen, but not everything outside your control falls into that category. Sometimes people are being failed by others - they have needs that are not getting met because other people are not fulfilling their responsibilities. So, someone might end up with an unfairly large workload because a colleague isn’t pulling their weight. It’s true that you can’t control how much work your colleague does. But that doesn’t mean that you should jump straight to thinking, ‘Ok, so I’ll focus on what I can control, which means I just get on with all the work they’ve dumped in my lap’. Far better, as I’m sure you know, to assert your needs - uncomfortable as that might be - by confronting your colleague or by approaching someone who can intervene. But, of course, lots of people aren’t comfortable doing that - and understandably so, in a lot of cases. Perhaps you’re a junior colleague who’s hoping for their contract to get renewed for another year, and you don’t want to risk doing anything that might lead others to judge you - even unfairly - as a complainer. Perhaps the colleague dumping work on you has been going through a difficult time in their personal life, and you just don’t know how to balance ‘I sympathise’ with ‘But seriously, I’ve got enough on my plate’. In cases like this, there’s sometimes not a clear answer about what you should do - whether to just suck it up or take some action to get the support you need and which you’re entitled to. But what is clear is that, where you end up worse off because other people are not fulfilling their obligations, it’s appropriate for you to blame people other than yourself. It’s appropriate to feel anger rather than guilt. That anger won’t necessarily fix that particular problem, but it could bring you some helpful perspective even so - this is something that Kate Ahl talked about in episode #104: Kate Ahl on what academics talk about in therapy. So. You find yourself in a situation you don’t want to be in, and there’s not much you can do about it. Unfortunately, we all find ourselves there from time to time. And when that happens, you might find you get a lot of peace from simply recognising that you don’t have as much control over this situation as you’d like. As I mentioned earlier, this is something that I’ve recently found helpful. I know what you’re thinking: ‘But that just makes me completely passive which means I’ll never be able to do anything at all!’ - in which case, you’ve lapsed into an unhelpfully binary way of thinking. Either it’s within your power to get the outcome you want, or you’re completely powerless and passive. You know what a dim view I take of that sort of binary thinking, even if I’m as prone to it as the next person. You don’t control everything, and you don’t control nothing. You have some influence over whether you get the outcome you want, but sometimes not as much as would be ideal. You might be afraid to let go of the idea that you have the power to make it all happen, because that’s part of your can-do attitude, but when you overestimate how much control you have, you can end up feeling guilty, ashamed, and dejected, and that can make it hard to think sensibly about what to do next. So, what does it take to make appropriate judgments about what lies within your control? Because it’s not always easy. Sometimes you really should have done more work on the grant application. Sometimes you convince yourself that complaining about your workshy colleague will harm your employment prospects when really you just don’t want an uncomfortable confrontation. How do you make the right call in situations like these? Well, I have a few suggestions for you. First, give up the idea that there’s a ‘right answer’, as if secretly there’s a set number of hours you should spend on your grant application or your essay or your article, and anything more or less is wrong. There’s no right answer. There’s just a complicated network of trade-offs. Devoting more time to working on your grant application will mean there’s less time for doing other things that are also important. Whether your time is better spent on the grant application or on any of those other things depends on what you care about and what in your life needs your attention at this moment. If every item of clothing you own is filthy, you should probably do your laundry before you work on your application. If you’ve been getting by on 4 hours sleep for the past week, you should probably prioritise rest. If you do more of one, you do less of the other. Getting away from the unhelpful ideas that there’s a right answer, and that doing more work on that grant application or whatever is just a question of whether you’re a lazy person or a hardworking one rather than someone with competing demands on their time, can introduce some helpful perspective here. However you decide to spend your time, it’s likely that something you care about is going to have to take a back seat - that’s not because you’re doing something wrong, it’s because your time and energy and attention are finite. If you need a bit of help with introducing some order to all the different stuff you have going on in your life, let me point you to a couple of exercises that you might find useful, both of which you can find on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website, and which I’ll link to in the episode notes. One exercise is the Wheel of Life, which is a template for mapping out the different areas of your life and working out which ones need more attention. Another is the Core Values exercise, where you identify the values that matter most to you, so that you can make choices that maximise those values. Another thing you can do is try to get a sense of how much time and energy you need to spend on something before you have the opportunity to view it with hindsight. So, you decide you’re going to apply for a grant, and you know you’re going to need to put some work into it. How will you decide when you’ve done enough? Take some time to reflect on that before you start. Make it explicit. Make a list. Here’s what would be on my list. I need to fill in the application form, describing the project clearly. I need to read the guidance that comes with the application to make sure I’m covering the right stuff. I need to read through what I’ve written to ensure I haven’t missed anything important. I need, if I have the opportunity, to have a colleague or two take a look at it and give me some feedback. If I can, I need to look at successful applications to the same scheme, so I can get a sense of what sorts of things work well. These are all specific, actionable, sensible things. If I manage to do them all, or if I at least try to get them done, and my application is unsuccessful, then I have a response to those hindsight-informed, nonspecific judgments like ‘I should have done more’. Because … what should I have done? I made a sensible plan for what to do, based on the information I had at the time, and I implemented it. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned for next time, in which case those need to be specific items to add to the list, not simply an unhelpful sense of guilt for not having done enough. What if you do all this and you still can’t work out whether you’ve done enough or whether you’re berating yourself for what actually lies outside of your control? This is where it can be helpful to change perspective. One way you can do this is by reflecting on whether you’d view things differently if a friend were in your situation. If your friend’s grant application had just been rejected, and they’d done all the stuff that you did, would you think to yourself, ‘Hmm, sounds like you should have worked harder on that’, or would you chalk it up to things just not working out this time? Just that thought experiment can give rise to some helpful intuitions here. Another thing you can do is talk it over with someone else and get their take on things. If the other person responds with, ‘Hang on, you’re telling me that you did X, Y, and Z, and you’re still thinking you should have done more? Are you serious?’ then maybe your sense of disappointment is skewing your judgment about your role in the outcome. So, there you go. I hope I’ve been able to offer you some tools here that will help you find some peace of mind next time you find yourself tangled up in thoughts about how much you should be doing and what you need to feel guilty about. Take care, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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