5 Ways Successful People Take Control of Life

Some of the most important things in life are accomplished when we have a sense of urgency. And some of the greatest stresses we endure are experienced when we are bombarded and ambushed by the emergencies of life. What’s the difference? It’s the locus of control. Are the stresses coming from outside ourselves, or are they coming from within?

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Best-selling author and leadership expert John Kotter suggests that too many workers—including executives—do not have a sense of urgency about their work. This is seen up and down the corporate ladder. This does not mean that workers should be running around with their hair on fire. It does mean that these workers are focused on what’s important. They understand that they live in a world where change is continuous and not episodic. They know that the company cannot rest on its laurels, even as they celebrate victories. This cannot happen without creating a sense of urgency.

How does this parallel our daily lives? When it comes to urgencies, there are two kinds of people in the world:

One group is a victim of urgency. The other group is a victor in urgency.

One person doesn’t create an inner sense of urgency. They opt to wait for life to become urgent and then react to it. Yet that kind of urgency brings its companions: stress, anxiety, self-pity, self-preoccupation, and sometimes for good measure, this kicks in the reactions of rush and panic in an attempt to salvage lost time. Rarely do these folks achieve their goals, if there were any.

The other person doesn’t wait for the urgent. They create that sense of urgency in themselves. Their urgency is not as stressful as it is motivational. It creates drive rather than panic. They are driven to accomplish what’s before them today. They understand that this day has never been here before, and it will never come again.

One group is a victim of urgency. The other group is a victor in urgency. What’s the key? Location, location, location. Is it an inner or an external locus of control?

Successful people refuse to give their power away. Here are five things they do to take control of their life:

1. Successful people create a sense of urgency in themselves.

They get up each day with that urgent feeling in their gut. They don’t create anxiety, but they do create urgency.

2. Successful people don’t confuse activity with accomplishment.

They understand that busyness can numb us to complacency—allowing one day to flow into the next with no real desired outcomes. Let’s call it intentional urgency.

3. Successful people don’t let emergencies derail them.

Their success is fueled by the urgency of the day, not the emergency de jour. When those inevitable emergencies arrive, it doesn’t derail them. They handle them as best they can and continue down the track. Outward circumstances are less compelling and urgent. An outer locus of control, with its plethora of issues, overwhelms us. We don’t need to find them. They find us. The urgencies they face are the ones they create. Even when they go fast, they are not out of control. They don’t rush. Rushing creates emergencies.

“Be quick, but not in a hurry.” —John Wooden

4. Successful people know what’s important.

Knowing what’s important to you creates clarity. That in turn reduces stress. This helps rid them of needless clutter that will slow them down. They understand that everything is not an option, so they focus on the priority thing—the urgent thing. There is never enough time to do everything, but there’s always enough time to do the important thing.

5. Successful people listen to the right voices.

Seth Godin warns about the trolls in our head. Beware of them. They love to instill a sense of panic. Be vigilant. The troll is the voice of insecurity and self-criticism. Don’t feed the troll. That supplies it with more excuses. Don’t argue with it. That just takes up your time. Don’t attempt to litigate it. Your inner troll is an expert at swaying the jury. You create your own urgency and don’t let your inner troll derail those good intentions.

Practicing simple habits will assist you in avoiding serious hazards. By creating your own urgencies, you will discover a newfound power in your life.

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4 Keys to Building Your Confidence

There is so little we control in life. But we can control our confidence.

Your experiences, education, talents and skills will take you far in life. They’ll help you build an impressive résumé and open doors to opportunities. But what’s the one quality that will get you even further and help you capitalize on whatever life presents you? Confidence.

Confidence is belief in your abilities. It’s the feeling that you can rise to the occasion when the pressure is on. It not only fuels your ambition but encourages you to set stretch goals. It even has a powerful influence on the results you experience. As the great Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

We all want confidence, especially during those critically important moments when we feel like so much is on the line and our actions will make or break our future. But to have confidence in these clutch moments, we need to first understand its nature.            

Confidence isn’t a skill like biking, typing or juggling balls. A skill is something you only have to learn once and then you’ve pretty much got it for the rest of your life. Confidence is an emotion, which helps explain why it wavers at times (or is sometimes entirely absent when you need it the most). It’s shaky confidence that makes you sometimes feel like you’re on a roller coaster—experiencing highs upon receiving great news and then plummeting a few seconds later back into the valley of insecurity.

There is so little we control in life. But we can control our confidence. Confidence can be developed and managed. It starts with employing the right strategies, which include:

• Experiencing success
• Developing positive self-appraisals
• Surrounding yourself with positive role models
• Managing confidence-killing emotions

To examine where you are on the confidence continuum, the best place to start is by thinking about your successes in life and how you handled them. Did you achieve your successes or did you experience them? The difference might sound nuanced, but it’s very profound.

1. Experience success.

Confidence is about seeing yourself clearly, appreciating your abilities and having a solid foundation on which to build when presented with challenges. There’s nothing more solid than concrete examples of past successes.

To start experiencing success, be conscious of your successful moments and bookmark them, don’t run past them. Attribute your success to yourself, not to someone else or some random event or luck. Branch Rickey, the no-table baseball executive who brought Jackie Robinson to the big leagues, once observed, “Luck is the residue of design.” Meaning that if you work hard and prepare hard enough, there’s a good chance that good fortune will smile on you.

Hard work and preparation not only help you catalog your success but also fend off the imposter syndrome: a psychological phenomenon even the most successful, talented and accomplished professionals experience at peaks in their careers. It’s a feeling that your success isn’t really due to your own hard work but merely a result of other people or other circumstances, and you just happened to be nearby to catch some of the glow of others’ shining moments.

So much of confidence is being conscious of how you handle your success and managing your internal dialogue when those moments occur. This leads us to our next confidence-building action: developing positive self-appraisals.

2. Develop positive self-appraisals.

Developing positive self-appraisals begins with paying attention to our thoughts, which can be difficult to do because it’s hard to stop a train of thought that’s already barreling down the tracks. This is where cognitive discipline comes in. As we listen to our inner dialogue, it’s important to separate the words, phrases and mantras that are helpful from those that are damaging and could derail us.

When we catch these self-defeating appraisals, we have to hold them in our minds and reframe them. For example, imagine that you need to confront your boss on an important issue that you disagree with him about. Rather than thinking, It’s hopeless, I can’t do it. It’s not really my place to disagree with his remarks on my performance review, stop yourself and rewrite your script: If I don’t stand up for myself, no one else will. He should know that I don’t agree with how my performance is being characterized.

When you find that you’re beating yourself up, stop in the moment and start down a new path, one where you begin to promote yourself and all the great things you’ve done. When you refresh your memory about your accomplishments, you start to feel like you’re prepared to face whatever comes your way.

Although it’s important to be able to rely on yourself in those moments that count, this next strategy helps you also rely on others who can help you develop and promote your confidence.

3. Recognize positive role models.

The best way you can pinpoint positive role models is to think about the people you know who embody positive behaviors. These are people who are credible, accountable and service-oriented, who have solid character and seem trustworthy.

Once you identify the people in your own life who exhibit spark behavior, you have to develop and nurture these relationships. Engage the people you admire and respect on a consistent basis, whether through conversations over coffee or ongoing email exchanges. One colleague of ours makes it a point to schedule two lunches each month with different people she admires. Her conversations with them don’t have an agenda; this is simply her way of maintaining the relationships she’s worked so hard to build.

Finally, we have to be open to input. If our role models are challenging us, that’s a great thing. We need to get uncomfortable in order to develop. Remember, no matter how much we want it, change isn’t easy. But it can be made easier by a focused effort to develop our confidence.

4. Combat confidence-killing emotions.

We all have our own internal signals when we’re experiencing fear. Though our survival might not be threatened, our security, stability and long-term success could very well be. When we have these fear responses, we need to tune in to them. Just by paying attention to our emotions, we can identify when we’re feeling anxious, and when we do, we can’t ignore that emotion. We have to confront it. Sometimes asking ourselves a simple question (What can I do about this right now?) is enough to propel us toward action.

To combat worry, another confidence-killing emotion that is often induced by stress, it’s important to determine whether your concerns are real or manufactured. Our brains, even as brilliant as they can be, often have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Sometimes, when left unattended, your imagination can run wild, and what you’re worrying about is neither logical nor rational. You can quickly find yourself worrying about things that can’t possibly happen, or that are even well beyond your ability to influence.

To deal with the confidence-killing emotion of insecurity, it’s helpful to refer back to the second confidence-building strategy: developing positive self-appraisals. Whenever you experience insecurity, you need to tame and quiet your inner critic. You need to flip the criticisms of yourself and offer yourself praise instead. Rather than beat yourself down, pause in the moment and recall all the things you’ve done, all the milestones you’ve achieved and say to yourself, I can do this. This mental reminder can often be enough to get you back on the confidence- building track that gets your head back in the game. 

Excerpted from SPARK: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success by Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch, and Sean Lynch. Copyright © 2017 by Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch and Sean Lynch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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