The Circle of Control: What You Can Actually Change
This post is about the circle of control. It is a simple idea I come back to a lot in sessions, usually when someone is worn out from carrying things that were never theirs to carry. I want to explain what it is, where it holds up, and where I think it gets used badly.
What the circle of control means
Picture a circle drawn on a page. Inside it goes everything you have some say over. Your attitude. How you respond. The words you use. The boundaries you set. Whether you eat, sleep, move and rest. Outside the circle goes everything else. The past. The future. What other people think of you. What other people decide to do.
That is the whole idea. It is not new and it is not clever. It comes from very old thinking and it turns up in a lot of counselling models today. The value is not in the diagram. The value is in doing an honest sort of your own life against it, on paper, with your real problems written down.
Why the things outside the circle pull so hard
Most of the people I sit with are not lazy about their problems. They are the opposite. They are working very hard on things that cannot move. They replay a conversation from four years ago and try to win it. They plan for a version of next year that may never arrive. They try to manage what a family member thinks of them by being perfect, or quiet, or endlessly available.
Worry can feel like doing something. It has the same tension in the body as real effort. But nothing changes at the end of it, so the body stays switched on and you get tired without getting anywhere. That is a big part of what people describe to me as anxiety. It is common. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that anxiety disorders are the most common group of mental disorders in Australia. If you feel like the only one stuck in this loop, you are not.
What actually sits inside the circle
The inside of the circle is smaller than people want it to be. That is the hard part. It usually comes down to five things. Your attitude, meaning what you decide something means and what you tell yourself about it. Your response, meaning what you do in the ten seconds after something lands. Your words, meaning what you say out loud and what you leave unsaid. Your boundaries, meaning what you agree to and what you decline. And basic self care, meaning sleep, food, movement, and how much you drink. That last one moves in and out of the circle for some people, and if it has stopped feeling like a choice, that is worth looking at through addiction counselling rather than willpower alone.
None of that is small in effect. Those five things shape most of what happens in a week. But they are all yours, which means nobody else can do them for you, and that is uncomfortable for a lot of people.
How do you stop worrying about things you cannot control?
You do not stop it by force. Telling yourself to stop worrying does not work and usually makes it louder. What works better is naming it. Write the worry down and ask one question. Is there an action I can take today that touches this? If yes, do that action and put the rest down. If no, then what you are holding is grief or fear, not a problem to solve, and it needs a different kind of attention.
That second answer is the one people skip. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be felt and carried. Trying to problem solve your way through those is exhausting.
Where this idea gets used badly
I want to be clear about this part, because the circle of control gets handed out like advice and it can land as a slap.
If something genuinely unfair happened to you, being told to focus on what you can control can sound like being told it was your own fault. It is not. Being judged before being heard is something I understand from my own life, not just from the chair I sit in. Some things outside your circle deserve anger. Some deserve grief. Neither of those is a failure of mindset.
The circle is a tool for working out where to put your energy. It is not a verdict on your pain. I use it with people working through grief, but only after the loss itself has been given proper room, never as a way of moving them along.
There is also a middle band that people miss. Plenty of things sit on the line. You cannot control a decision made about you, whether that is a plan outcome, a diagnosis or a knockback at work. You can control how you put your case, who you ask for support, and what you do while you wait. That band comes up constantly in NDIS counselling, and it is often where the real work is.
What I notice in the room
When I ask someone to list what is wrong at the moment, most of the list is about other people. What their partner said. What their boss did. What their family expects. Then I ask what is left on the list once we take out everything that belongs to somebody else. There is usually a long pause.
That pause is not a bad thing. It is the first time in a while that some people have looked at their own part of the picture without a fight going on around it. Men in particular tend to arrive with a long list of things done to them and a very short list of things they have any say over. That comes up a lot in counselling with men, and it is worth sitting with rather than rushing.
I have also had long stretches of my own life where a lot of it was decided by things I had no say in at all. I am not going to pretend the circle made that easy. What it did do was stop me pouring energy into arguments I was never going to win, so there was something left over for the parts I could actually move.
Using it without turning it into another job
If you want to try this, keep it small. One page, one week. Write the things sitting on you at the moment. Draw the circle. Put each item inside or outside.
Then pick one item inside the circle and do something about it this week. Not five. One. The point is not to sort your whole life. The point is to notice how much of your energy has been going to the outside of the circle, and to move a little of it back in. Doing that with someone else in the room is usually easier, which is most of what one on one counselling looks like week to week.
If the worry itself is the main problem, and it is running most of your days, that is worth looking at properly rather than managing alone. I work with that regularly through anxiety counselling in Cairns.
One more thing. The circle of control is a way of thinking, not a treatment. It sits alongside the rest of the work, it does not replace it, and it will not resolve something that needs medical attention. If you are unwell, see your GP.
If you keep landing on the outside of the circle and cannot get your energy back to your own side of it, I work as a counsellor in Cairns and by telehealth across Australia. You can get in touch through the contact page or book a time directly through the booking page.
Written by Allan Bunyan, CPCA. Counsellor at Strong Foundation Support, Cairns. Allan works with adults and young people aged 14 and over, in person in Cairns and via telehealth across Australia.
