Feeling Out of Control?

I so often refer back to 2017 when I was really ill and spent 4 months in intensive care. This was a pivotal time in my life, for many reasons. One thing that I learned during this time, was how much my life had spun out of control and yes it was due to me being ill and I didn’t have control over what was happening to my body. Nevertheless, there were things happening to me that were as a result of an outside force, and I had to learn how to take back the control of my life that we so very vital to my survival.

During that time, my world had become so small that the only focus I had was on my body and what was happening in that one small glassed off room. Now that we are in lockdown, I can see how this happens to other people too. We have all become very focused on our worlds, which is understandable, but I feel that we need to be aware of how small our world has actually become – kind of confined to the four walls of our homes! And it’s really easy to understand how quickly we can come to feel out of control. Thinking about going out? Oh do I really have to? Can it wait? Is it really important? Am I going to be stopped and if I am, what am I going to say? It feels to me like without us even realising it, there is an element of fear that has crept in for all of us that has arisen outside of the fear of contracting the virus. And of course, when we live in fear, we become out of control.

Control of our lives, creates a certain amount of security. It allows us to feel confident of our next move, our next decision and there is comfort in the knowledge that you can get into your car and go somewhere any time you want to, even if there is no particular reason for it. But when this becomes something that is controlled by a force outside of yourself, it’s only natural that the sense of being in control is diminished.

A very big portion of our workforce is still working, they’re just doing it from home. I feel like I need to go back to my philosophy that humans are creatures of habit and we find comfort in doing things in a certain way every day. It makes us feel like we have a grip on our lives. However, with the lockdown, we have had to find different ways of doing our lives. We have technology available to us to still connect with our loved ones – a video call is just a click away. We have technology to enable us to continue to work and that’s a great thing. I have a suspicion that productivity in some instances has actually increased, because people aren’t spending huge amounts of time on the road, stuck in traffic.

So it’s a lot about changing our mindset. Knowing that things will never be the same and actively questioning what part are we going to play in our lives, in terms of controlling a positive outcome for us all. When you feel like things are out of your control, and this applies to anything not only now during lockdown, use the pause. Pause, breath in deeply, breath out slowly and do this a few times. Know what your triggers are. Our triggers are those pushpoints that bring about our go-to reactions. Take time to question is this reaction working for me? Get the facts, that’s really important. Anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, uneasy or unsure, is generally as a result of you having insufficient information. When you know the facts, you’re able to make clear and informed decisions. And when you can make clear and informed decisions in your life, then you become in control of your life. Know always that you are the driver, you are the captain of your ship. Everything that you do in your life is as a result of a decision that you have made. And even if the decision is as a result of something that originally was out of your control, know that at that time, you still had and will have the control, you just need to recognise it in yourself.

I suppose it’s a bit about being self confident. I watched an interview the other day where this lady was saying that self-confidence stems from self-believe and that’s really true. When you believe in yourself and believe that you have the capacity to do something, anything, whatever it is that you want to achieve, then you become self-confident and the more self-confident you become, the more successful your life becomes and so it just keeps getting better.