Una's Blog

by Una Hearne.

Control Freakery is the attempt to make the world work and other people behave the way we think they should. As a recovering control freak – I get it. I really do. It would be so much better if everyone acted in a rational and civilised way.

What drives control freakery is fear. Plain and simple. Fear of what will happen when it all goes wrong. Or more accurately (as Susan Jeffers explains in the best book ever written on fear ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’): All fear boils down to the fear that we personally won’t be able to cope when disaster happens. So we spend our time and energy trying to fix other people and the world to avert disasters. Which we have predicted. And mostly don’t happen.

Covid-19 is a global reminder that we are not in control of what happens. It belongs in a very long list of things we don’t control: Other global and local events, the weather, where you are born, people you encounter in your life, opportunities you get, other peoples’ behaviour, the movement of the planets… the list is presumably infinite.

What you do control is the choices you make – how you respond to other people and life events. You control YOU and that’s it. On the other hand that’s the whole point and it is your super power.

Covid-19 has also shown just how powerful that is. No one person could stop Covid. However, collectively we massively reduced its impact. We each continue to make personal choices to prevent the spread. Millions of individual choices to act in our collective interest. And it has worked. True, some countries did better than others and some of us have the privilege of having easier choices to make. But this has been the first time we have been called to act urgently as a global community and we did pretty well. (Next, the environment…?)

Taking responsibility for our individual choices, listening to the experts and balancing our personal interests with the interests of our global community, works.

So I’m offering a gift to all my fellow control freaks. If you are ready to give up control freakery in favour of, say, common sense? This is a personal declaration to be repeated as often as it takes to become your truth. Change up the wording to suit yourself.

“Today I resign as general manager of the universe. From this moment forward I recognise I am not responsible for other peoples’, choices, actions or feelings. Even if they are wrong. It is no longer my job to fix anyone.

I now give up worrying about everyone and everything because I recognise it does exactly no good at all. I now reclaim all this energy and I will use it to get informed and make the best choices I can for me and the world.”

There, isn’t that a relief?

Don’t take my word for this – or anything. Experiment with letting go of control of anything or anyone that isn’t you and see what happens. 🙂

 

 

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