Control and responsibility

In one paragraph

Sort what is worrying you into what you control, what you influence, and what you can only react to. Effort spent outside the first two is wasted.

Control. Your own decisions, your prices, who you hire, how you respond, what you spend your time on.

Influence. Your team's behaviour, a client's decision, a supplier's terms. You can affect these and not determine them.

Neither. Interest rates, the weather, what a competitor does, the economy.

The trap is spending emotional energy on the third category, which produces stress and no change. Covey's version: working inside your circle of influence expands it; complaining about your circle of concern shrinks it.

The uncomfortable half is the reverse. Owners routinely file things as uncontrollable that are entirely within their control — their prices, their opening hours, which clients they keep.

How to actually use it

• Write this week's three worries and sort them into the three columns. Then only act on the first two, deliberately.
• For anything in column three, decide what you would do if it happened, and then stop thinking about it. A plan converts worry into a contingency.

Where it breaks down

• It can be used to dismiss legitimate structural problems as somebody's mindset. Some things really are outside people's control and telling them otherwise is unkind.

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