Control what you can and ignore the rest

I’m sure you’ve heard the Serenity Prayer? It’s very similar to control what you can and ignore the rest. It goes like this:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.” Basically control what you can…

Reinhold Nieburh came up with it around 1934. The Stoics were preaching the basic idea of control what you can and ignore the rest about 2000 years earlier.

The Stoics were really big on control. But they weren’t control freaks at all. A key part of Stoicism is just asking yourself: “Can I do anything about this?”

If you can, do it. If you can’t… then you can’t. But worrying achieves nothing but stress.

What the Stoics are saying is so much of what worries us are things that we have no control over. If I’m doing something tomorrow and I’m worried about it raining and ruining it, no amount of me stressing about it is going to change whether it rains or not. The Stoics are saying, “Not only are you going to be happier if you can make the distinction between what you can change and can’t change but if you focus your energy exclusively on what you can change, you’re going to be a lot more productive and effective as well.”

Here’s a visual to help get the ‘control what you can and ignore the rest’ point across:

So, next time you’re worrying, pause and ask yourself: “Do I have control over this?” If you do, stop worrying and get to work.

If you don’t have control, worrying won’t make it better. And going back to the first point, it might be a good idea to ask yourself what your belief is that’s causing all this worry… Yup, it’s probably irrational.

So sadness, anger and worrying are irrational responses and they’re not the right way to react when things happen. So what is the right way to react to stuff that doesn’t meet your expectations?

Acceptance doesn’t make you passive

This is the bit everybody has trouble with. Nobody likes the word ‘accept’ because we think it means give up, but it doesn’t.

Let’s look at it another way. What’s the opposite of accept? Deny. As in denial and nobody ever recommends that.

Albert Ellis told people they’d be much happier if they removed the word ‘should’ from their vocabulary. If you think about it, ‘should’ is denial. You’re saying your expectations deserve to override reality.

• “My kids shouldn’t be misbehaving!” (news flash… they are)
• “Traffic shouldn’t be this bad!” (err…but it is)
• “It shouldn’t be raining!” (say it louder, that might work this time…)

Denial is irrational, and as we just learned, irrational beliefs are where negative emotions start. So, the first step is to accept reality. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it or be passive.

You accept the rain. It’s here. You have to accept it, you have no other choice. You can’t make it stop. Denial and ‘it shouldn’t be’ won’t change anything, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grab an umbrella.

Acceptance to us often means resignation, but to the Stoics it meant accepting the facts as they are and then deciding what you’re going to do about it. The problem is that because we have expectations about how we want things to be, we think that acceptance is settling, when in reality we have no idea what could have happened instead. This awful thing might have saved us from something much worse. Or maybe this is going to open us up to some new amazing opportunity that we can’t yet fathom. The Stoics are saying, “Let’s not waste any energy fighting things that are outside our control, let’s accept them, let’s deal with them, let’s move on and see what we can do with it.”

So, next time things don’t go your way, don’t deny reality. Accept it. It’s here. Then ask if you have control over it. If you do, do something. If you don’t, ask if your beliefs are rational.

That’s how you go from: “It shouldn’t be raining! We can’t go to the park! The day is ruined!” to “Yeah, it’s raining. No park today. Let’s watch that movie we haven’t had time for.”

Alright, we’ve covered a lot of Stoic methods for beating bad feelings. That covers defense. Let’s talk offense. In the next article we’ll look at how you can improve your life… permanently.