Your Locus of Control, Part I

Think about where you place the cause when life goes sideways. If your locus of control sits outside you, the explanation for trouble almost always lands on somebody else. You put in the effort, sure, but some force beyond your reach keeps getting in the way. When a plan falls apart, your first instinct says it wasn't your doing. Her fault. His fault. Their fault. Anyone but you.

That reflex to assign blame is worth sitting with for a moment. The next time something goes wrong, ask whether any part of it traces back to a choice you made rather than to what the other person did. Handing out criticism and passing judgment both point the spotlight away from yourself, which is convenient but rarely accurate.

There's a related habit that goes with it. When you look at a situation, do you only ever see it through your own eyes? Some people genuinely struggle to step into another person's shoes, or even to grant that a second point of view might be valid at all. So when someone acts in a way you can't follow, you file it under stupid or wrong instead of under not-yet-understood.

And then you notice people bristling at your remarks. They get defensive, they get angry, they feel small, and you can't quite figure out why a simple observation set them off.

Other people carry their own logic. They have reasons for what they do, reasons that make sense from where they stand. Part of respecting that is letting them explain themselves before you weigh in. If your face and your tone have already decided they're mistaken, they feel it. The unspoken message is that they're wrong and you're right, and that lands as an insult whether you meant it that way or not.

So here's the pattern to watch for. When things break down and you keep finding that the responsibility belongs to someone else, that it was their error, their failing, not yours, that tells you something about where your sense of control lives. It's parked outside you, out there, in everyone but the one person you can actually change.