Steven Covey wrote a pretty seminal self help book called ‘The 7 habits of highly effective people’, now its not the best book ever, but I like to say that if it was the only book you ever read, and you managed to implement all of the key learnings or principles in it then you would almost definitely have a magnificent life and achieve all of the goals you set yourself. If it was your one book, then you wouldn’t need anything else in order to be successful. Life is more than just success and achievement though, so I recommend you read some other books too.
One of the key principles is labelled the circle of control, the circle of influence and the circle of concern. Perhaps the concepts are relatively self explanatory, but lets try to boil it down to a few sentences. Covey is basically saying that we have things we can control such as our words, thoughts, emotions, actions. We have things we can influence, others reactions to us, grades we get in school, how much we make from investments. In this second circle we don’t exactly have control, its not directly in our hands, but we can play a crucial rule in deciding the outcome. Lastly, we have the circle of concern, this is exactly what it sounds like – we care about it, but its outside of our control. This is actually ingrained in the Norwegan saying ‘Ingen dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær’/'No such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing'. Covery would love this saying, obvious we care about the weather, and if it is raining – yet we have zero control over it – so don’t focus on what you can’t control, instead shift your orientation towards that which you can control – the clothes you pack with you on a trip.
I like this visual representation here from Discoveryinaction.com.au
This concept is easy to understand, yet I suspect takes a lifetime to master. It also interestingly shows up as a key concept in helping alcoholics recover through the group of alcoholics anonymous, and the serenity prayer which says: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Now you might think that we are off track and lost in the weeds, but when it comes to mentoring others knowing what falls into each of Covey’s three categories (actually 4 – the 4th is things outside of concern) is crucially important.
1) There are the things we might want to be concerned about, but ultimately are oblivious to them, and therefore want to increase our awareness of them and shift them into one of the 3 other categories.
2) There is things we feel helpless about i.e. we think we have no influence or control but in reality, we can begin to regain some semblance of agency over.
3) There is situations that we think we feel frustrated about that we think should have control over, but in reality we need to shift them to one of the outer rings.
No one likes mansplaining, but I will take the time to go through some examples that demonstrate the importance of some of these categories, and how they can play a role in mentoring others. One of the most typical conflicts that occur in teams is differences in workloads that different team members carry out. Normally people just let resentment around this silently bubble under the surface, until the pressure gets too much and they explode in a fit of rage and say things they can’t take back. If they do come to you as a mentor and mention their irritation around differences in effort it will normally sound like this “I work really hard, but Peter doesn’t do anything”. If we ignore the fact that this statement is technically false (everyone does something, the something might just be different from what you want), and instead focus on the message. The complainer is saying I want to be able to control or force Peter to work the same as me, because I believe that my work effort is the correct and appropriate amount of work. Now if we accept that we have Frankl’s freedoms, then we cannot force anyone to do anything. Therefore, trying to control others is a breach of their sovereignty, or their freedom to choose. So having Pete’s effort in our circle of control is the wrong place, at best it might be in the circle of influence. How do we influence it? By returning to our circle of control, and focussing on what we can do within that. We can control our words and actions, so we might want to consider taking Pete aside and saying ‘hey, I feel frustrated, because the story I have in my head is that I work more than you. My intention for sharing this is that I want to request that you spend some additional hours working on the project this week. How does hearing that feel for you?’ In staying focussed on what is inside our control, versus influence is crucial in our capacity to be effective individuals. Placing things in the wrong category is a recipe for frustration, feelings of helplessness, anger and resentment – not exactly the picnic basket of emotions we are aiming to have on a daily basis.
Perhaps one of the contentious elements of Covey’s circles is that he places emotions within the circle of control. I think he is partly right in doing so, or at least it requires a more nuanced discussion around emotions. The responses we discussed in the previous section often feel like they are outside of our control, we often feel triggered instantaneously, and land ourselves in a place where we end up getting steered by our emotions. So potentially on a short term horizon, our emotions might feel outside of our control. However, through practice, mindfulness, self awareness and practicing the more difficult elements of relating to others I believe we can wrestle back a large amount of control over our emotions. Again, easy to understand, difficult to implement or master.
The reason these two concepts are crucial is because if we get the foundations right, then the other pieces of the puzzle fall into place easier. When we know what freedoms we have, and what freedoms others have, then we can make sure we don’t try to control what’s outside of our control, and we can make sure we take responsibility and accountability for that which is rightfully under our control, rather than blaming others for what is in fact well within our control. I sometimes think if we could get crystal clear on Frankl/Covey’s concepts, then around 80% of conflicts out there in the world would evaporate.