Control Freak with No Control

A number of years ago, I was stressing about a few particular things going on in my life and a friend of mine gave me this little lecture about trying to focus on the actual things I had control over. He drew a diagram with two circles – one inside the other. The inside circle was me and what I had control over. The outside circle was everything – all the things I was worried about. The area of where the circles overlapped – those represented things I could actually do something about. Anything outside of that were things I had no control over. I think this was taken from a book – discussing “circle of influence / circle of concern”. I of course remember it as “circle of control” because I’m an admitted control freak. So this is what I remember it looking like:

The problem however, is that sometimes in my life, I feel that blue circle in the middle is really really small. And that just about drives me nuts. Makes me depressed. Frustrated. Resentful. Sometimes it seems like what I actually have control over are inconsequential things like – what will we have for dinner. Things that really don’t affect my life on the whole. This is what it feels like right now:

There’s probably disastrous ways to change the shift – but… yeah – they’re disastrous. To shift priorities in my life, I gave up some control of it. It was a choice I made. I don’t regret it. But that doesn’t change the fact that things are not so great right now. I keep trying to dream like I described in my last post but even that has become hard at times. The difficulty is that I need to come up with the idea – and then make other people act on it – as I am not the one in control so I can’t do it myself. THIS is why I am a control freak. Trying to influence people to act on my dream – I’m “nagging” them or “stressing them out”. I just want to move forward.