How to Be More Effective by Developing an Internal Locus of Control
I’ve been a fan of stoicism since I came across Ryan Holiday’s book “The Obstacle is the Way” 3 years ago. I feel like it’s helped me enormously in building equanimity, which is something I struggle with.
That said, there is a core tenet of Stoicism that I struggle with, and it is this:
“Focus on what you can control”
Ryan Holiday, 50 (Short) Rules For Life From The Stoics
Every time I come across this concept, I feel like it opens up a gap in my cognition. How do you decide what you can and can’t control? Most situations are multidimensional and your control is only ever partial. Luck and other people factor into almost anything of consequence that we make decisions about. I struggle with the value of this rule in and of itself; I feel like it can’t be a standalone without factoring in HOW to decide what you can control so you can in turn focus on it.
In the words of Epictetus:
“In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.”
This brings me more in line with what I find useful. I don’t feel like it helpful to focus on what you can control without first focusing on how to decide on what you can actually influence. This is why I feel like this guidance requires being shared in 2 parts. Let me attempt in my own words:
Evaluate constantly what is within your control, and what is outside your control. Once you are clear, focus on what is within.
In my undergraduate degree, I studied Psychology, which set my life on a new path. One of the most valuable lessons I took was about the concept of a person’s Locus of Control.
Locus of Control
A locus of control is your frame of reference about what you have control over. The concept was first described by Julian B. Rotter in 1954, and has since been integrated consistently into personality psychology. The basic idea is that people with a strong internal locus of control believe that the events in their lives are largely a result of their actions. A person with a strong external locus of control believes that luck plays a large role in their lives.
Here’s an example: meet Jin Yang and Karen. They have different loci of control. They’re on the same team in a consulting company and have partnered on bidding for some work from a bank. They collaborate on the RFP and submit it on time, both happy with the work, and both working equally hard and contributing equally to the submission.
The bank comes back and says they have been unsuccessful and have selected another company. Here are some example comments from the debrief with the executive team on why the RFP failed. Try and pick who has an internal and who has an external locus of control.
Jin Yang:
- “The competition already had relationships with key stakeholders”
- “Damn, better luck next time”
- “These things happen for a reason — now we can invest more time in Project X which is more valuable anyway!”
- “Our RFP win rate is still really high”
- “It’s nobody’s fault— you can’t win them all”
- “Karen was great to work with — I couldn’t have asked for a better partner”
- “Karen could have done better on the technical spec, but I didn’t feel like it was my place to say — she’s the expert, after all”
Karen:
- “I was worried that we didn’t put enough detail into the rollout plan — I knew we should have done more on that should have gone deeper”
- “Damn, we put so much effort in — next time let’s make sure we improve the branding on the submission as I know Competitor Y’s deck was slicker than ours”
- “I felt like Jin Yang didn’t take my suggestions about the design brief seriously, even though he agreed with them. Next time if I don’t feel they’re on track I’ll need to push harder to ensure we’re aligned that they get done.”
- “We really need to start nurturing the relationships with key stakeholders earlier or we’re going to keep losing these types of deals”
- “This was a great learning experience and working with Jin Yang was great overall. I’m confident that as long as we apply our learnings we’ll be much better placed for the next deal.”
You can see here that both people have good perspectives! It’s important to accept that people have different outlooks on the world. One of these people is much more likely to win a larger number of deals though: Karen.
I believe that the best outcomes result from developing a strong internal locus of control, and applying good judgement. That said, it has to be tempered by being right that you can influence something_,_ and you can’t always know. If you’re right that you really can influence something, then it’s good to take action. However, if you’re wrong, and you believe you can influence something but you really can’t, this is where the Stoic philosophy would suggest that you’re going to be frustrated and less happy.
This is why I say that it’s so important to develop a good means of ascertaining whether you CAN or CANNOT have control over something. And it’s often blurry: we often only have partial control. The world is complex, and every outcome is the result of numerous inputs, sometimes only one of which you have control over. This means that it’s extra important to be able to understand that even if you CAN have control over something: the outcome is not 100% correlated to your input. So you need to accept that.
I think it’s very dangerous to be indifferent to something before you have at least an 80% certainty that you can not have any influence over it. It feels to me like there’s huge value in focusing on this when evaluating what you can and can’t control.
Being More Effective
Okay, so now that we understand that it’s important to determine whether you have control over something, we can focus on the value of exercising that control.
This is fairly straightforward: there is a lot of evidence suggesting that having an internal locus of control will drive better outcomes for you. One example is this study in which the researchers demonstrated the positive impact on career success:
[
Career success criteria and locus of control as indicators of adaptive readiness in the career…
Intrinsic career success criteria positively predicted career adaptability. * Work-life balance career success criteria…
And here’s an example of a study showing a positive relationship with academic success:
[
The Relationship Between Locus of Control, Metacognition, and Academic Success
The previous research on locus of control or metacognition suggested that they are closely related to academic…
Note that metacognition actually has a far, far higher impact on academic success than an internal locus of control… but that’s a post for another day. If you’ve read this far, you’re definitely interested in reviewing how you think so you’re likely faring well!
Now that you know these things, I recommend that you think about the type of comments Jin Yang said above. Do you find yourself saying those types of statements? If so, you’ve got an exciting opportunity to develop a more internalised locus of control.
The simplest form of developing an internal locus of control is by asking yourself the following questions when something goes poorly for you:
- How much control did I have over the inputs that led to this outcome?
- What could I have done to change the course of things?
For the first question, I recommend thinking in percentages. This will help you think about the different factors that shaped the outcome, and evaluate which ones you could have influenced.
Let me provide an example: you’re a software engineer on a team of 5. There are 2 senior engineers, 2 juniors and a manager. The manager calls a team meeting to discuss a new feature, and to share their early design decisions they’ve made. In the meeting, the manager runs through their design decisions, then asks if anyone has questions. You find yourself concerned about the decisions, and ask some questions that you think illustrate your concerns. Nobody else in the team seems to share them, and the manager answers your questions definitively, then moves on. You feel that they didn’t really understand the nuance of your concerns, but don’t fight it as you can tell you’re the only one thinking this way.
The project proceeds, and during late-stage testing it turns out that the concerns you had raised in the meeting were accurate, and the design decisions have resulted in large amounts of work needing to be re-done. You speak with the manager and note to them that you had called this out earlier. The manager gets defensive and tells you that “I told you so” isn’t helpful.
This is the perfect point to ask yourself those 2 questions. You did have control over the outcome. You probably had a 80% influence on it in this scenario. Your responsibility may be shared with the rest of the team, but if you believe you understand things in a way others don’t, you have a duty of care to share that. You could have come out of the design decision meeting and written a document with some diagrams describing your concerns in a different way. You could have discussed your concerns with one of the seniors. You could have told your manager that you didn’t feel like you described your concerns well, and described them differently (definitely don’t say they didn’t understand you — that is the external locus of control approach!).
By asking yourself these questions post-hoc, you increase the chances that the questions will occur to you in the course of your life, allowing you to take control of things and more effectively influence good outcomes.
Conclusion
In this post I’ve described the way in which I think the Stoics fall short in focusing on what we can control, without guidance on evaluating HOW to ascertain what is and is not in our control. This requires further inspection and I hope to follow up in the future.
I’ve described the differences between an internal and external locus of control, and it’s location determines ones proclivity to take action on things in our lives.
I’ve then pointed out the value in developing an internal locus of control, because it will result in you being more effective, in your career and academically.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! If you find this useful or useless, please let me know. I write these posts for myself, to focus my thinking and ensure that I am consistently trying to get better at thinking and being a better human. Your input will help harden these ideas.