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n is control an illusion?
Lia Smith and Marise Redmann
Is Control an Illusion?
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Photo ©2021 Lucas Smith
You don’t have control, you never had control, you never will have control,” says author, speaker and professor, Dr. Srikumar Rao. “What you have is the illusion of control.”
Rao says that attempting to control some part of our internal and external environment helps us get up in the morning, make plans and execute them. But when things don’t go as planned all we truly have control of is our thoughts.
“Thoughts are things,” famous words by author Napoleon Hill in his 1937 book, “Think and Grow Rich,” are what philosophers and authors have expounded on saying you create your reality just by thinking. So when things go wrong we need to consider the 75% of negative mental chatter in people’s minds.
According to Raj Raghunathan Ph.D., author of “If You’re So Smart, why Aren’t You Happy?,” wrote in Psychology Today, “Spontaneously occurring negative thoughts are not randomly occurring thoughts that come out of nowhere; rather, they are rooted in deep-seated goals, desires, and values.” Many belief systems we never even question.
Rao says we focus on the negative because of our rigid expectations of how we think life should be. “When things don’t go the way we want, we feel out of control and this is the cause of stress.” Yet what goes ‘wrong’ may be setting you up for something better. Rao says to approach these moments asking, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”
“Success does not come from success,” Sumner Redstone, billionaire and ViacomCBS mogul Photo ©2021 Lucas Smith said. “Success comes from failure, frustration and catastrophe,” and he had a life to prove it, finding each roadblock created another success story. “Changing your thinking about the event can take you from the stress of despair to the realm of possibility,” Rao said.
The endpoint is not the end all. “What you really want is that feeling of purpose and being radiantly alive,” Rao said. “Investing in the process means we can start enjoying the journey.”
