#35 Control: How Do Those Around You Feel About It?
Uncover what a word like control may mean to people in your context and the impact it can have on their behaviour.
Hi, I write about the why-do-we-experience-life-as-we-do question.
I find it’s helpful to those who seek to understand why they, and those around them, live in the realities they do and behave accordingly.
You’re very welcome here.
Enjoy getting in touch with the sensations, thoughts and feelings that come your way continuously, including those relating to a word like control. These form how you make sense what’s being conveyed and the impact it has.
Oh, and remember to wonder what new perspectives may appear should old sense making dissipate or not be taken so seriously!
Words matter.
They imply shared meaning.
They convey intention.
They can have negative as well as positive impacts.
How often do we check all three though? In the busy, always-on world of work, it’s easy to assume what you mean and intend are clear. When we forget to ask for feedback about their impact, we’re prone to blind spots; what we think we’ve conveyed and what’s actually been received aren’t one and the same.
Control is a frequently-used word in workplaces. Let’s take a deeper and closer look at what it means to people.
Syd Banks was a Scottish philosopher and spiritual teacher, who wrote about the principles that underpin all human experience. He wasn’t interested in prescribing what experiences someone should have, more in describing how all experiences, be they good, bad or indifferent, past, present or future, form. He suggested that once we see these principles at work we have much greater insight into why we humans behave as we do. Syd’s writing has been immensely helpful to me personally and has inspired much of what I write about here on Helpful Questions Change Lives.
Two of the three principles - Thought and Consciousness - are particularly relevant to this exploration of the word control. Banks suggested that without our capacity to receive thoughts and be conscious of them, human experience, of whatever kind, cannot exist. With respect to the principle of Thought he wrote this;
“I am not talking about your thought or my thought. I am talking about the universal power called Thought. There are no components to Thought. It is an element that can never be broken down into smaller segments.
Thought is a spiritual power, but on its own it really has no power. Thought itself is completely neutral. It is not until you put your ideas into a thought that that thought gets its power. Whatever you put into that thought, whether it be negative or positive or whatever, it will manifest itself into actual experience.”
This took me a while to get my head around. Banks was encouraging me to see that the principle of Thought is impersonal, neutral and separate from my personal thinking. I’d never contemplated that separation before, I thought I was my thoughts, not a distinct entity through which impersonal thoughts flowed, prior to me fusing meaning into those I was conscious of.
A colleague of mine helped me out. He said this..
“Imagine your attention is drawn to the fact it’s raining. Rain appears as a neutral thought; wet stuff that falls from a cloud. Your personal thinking says, ‘oh no, I have no umbrella I’ll get wet’. A friend says, ‘thank goodness we need the rain for our gardens and food to grow’.
“Your experience of the rain on this occasion is one of mild anxiety, your friend experiences gratitude. Two separate experiences from the same event - a shower of rain.”
Such sense making is happening all the time in teams. At lightning speed. As the meanings we fuse into a neutral word like rain trigger different feelings that form our experience, so too the word control. Based on our conditioning and past experiences we automatically fuse meaning into it. Though we can vary what we mean, depending on different contexts, our corresponding intentions and actions flow directly from this.
We rarely stop to notice this happening in real time though, let alone wonder how helpful our meaning making is, both for us and those around us. Like me at one time, we forget to recognise that we have some control over the meaning we fuse into the word control, immediately after it appears in consciousness in neutral form.
Suppose you were to remember this though. Instead of assuming everyone shares the same meaning, imagine inquiring into what control means to you and those you’re working with, whenever it’s in the spotlight. Here are some meaning-making examples taken from team members I’ve worked with in different contexts…
Control information is vital if we’re to understand and learn.
Controls save lives and prevent harm.
Control is a useful break on recklessness.
Controls, like rules set out what’s expected of those who choose to play the game.
In control is how I feel when I remember my sense making shapes my experience.
Control is all about big brother watching over us and restricting our freedom.
Controls are needed because people are lazy and don’t do what’s required.
Control just means more rules and less trust.
Perhaps you can see how easy it is for colleagues to misunderstand each other here. Imagine speaking to someone with either of the first three meanings in mind, only to find they hear you by tuning into either of the last three. Your good intentions can easily be misread.
Similarly, staff members often stereotype managers, they think they’re all ‘control freaks’, irrespective of an individual manager’s actual meaning making.
Ditto people from one department. Finance staff are often thought to have just financial controls on their mind, for instance. The seeds of silo mentalities are sown from this kind of stereotyping.
I’m not saying make control mean this or that, or even insist on a dictionary definition to clear up any confusion. I’m simply encouraging you to check your own meaning making of a word like control and whether that is shared by those around you. If not, and what they hear is not what you intend, you could save everyone a lot of time by clearing this up at the outset.
A helpful question to ask yourself could be: is what you mean and intend by control in a given situation, aligned with others’ understanding or does their automatic sense making take them in a different direction?
A question for your group could be: does the impact of our collective sense making and articulation of what control means to us, help us get what needs doing, done well?
Who knows, you just might be amazed by what happens when colleagues start entertaining the idea you’re not on Big Brother’s payroll nor suffer from control freakery!
Thanks for being here. I hope you’ll join me next time.
Until then,
Kindest,
Roger
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Other useful, free posts.
You can find all the posts in my first series here.
While it’s good to pick those whose titles speak to you most, I recommend these five in particular:
#3 Being Right Here Right Now - Hard To Do? - This covers the idea of being fully present and what distracts us from that.
#4 How We Experience Life Is Mysterious. Isn’t It? - This goes to the heart of the mystery surrounding why we get sensations, thoughts and feelings in the first place, and what the implications are of being at ease with this.
#5 What Influence Do You Have Over Your Experience In Each Moment? - Here I look at what is and is not within our control and where we can exert influence when changing our experience.
#6 If You Saw Wellbeing Like This, What Difference Would It Make? - If BEING WELL RIGHT NOW is the goal, this describes what that’s like and how our feelings can be a useful warning sign of wellbeing’s absence.
#8 Why Do You Respond To “Difficult” Others Like That? - Here I invite you to consider some of the deeper, often-hidden assumptions we hold about the nature of human nature, and their impact on your experience of difficult others.