I’m paraphrasing from Steven Covey’s, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.
We’ll define the situation that you feel like you have no control over as your “Circle of Concern”. And we’ll define the power that you have over the situation, as your “Circle of Influence”.
Steven Covey defines a Circle of Concern as a whole range of things – global warming, the state of the economy, the clothes your children want to wear, attitudes in society, the organization you work for, the things your colleagues do, the way people drive their cars, etc. The actual list will depend on you specifically, but the important thing to understand is that there may be little you can do about many of these things since they are outside your influence.
WRITE DOWN WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS For Example: My supervisor is a piece of shit that rarely ever shows up for work and pawns his work off to me. This was actually one of my problems. I struggled with this for a while. I clearly cannot control the way another person values their job and shows up for work. And I felt like going to my supervisor’s boss wouldn’t yield a positive outcome.
WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM SO FAR You may realize that some of the steps you’ve taken intentionally or unintentionally are counterproductive to the result that you’d like, or you may realize that you’re on the right track.
WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO WITHIN YOUR CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE After you’ve taken this step you may realize that you’ve done many things that are within your control—your circle of influence. If you’ve done everything that you can do, it’s probably time to start asking yourself a different question (i.e. is it time to move on, do something different, etc.)
