The Dichotomy Of Control: 3 Stoic Skills To Let Go

You've heard the advice.

Just focus on what you can control.

It's in every self-improvement book.

It's all over social media.

You've been told it when you've been having a hard time and you've probably said it to other people too.

Just focus on what you can control.

And yet we still lay in bed at night overthinking.

Thinking about the reply that we did or didn't send.

We have that knot in our stomach,

That tightness in our chest.

What's going on?

The Stoics call this the dichotomy of control,

And Epictetus built an entire philosophy around it 2,

000 years ago,

And it's genuinely one of the most useful concepts in Stoicism.

But most people get it wrong,

Not because they're stupid,

But because they're thinking about it more like a cliche or a bumper sticker instead of a skill set to practice.

And in this episode,

I'm going to be sharing with you.

Three mistakes people make when it comes to the dichotomy of control and how you can practice it in real time when life gets difficult and you feel overwhelmed.

Epictetus was a former slave and he walked around with a limp his entire life.

The stories say that his master badly broke his leg.

And in the opening line of the Enchiridion,

His handbook,

His stoic training handbook,

He says,

Some things are in our power and others are not.

And in that single line is the entire distinction when it comes to the dichotomy of control.

According to Epictetus,

The things that are yours are your aspirations,

Your considered opinions,

Your judgments,

Your aversions,

And the use you make of your own mind.

In plain English,

This might look like what you choose to go after,

What you choose to avoid,

How you interpret things,

And what you choose to do next.

And in the not yours side of the line would be your body,

Your reputation,

Your position,

Your possessions,

And anything that depends on the external world,

Like other people or fortune.

So the distinction is clear.

On one side,

We have things that we can completely control,

Which would be things outside of the line,

Our internal world.

And then there are things that we don't have complete control over,

Like other people,

The weather,

The algorithms,

And chance.

He's not saying that you shouldn't care about things that are not directly within your control or that you can't influence them through your own actions,

But rather it's a bit more like gambling,

Right?

We can control and the problem is a lot of people suffer unnecessarily because they're trying to rule a kingdom that is not even theirs in the first place.

In other words,

The external world.

A few years ago,

I had what I called the year I argued with reality.

On paper everything was fine.

Happy.

Healthy family,

Good relationships.

Work was going well.

I had my health.

Everything was okay.

But I was still paying a lot of attention to the external world.

How many reviews did I get?

How many downloads did I get?

Did people like what I was sharing or not?

And just in general,

You know,

Over-reading other people's reactions.

Did they seem distant or not?

And should I think about it?

What if they didn't reply quickly?

What if they did reply quickly?

What did it mean?

What if a launch didn't hit the numbers that I would have liked?

And I was basically having a part-time job.

Called Trying to Control What Isn't Mine.

And the cost was burnout,

Resentment.

Low level hum of anxiety walking around with a bit of a knot in my chest.

And I just asked the question,

What would Epictetus say here?

Something simple.

It wasn't revolutionary.

And the advice that came to me in my mind was focus on what is yours to control.

So I started asking the question.

What is mine to control here?

And even though the answer was often quite small and simple,

The results of inquiring into that were profound and created a whole shift.

And I started living according to that simple question,

What if I just only focused and put my energy and staked my happiness on what is mine?

You're probably listening to this going,

Okay,

That sounds good.

I understand it,

That it cuts me out of control.

Focus on what is yours and ignore what is not yours or don't see them as part of your concern.

But that doesn't really help me.

You know,

I already understand that.

How can I actually apply it and think about it in a way that creates actual change in my life?

And that's what we're going to be talking about next.

Three mistakes that people make with a dichotomy of control.

Okay,

So there are three main mistakes people make when it comes to the dichotomy of control.

Mistake number one.

They treat it like a mantra instead of a skill set.

So even if you've read the book and you've bought the t-shirt,

You have the mug that says focus on what you can control.

When you start spiraling,

You say to yourself,

Right,

I'm going to focus on what's mine to control.

And yet you still feel like crap.

The dichotomy of control is at least three skills.

So the first skill is sorting,

Being able to filter.

What is yours and what is not yours to control.

The second skill is releasing,

Not intellectually,

But actually releasing what is not yours in your body.

And then the third skill is acting,

Knowing what to do next after you've filtered and you've let go.

It's not enough to just filter what is yours and what is not yours and just try to let go of it.

You have to respond.

You have to act.

You wouldn't go into a gym and just say,

I need to get stronger.

You'd make a plan and you train.

And the dichotomy of control is the same thing.

It's a training program.

It's not just something that you say to yourself.

Mistake number two.

Confusing influence with control.

And smart people get this confused quite a lot of the time.

Let's just say you have a job interview.

You prepare for it.

You study for it.

You might do role plays with a friend to try and practice responding to the questions as well as you can.

You show up fully prepared,

Fully ready,

And you don't get the job.

So you say,

I don't understand.

I did everything within my control and I didn't get the job.

Surely I could have influenced that.

Not quite.

There was some level of influence,

But the thing that was truly yours was your preparation,

Was your attitude,

Was the way that you showed up for the interview,

Was the training that you underwent before you took the interview,

The effort that you put in.

But you didn't control whether you got the job or not.

That was ultimately up to someone else.

It was up to the company or the interviewer or how many people had applied.

And if there was someone better that came in just before you,

Or even not better,

But just you The interviewer liked a bit more.

Maybe they wore glasses.

Apparently studies show that individuals that wear glasses to interviews are more likely to get the job,

Right?

There's all these things outside of your control.

You could control what was on your side of the line,

Your preparation and your effort.

And yes,

You could influence the external world,

But you could not control it.

The Stoics had a nice metaphor of the archer for this.

They would say that an archer aims at a target.

The archer controls.

Their practice,

Their training,

How they draw the bow,

Their stance,

Their intention.

But as soon as they let go of the arrow,

It's up to fate because there's wind and all sorts of other influences that will ultimately determine exactly where the arrow lands.

Cicero paraphrasing the Stoics had a nice phrase for this.

He said that hitting the mark is to be chosen but not desired.

So you can prefer it.

You can aim at it,

But ultimately you let go as soon as the arrow leaves the bow.

And this is where we get confused because we confuse influence with control.

Yes,

You can influence where the arrow lands,

But you can't ultimately control it.

And if you keep confusing influence with control,

You will be staking your peace of mind on things that you partially control,

But not really.

Because even the things you partially control or the things that you influence can still be divided into things that are up to us versus things that are not up to us.

So once again,

The dichotomy is pretty clean in this regard.

Dichotomy of control mistake number three.

Thinking that acceptance means going cold or not caring.

This is a really common misconception about the dichotomy of control.

And it actually causes some people to be turned off by Stoicism because they think,

Well,

I actually do care about a lot of things that are external.

There's injustice in the world that I care about.

And there are things going on in my family and my social circle that I care about.

Acceptance doesn't mean approval or endorsement.

It just means you stop arguing with reality.

Epictetus is not saying that you shouldn't care about the things outside of your control.

That's the opposite of what he's saying.

You can get rejected and still feel the pang of pain.

You can lose someone and still grieve.

You can accept something and still understand that it's wrong or undesirable.

Acceptance just means not arguing with reality and instead redirecting your energy into the things that are likely to help the situation and help you stay peaceful and tranquil and a powerful agent for change.

There's a quote by Apictetus that I love.

He says,

Do not seek for things to happen as you wish.

Wish for things to happen as they do,

And you will go on well.

The Stoics loved deeply.

Marcus Aurelius sadly lost children.

Seneca lost a child.

Epictetus cared about his students.

He even adopted a child later on in life.

The Stoics cared and loved,

But they were free.

And being free is not the same as being cold.

The goal isn't to stop feeling.

The goal is to stop adding unnecessary suffering to the situation.

So let's just say that you get rejected in some way.

To feel a bit of pain as a result of that is natural.

But then to spend three hours spiraling after the fact is unnecessary.

The philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris talks about this a lot in relation to Buddhism.

And he says that the actual half-life of any emotion is often seconds.

The thing that makes you angry,

The thing that makes you sad.

On a day-to-day basis.

The emotion comes,

We feel it,

And then after that,

We're usually just adding to it,

And the Stoics are pointing at a similar thing.

Instead,

It's much more productive to take the lesson,

Understand the action.

And then deal with it,

Do something with it.

So the question now becomes,

How do I actually practice the dichotomy of control,

Not just theorize about it?

And now I'm going to give you the three skills and how to train those individual skills so that you can start mastering this dichotomy.

So the first skill is sorting.

Here's what you've got to do.

Imagine in front of you,

There are two shelves.

One shelf.

Belongs to you and the other shelf does not belong to you.

Mine versus not mine.

And then when you feel stress rising or worry setting in.

You ask,

What actions can I take?

And what attitudes can I choose?

You think about those and you put them on the mind shelf.

You do this in your mind.

You can journal about it if you like,

Or you can just contemplate it in real time.

It helps to visualize.

And then you ask the question,

What can't I guarantee in this situation,

No matter how hard I try?

And then you put all of those things on the not mine shelf.

When you do this,

You'll be amazed at how much.

Is on the not mine shelf that is causing your suffering and anxiety.

That's usually where the suffering lives.

A simple day-to-day example would be you're waiting for a reply to a message.

So you imagine the two shelves.

You think about the mine shelf.

Well,

What was mine in this situation?

Was I honest?

Was I respectful?

Did I speak my mind?

What I should do next with my time?

While I'm waiting,

That is on the mind shelf.

What is not yours here?

Their attitude,

How their day went,

Their past traumas,

Their mood today,

How well they slept.

How busy they are,

Their interpretation of your message,

And their answer ultimately.

Those things belong on the not mind shelf,

But how much does that not mind shelf cause suffering in these types of situations?

And now that we have these two shelves,

We have a much clearer picture of where we should put our attention.

The second skill in mastering the dichotomy of control is releasing,

And we do the set it down exercise.

Sorting is important,

And just sorting the two things out can be very But the next step is to emotionally release the things on the not mine shelf.

Here's how I do the setting it down exercise.

I imagine that whatever I'm holding on to,

Whatever is causing me suffering,

Whatever is in the not mine shelf.

I imagine it as a physical object in my hand.

And I ask the question,

Is holding on to this?

Hurting me or protecting me?

If I think that it's harming me in any way,

I will physically open my hand and set it down and release it.

You can do this over and over again.

Sounds really simple.

But it's very powerful.

You're connecting your body physically to the mental practice of sorting through and letting go with the things that are not up to you.

Darren Brown in his book Happy.

Has a really nice metaphor.

When it comes to letting go of things you can't control.

He asks us to remember the time when we were younger and we were lying in bed and we thought school was about to start,

Right?

And we felt like we had to get ready and we had to get our food sorted and now we had a whole day of school and then someone tells you it's actually the weekend.

And there's no school today.

A second ago,

You were getting all stressed about the fact that you had to get ready for school.

And now there's this sort of relief,

Like,

Ah,

This relaxation.

And then you climb back into bed.

Nothing had really changed.

In your moment-by-moment experience,

You are still you in the same place.

But the story was completely different.

And we can experience that sort of relief.

At any time when we let go of the things that are not up to us,

It's a similar kind of feeling.

And that relief there is available to us if we practice the dichotomy of control.

After you've sorted through the dichotomy of control and you've released physically the things that you're holding on to that are no longer serving you,

The third skill is responding or acting.

This is really important.

And now the list should be pretty small in terms of the things that you can do.

The things that are up to you would include your attitude,

Your effort,

Your next action.

And a simple grounding question is,

What would my best self do here?

Very simple.

What would my best self do here?

Sometimes the answer will come as silence.

Sometimes it will come as walking away.

Sometimes the answer will come as a sentence or something more like a multi-step plan.

It doesn't really matter.

The point is that the answer will be so much better now that you've done the sorting You have that clarity.

And that is the three-step practice.

Those are the three skills to learn.

Sorting,

Releasing,

Responding.

Now,

I want to be honest about what this practice does and doesn't do.

For most of us doing this,

It's not going to make us completely calm all of the time.

I think that would be possible if you fully embodied it in the way that Epictetus had.

It's also not going to fix every problem in your life.

But it will do something settler and honestly more valuable.

It will give you your energy back.

There is so much time and energy that we all spend on a given day in a given week on trying to control things that we can't control.

And when we now have that bandwidth back to focus on the things that we can control,

Everything opens up.

We now have so much more energy and so much more time to spend doing the things and focusing on the things that are more meaningful,

More impactful,

And on our side of the line.

As a parent,

You let go a little bit more about the decisions and actions your children make and focus more on coaching rather than controlling.

Your relationships will improve because you now no longer try to control other people,

Which is inherently off-putting.

You're more accepting and tolerant,

Something Marcus Aurelius practiced all the time.

Being more tolerant is a constant reminder in the meditations.

Anxiety will start dropping because anxiety is this belief that something bad is about to happen.

And instead,

You'll just focus back on the things that are up to you.

So that low-level anxiety hum will start to drop.

And in work,

You'll stop caring about how other people see you,

Whether you get approval or validation,

Whether you get that outcome.

And instead,

You'll start focusing more on the process,

On improving your systems and actually putting in good quality work.

Marcus Aurelius said,

That the Stoics were pointing at.

It's not the freedom of never having to deal with difficult things or wiping out external circumstances that challenge us.

It's the freedom of encountering difficulties and obstacles and not being owned by them,

Not being controlled by them,

Not staking our happiness in things that are not up to us that we can't guarantee.

So if you take anything away from this video,

Think of the dichotomy of control as a skill you practice,

As a form of psychological and physical training.

It's not a bumper sticker.

It's not a cliche.

It's not a mantra.

It's something that you practice and you put in the reps.

And over time,

You'll start thinking naturally,

More in tune and aligned with this dichotomy and things will change for the better.