What I Can Control

What’s on my mind?

This morning I hit play on The Courage to Be Disliked. Carmen—my therapist—recommended it, and I was only a few minutes in before I felt that familiar thing: oh… this is for me.

It starts with a simple story about well water.

Well water stays about the same temperature year round. Drink it in the summer and it feels cold. Drink it in the winter and it feels warm.

Same water. Different context. Different experience.

Same reality. Different lens.

That idea followed me into yesterday.

Yesterday I took Leo to a birthday party. A kid his age spent a lot of the party worried about whether the birthday girl liked the gift he gave her. She told him she liked it. And still… he couldn’t accept it. He was sure she didn’t like it. Maybe even sure she didn’t like it at all.

Leo asked me about it afterward. He told me he tried to reassure his friend, and he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t helping.

That led to a conversation about what we can control.

Leo couldn’t control how that kid felt. That was hard for him. He just wanted him to feel better and noticed that nothing he was saying was working.

We talked about two of the posters we have up—one about “What I can control” and the other is a Feelings Wheel.

Leo’s idea was that if he had the Feelings Wheel with him, he could help the kid name what he was actually feeling. If it’s not really about the gift… what is it about?

Feeling inadequate is linked to sad. Are you sad? Why are you sad?

And then we started talking about how this happens several times a day in our house.

Jett, Leo, and I will often be playing video games at the same time. Something challenging happens in the game I’m playing—or I die at a particularly hard part—and I get frustrated. Then one of them asks me a question and I snap at them or talk rudely.

They assume they did something wrong. Sometimes they get defensive and say something rude back. And suddenly we’re in a small spiral.

I happen to be getting better at calling this out.

When it happens, you’ll hear me own my part and say something like:

“Sorry guys. I just got killed in the game I was playing and got really frustrated. When you asked me that question, my frustration came out in your direction. It had nothing to do with you. Sorry.”

It feels like when one of us admits it out loud, the others can immediately relate. We’ve all been there.

I’m not saying it’s ok—but it feels like a step in the right direction.

A future where I recognize what I’m feeling and put it where it belongs, instead of dropping it on the people around me.

And most of the time, after that little reset, we end up laughing about how each of our games frustrates us in different ways. The challenge is often what makes the game fun. The frustration followed by success is part of what we enjoy.

Which brings me back to this very life we live.

The challenge is where it’s at. It’s where we learn.

And I don’t actually know what it feels like to live without struggle. My experience has been that I’ve never been successful at everything I’ve tried.

But I’m also noticing how much of that is perception.

If I label every failure as “proof I’m not good at this,” it becomes that.

If I can see failures as information—another way that doesn’t work—then even the struggle starts to feel like progress.

Where are you trying to control something that isn’t yours to control?