What Is Locus of Control? How to Stop Feeling Powerless & Take Back Your Life – Transcript

00:00 – What Is Locus of Control? (Simple Explanation + Examples)

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00:00 — What Is Locus of Control? (Simple Explanation + Examples)
Brent: Your locus of control is a deep-seated belief about how much influence you have over the outcomes of your life. Do you see yourself as helpless? A pawn of vast forces beyond your control? Or do your actions have meaning, creating opportunities and possibilities out of challenging situations? In this episode with Camille Diggs, we take an in-depth look at locus of control, how to recognize your beliefs about control, how to change your locus by focusing on what you can control, and how to find actionable interpretations for the events in your life. I’m Brent Diggs, and this is The Full Mental Bracket, where science and storytelling meet to help you level up and tell a better story with your life. Good time period, Bracketeers. We’re coming at you with another episode today. Joining me in the stunt host chair is Camille Diggs. And up for this episode, we’re going to discuss the locus of control. This is a fancy sounding term coined by Justin Reuter in the 1950s.

Camille: Okay. I brought my locust controller or it can also be used to kill flies.

Brent: Is that a video game controller?

Camille: No, it’s like a fly swatter.

Brent: Oh, you’re going to control the locusts.

Camille: Yes.

Brent: To make sure we don’t have any infestations.

Camille: I’m going to get them.

Brent: Well, you know, if we had crops, the locusts would be a threat, but we don’t. But I appreciate that.

Camille: It’s even in my favorite color, though, yellow.

Brent: It’s quite yellow. And it’s very useful, the yellow swatter of control. Oh, it could be like a scepter. Like, he who holds this scepter will be the controller of all locusts.

Camille: Yay!

Brent: Yeah, there you go.

Camille: Get ‘em.

Brent: You’re the queen of bugs. Congratulations. Is that what you were aiming for in this episode?

Camille: Well, yeah, we were talking about locusts, right?

Brent: No, no, actually it’s locus. It’s the locus of control. It’s kind of, it’s kind of Latin. I don’t know why these people always have to pick Latin words.

Camille: Oh.

Brent: We have plenty, plenty of good English words. But anyway, so this guy Reuter, he comes up with the locus of control and it’s basically…

Camille: Wait, wait, wait. His name is Rotter?

Brent: Rotter.

Camille: Like rottweiler or goiter or oh

Brent: Yeah. He he had an unfortunate naming incident in his childhood

Camille: So did he name it locust? What was wrong with scorpion?

Brent: You know i think he just was so sad that he had such an awkward name of loiter reuter goiter he just he couldn’t you know he was yeah it just he just took it out on the rest of us.

Camille: Maybe he had an infestation of locusts, and so that’s what he decided to go with. He couldn’t get the locusts off the brain.

Brent: That’s gotta be it. There couldn’t be any other answer as to why he picked this term. All right, so leaving the actual issue of what it’s called, what it means is a locus of control is how much you believe your actions and efforts affect the results in your life. Whether you think your actions and efforts are useful or useless or on a sliding scale referred to as the locus of control. If you have an external locus of control, it means you believe that most of your life, if not all of your life, is controlled by things outside of your control. There’s forces, there’s powers, there’s conspiracies, and you don’t get an even break. If you have an internal locus of control, you feel like your actions are effective and useful and can actually help you get good outcomes in your life.

Camille: Oh, we’re really glad that we aren’t talking about locusts then.

Brent: I am so glad too.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: It’s linked to another term, self-efficacy, which, which is also how useful you feel your life is, how impactful your life is.

Camille: You better not say that really fast or it could be a bad word.

Brent: Okay.

Camille: Efficacy.

Brent: All right. All right. So as we were saying, the locus of control is on a scale. So from internal to external is like a sliding scale. And most people are somewhere in the middle.

Camille: OK. Can you be fat with control? On the scale?

Brent: Right. Yeah. There’s a control scale and you are heavy with locus. Congratulations. You win the contest. That’s that’s it. Exactly. All right, so here’s an example, right? Let’s say that you are studying and you take a test and you don’t do very well on the test.

Camille: Which would be very unlikely in my case.

Brent: You have to use imagination. In your case, you have to imagine.

Camille: Okay. Okay

Brent: I want you to imagine that somehow there was a test that you didn’t pass.

Camille: I must not have known about it.

Brent: Yes, that was it. You slept through it or something. If you have an external locus of control, you focus on these external factors, such as maybe you say the teacher wasn’t very good. Maybe you say the questions weren’t very accurate. Maybe you blame your mom for not getting you a tutor.

Camille: Or I didn’t know about the test.

Brent: Or you slept through the test. But it’s everybody else’s fault but yours that you didn’t do well on the test. Whereas if you have an internal locus of control, you’re focusing more on I probably could have studied more. Now the trick is that it’s not either or, both of those things can be true, but it’s what you focus on.

Camille: Okay. Focus, focus, focus, focus. Okay.

Brent: You focus on the one that’s under your control. So some of these factors are not under your control. Like if you have a good teacher or not, that’s really not under your control. How much you study is under your control.

Camille: That’s true.

Brent: So we’re going to say this again and again, but your locus is really all about your focus, what you focus on.

Camille: Okay, so maybe it would be like… me going through this whole menopause thing, which has been years and years and years, going into my eighth year now of hot flashes and fighting with my weight because it’s just that part of life. It’s just that time. And there have been moments in that process where I have been very frustrated about the way that things are going or not going. I’ve struggled with weight issues. And sometimes I’ll say, well, it’s just life. It’s just menopause until I get through it. I guess I’m just going to gain weight. And it just that’s just how it’s going to go. And OK, well, you know, I’ve talked to some women who’ve had hot flashes for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. And OK, I guess I’m just going to. I know. Right. I’m only on year eight or whatever. But, you know, it’s you know, these things are These particular things are not necessarily in my control, but how I choose to focus on it and how I choose to fight the things that I can fight, such as the hot flash. Okay, I have multiple fans now. I have little fans. Of course, they’re yellow.

Brent: You have an entire fan club.

Camille: I do. I do. Okay. I have my freezer friend. Okay.

Brent: Yes, little ice pack that you bring out.

Camille: Yes, absolutely. And then, of course, in the whole weight battle, I’ve had to make some serious sacrifices and determinations and say, okay, if I’m going to fight this, then there are certain things that I’m gonna have to do, which don’t seem fair because other people do these things and would be like a toothpick, but I do these things and I have to do them all in order to lose an ounce of weight. and I have to keep up with that. I can’t, I can’t stop. I can’t take a break. It just has to keep going. Good news is, lost 25 pounds since December, so keeping up with those things has. So I guess we could say that the external versus the internal focus And as far as fighting that weight, I have chosen to focus on the things that I can do to make any kind of a difference.

Brent: I mean, and that’s the thing is by focusing. So every situation is going to have factors that you can’t control and they’re going to have factors that you can control. And you always get to choose which factors. So, you know, genetics and time of life and hormones and age and all that stuff. I mean, it feels like it’s ganging up against you. I mean, I’d fight him off if I could, but you know, and I get that. And if you focus, and you have to address that, you don’t ignore that, but you don’t, the problem, and sometimes this happens to me, not with menopause, but with other issues, is I’ll just sit-

Camille: I hope not with menopause, oh my goodness gracious.

Brent: Let’s be clear. No, but on some issues, I’ll just sit there and just ruminate about how unfair it is, and I’ll go over, it’s unfair, it’s unfair, it’s unfair, and then sometimes-

Camille: You can get stuck there though.

Brent: My wife from the other room would say, you mentioned that, shut up and move on.

Camille: Yes.

Brent: But that doesn’t help him.

Camille: It’s true.

Brent: It doesn’t but it’s not helpful.

Camille: No, it’s pitching a bad mindset It’s it’s like you get this negative mindset and then you can’t really push forward

Brent: You burn all your mental energy ruminating on the negativity that you need to actually solve the problem.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: So no one’s saying that life is fair. No one’s saying that you’re not gonna deal with things that are unfair. You acknowledge that. You come to grips with that. You have to find some way to accept that and move on. You have to focus on the things that you can control. There’s always gonna be things you can’t control. You can’t control what family you were born into. You can’t control what genes you got. You can’t control the parenting that you got retroactively.

Camille: You can’t control the weather.

Brent: You can’t control the weather. You have to just move on with, at some point, you have to move on from the hand that you’ve been dealt. And I mean, and we’re not trying to be mean. It’s like, yes, some people have been dealt a bad hand. Some people have been dealt a far worse hand than we ever were.

Camille: That’s true. That’s so true.

Brent: And we’re not trying to minimize that, but you don’t get anywhere by mourning your hand. That’s what we’ve learned. If there’s people out there that have a hand mourning card game, trigger warning program, please let me know. I haven’t heard about one so far. The internal locus focuses on things you can control, the external locus focuses on things you can’t control.

Camille: Like the hot flash. Can’t control the hot flash. But the good news is that the locust fighter, or controller, also works as a fan.

Brent: So is that manufactured by the Ginsu company? It slices, it dices, it juliennes? Can cut through a can and still slice a tomato! Alright, that’s good.

Camille: That’s awesome.

Brent: So I think you were telling me something about… So I’m always harassing my wife

Camille: In a good way.

Brent: For her love of school and being a brown noser. And we met in high school and she was always so excited to be there. And I was very adolescent and I was too cool for school. And you were not too cool for school. You loved school with an unholy passion that I did not understand.

Camille: I still love school, and I think it really stems from being raised in such a dysfunctional family and going to school was a safe place for me. It was something that I could count on being the same all the time. I was validated in that space. I worked hard, so I was validated. When I was in grade school, I lived across the street from the school, so I was actually able to go to the school during non-school hours.

Brent: Off hours.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: Bonus schooling.

Camille: Bonus schooling. And even like the time frame before school started, the few days that the teachers were there before the students, I was able to go into the school and help the teachers set up the boards and be there. You know, just that person was there to talk with me and be supportive for me. And it was it was a time when I could get out of the dysfunction and be seen for who I was and appreciated for who I was.

Brent: So it’s kind of a place of safety.

Camille: It was very much a place of safety.

Brent: Calm and safety.

Camille: Yep.

Brent: Yeah, I think we’ve talked about that. And, you know, to different extents for Camille and myself and for most, if not all people of our age, Generation X, there was a great like, you’re six. Oh, great. You’re an adult here. Handle these adult responsibilities. These, yeah. Helicopter parents were not a thing.

Camille: Noooo.

Brent: Were not a thing. Here’s a knife and a can opener. We’ll see you tomorrow. It’s like, what? What is that?

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: Oh, man. So I think that when you look back at your childhood and you’re finding that bubble of hope, that is a form of internal locus of control, because there’s plenty of negative things that you could focus on, and we do address them, and we’ve had to go through healing and counseling and things to get through that stuff, but the thing that you’re focusing on, the value you’re pulling out of it is the positive part.

Camille: It was it was very much a place of safety for me, so much so that there was a time when I was done with my family. I had enough and I decided, yeah, I’m out. So I ran away from home. But I had…

Brent: The police caught up with you. Where did the police find you, Camille?

Camille: I had a test the next day.

Brent: The police got you at school.

Camille: In the classroom, taking my test. Because I had a test. I had to take my test.

Brent: Bad girls, bad girls, where are you going to go? You’re going to go to school and take your test, bad girls. You could have your own TV show.

Camille: So yes, the police found me at school, took me in the police car. I said, wait, wait, I gotta get my books. Hold on, let me stop by my locker first. And they let me stop by my locker. I got my school books and I worked on my math homework while I was in the jail.

Brent: I gotta take my math homework to the big house. I can’t go.

Camille: I did, and I worked on my math homework while I waited for my parents to get there.

Brent: You can put me in solitary, but I’ll work on this algebra while I’m there.

Camille: Yes.

Brent: Okay. Okay. I believe we mentioned earlier in this episode that your love for school is really hard for me to comprehend sometimes.

Camille: Yes. Yes.

Brent: Now, I’m not going to speak for all the Bracketeers. I’m sure some of them really understand what you’re talking about.

Camille: They probably love, some of them probably love school too.

Brent: At least two.

Camille: Yeah. Okay.

Brent: All right. So this brings up a principle that we like to bring up a lot in this show. And that is that you have the opportunity and the responsibility to choose your interpretations.

Camille: Yes.

Brent: So the things that happened to us in life. You know, the situations themselves are not necessarily good or bad. It’s how you interpret them. How you, especially you have these automatic interpretations. Your brain says, oh, that’s terrible. Oh, that’s a threat. Oh, that’s wonderful. And they may not be accurate.

Camille: Yeah. Sometimes you got to actually speak to those interpretations and correct them.

Brent: A good thing to do is often take time and journal about things that you’re upset about and really go through your interpretations. Like, okay, so what’s factually happening? What do I feel like? What automatic interpretations am I bringing from this situation? Like, you’re like, it’s the end of the world. It’s like, well, no, it was just a note from your boss. Yeah, it’s the end of the world. It’s like, no, write it down. Okay, there was a note from my boss. It feels like the end of the world. But is that an accurate assessment? Is that an accurate interpretation? And is that a useful interpretation?

Camille: I love to journal. I’ve been doing it since high school. And it has really helped me to almost like it’s almost like a silent counselor. I can I can write down my thoughts. I can write down my feelings. I can write down my fears. I can write down things that really have bothered me. I’ve actually even taken time on some occasions to actually write this may seem strange, but I’ve written an apology from other people to me.

Brent: Oh. That’s interesting.

Camille: So I’ve, yeah, so I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been so stuck because I felt like that person has wronged me and I was having a really hard time letting it go. So instead of continuing down that path of being angry at that person for not apologizing to me. What I did was I wrote in my journal and I wrote an elaborate apology, like if that person actually apologized to me and it was meaningful to me, what would that say and what would that look like? And so I wrote out the apology like that person was apologizing to me. And then I felt it in my being, like I felt like, hey, that They didn’t actually apologize, but because there was something inside of me that needed that, then I was able to more completely let it go.

Brent: And that helped you release…

Camille: Yes.

Brent: …the bitterness and the conflict and helped you shift your locus of control.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: Focusing on the things you could control.

Camille: Yeah, I can’t control whether that person apologized to me or not. But but you know, just just writing that out just really help me

Brent: We’re gonna have to look into that deeper. Maybe have an episode about that You know therapists or somebody told me to write a letter write letters to people that that hurt me and stuff. But I missed the part that you weren’t supposed to send them and I send them all out and I made everything ten times worse.

Camille: Oh, no That’s really not a good idea.

Brent: Either here or there. But if someone tells you to write a letter to someone, maybe you burn the letter and not the person and things of that nature.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: So when we were talking about your school experience, you were talking about being able to replicate that safety for yourself and others. You know, what you were learning from the past is how you could bring that forward.

Camille: Well, sometimes you can recognize things in other people who, when you’ve suffered something, you can recognize it in other people. You can listen to a story they tell you. You can listen to something that’s happening to them or has happened to them, and you recognize that in yourself. You recognize, hey, Wait a minute, I’ve been through that before. I know where they’re at and what they’re going through. And it helps you to be able to have that kind of empathy for that person, and then be able to hopefully share your story with them, help them through that space where they’re at, to be able to move forward.

Brent: And I like that because it’s great. You want to actually find meaning in your life. It’s this thing is like, I think we talked about the difference. The difference between just suffering and struggle is if there’s meaning to it. If there’s no meaning to your struggles, then you’re suffering. It’s like, you can go through some very difficult things if it’s accomplishing something. I mean, you talked about your battles with…

Camille: It’s like trying to find the good in the fact that, yeah, okay, this bad thing happened and there’s not, it’s done. So now what can I, what good can I find in that?

Brent: Right. Now, I think something I’ve mentioned before is the saying that they had when I was in the Marines is that weakness is pain leaving the body. And that is true. Like you were working hard, you’re having a lot of pain, there’s some suffering in there, but they bring out the flip side of the coin. It’s like you are getting stronger. Like every pain that you feel is a little bit of weakness sneaking out the other back door there. And it’s like you’re just getting buffer and stronger and tougher every time. Now this advice only goes so far.

Camille: Yeah, they take it to an extreme. They take it to an extreme for sure.

Brent: Riding out your entire life. Do you feel me getting stronger? I think that’s pain. I was like, no, no, no, this is great. I’m getting stronger all the time. It’s like your leg broke off. No, no, no, I’m getting stronger. It’s only a flesh wound. I’m doing great. But I like that idea, it’s the flip side of the coin.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: And then your desire to pay it forward and recognize people, that’s our principle of legacy. After you’ve gone out on your hero’s journey, as you’ve struggled, as you’ve overcome, as you’ve had a cycle of healing, as you’ve come and actually improved and transformed and become a stronger person through the struggle, you bring that treasure of wealth and wisdom back to the community.

Camille: I like that, treasure of wealth and wisdom. It is a treasure. You’ve had to work hard for it. You’ve had to go on a quest to accomplish and, you know, so now it becomes a treasure for you. I agree.

Brent: Put that on a name tag on your desk. Camille, treasurer of wealth and wisdom.

Camille: Okay, we can put it on a rock too.

Brent: And then throw it at somebody? I got some wisdom for you. Wham! Ow, that hurt! That’s just weakness leaving the body.

Camille: I was thinking of a rock of remembrance, but okay.

Brent: Oh, I’m sorry. I was like, that was weakness leaving your body. I just threw a rock of remembrance at you.

Camille: Okay.

Brent: No? Okay. It’s those letters again. You always get confused what you’re supposed to use them for.

Camille: All right, so I think at this point, I’d like to talk about journaling as a tool to help to shift your locus of, not your locust, but your locus.

Brent: You move your locus from one side of the table to the other.

Camille: That’s right. That’s right. So, you know, if You know, there’s, it’s a great tool. So let’s say you take some time and you journal about blame. You say, okay, I blame so-and-so for such and such. And you know, you then take that, you write it out, you say, I blame this person for this. This is what happened to me. It’s not fair because this person did this. And then you take that same thought and you write out, well, what caused that person to do that? What could a possible cause be? That person was driving and they cut me off and, or they cut in the place in the car line when I was waiting to pick up kids from school. Okay, so instead of focusing on the fact that, and it might be true that they’re just a total jerk and they have no consideration for anybody else, but don’t focus on that, you know.

Brent: Don’t throw the rock.

Camille: Don’t throw the rock. You know, but try to come up with an alternate scenario in your mind or write it out. Like, OK, that person just had a doctor’s appointment with their other child where their other child broke their arm and now they’re late picking up the other child. You know, it’s like if you just come up with, and there could be 1000 different reasons why that person did what they did or said what they said that you don’t know. But instead of making it about you, and looking only at how it affected you, If you look at the possibilities and some of the reasons as to why that person or the entity or whatever did this or said this, then it gets easier for you to, instead of having to internalize that and take it on as a negative, you can then say, okay, maybe this happened to this person and it makes it easier to let it go and not allow any bitterness to form in you.

Brent: We talk a lot about that in our episode on the spotlight effect. It’s like you’ll, you’ll stop thinking so much about what other people think about you when you realize how seldom they think about you.

Camille: That’s so true.

Brent: How much of the things that we see in our life are not actually about us. That guy cut me off, like that guy was in a hurry and you just happened to be in the way. It really wasn’t about you necessarily. And that’s a good thing, that’s a good function of journaling is to just once again, you know, you have your automatic interpretations, which could be considered part of your system one, and then you have your deliberate reflections, which could be part of your system two, and it lets you sift through these automatic emotions, these automatic explanations and say, okay, so they’re trying to protect me, but are those really threats in the first place? Or maybe my whole red alert alarm system is going off for a misunderstanding. Journaling is great.

Camille: It is so great.

Brent: Journaling is really good.

Camille: It’s very helpful to me.

Brent: So I think we have some takeaways. So think about your life. Where are you feeling trapped by events outside of your control?

Camille: Have you spent time reflecting on those situations to see where those feelings might be coming from?

Brent: What automatic interpretations has your mind supplied for this situation?

Camille: And are they right?

Brent: And are they helpful? Are you working from an interpretation that gives you meaning and purpose and a way forward? Or are you stuck spiraling in ruminations of blame? I get stuck a lot. You do. I do too. Anyway, that’s what we have for you today. Thank you for joining us for another episode. We have more episodes coming up and they’re so good.

Camille: So good.

Brent: They’re so fabulous.

Camille: So good, we might even bring back them.

Brent: You never can tell, we can bring back the fly swatter of destruction.

Camille: The locust of control.

Brent: That’s what I meant.

Camille: AKA my fan.

Brent: Thank you, we’ll catch you next time.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket podcast hosted by Brent Diggs. Logo by Colby Osborne. Music by Steven Adkinsson. Learn more at FullMentalBracket.com. This is the Full Mental Bracket.

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