Influence or Control?

Have you ever met someone and thought they were a control freak or perhaps someone has even called you a control freak? It’s a term that we generally associate with dominating behaviour that one person may have over another.

When we feel controlled by another person we feel required to do something or behave in a way that we may not necessarily want to but often give into to keep the peace or to stop a situation escalating. The control freak may use emotional techniques such as sulking, tantrums and in extreme situations, physically aggressive behaviour to get their way. Their poor mood or behaviour directs our behaviour to achieve the control freak’s desired outcome. It’s not a comfortable situation to be in and can leave you feeling powerless.

If someone was to ask you if ‘influence’ meant more or less than control, what would you say? The majority of people would say that it’s not as bad or it’s more easily ignored compared to someone trying to control you or a situation. The definition of ‘influence’ is an effect that a person can exercise on or have over another. Sounds like control doesn’t it? Yet we don’t have the same negative association with the word ‘influence’ as we do with the word ‘control’.

We all have the ability to influence others and you probably do it sometimes without realizing it. For example, you go to a movie and don’t enjoy it so when you leave the theatre, you say to your friends ‘that movie was terrible!’. Now for some of your friends who were unsure of whether they liked the movie or not, your comment may well influence the way they think about the movie: “yeah, it wasn’t good was it”.

Do you remember being a child trying to get your parents to agree to you going somewhere with friends or buy you something? You would give them all sorts of reasons as to why you should go or have to have it just to get them to say yes: you were influencing people. Influence, be it conscious or unconscious, is actually a normal part of human interaction.

Sometimes when you influence people they can get upset or angry because theyfeelthey are being controlled by you. In these situations, the person being influenced is not aware that they are only being influenced and are in fact still very much in control of themselves. So be aware that in every interaction between people, influencing will be happening. The thing that you need to be aware of, and this is where you do have the power, is that influence is just that – you can take it or leave it: it is not control.

Control does exist and the important thing to know is that no one can control you and you can’t control anyone else – influence, yes but not control.

To give you an example, if you wanted someone to jump off the roof of a house right now can you control them to do that? The answer is no, you can’t. You can tell them to, threaten them to, bribe them, all sorts of things that may influence them but you cannot physically control them so that they would climb on to a roof of a house and jump off at your say so. The influence might be sufficiently strong or worthwhile that they do climb up on the roof and jump off but they do that by choice not because you are physically controlling them.

The only person you will ever be able to truly control is yourself. You alone have the ability to decide what you think, say, do feel, see, focus on etc. No one else can do that for you.  Knowing this is really powerful stuff! People can influence you but they can NEVER control you!!!!

To put this into an everyday perspective, knowing that you are in control of you and nobody else and that they are only in control of themselves and no one else, there is no point getting upset about what other people do or think because you have no control over them to change and they have no control over you to change.  Worrying about what they do or say only robs you of your own valuable energy and at the end of the day what you think or feel about them is just that: what you think. Their attitude is their attitude, yours is yours. Their choice is their choice, yours is yours. Put the energy into what you can control not what you can’t. Take back your power knowing that the YOU are in control!