Your Need for Control Ruins Everything

How to detach from outcomes and find freedom

Have you ever wanted something so badly you’d do anything to get it?

Chances are, the harder you tried to get a specific outcome, the further away it felt. The more you chased, the more they ran. The more you gripped, the more it slipped through your fingers.

This need to control every outcome in life — to always get what you want — increases your anxiety.

When things don’t go your way, your frustration skyrockets and you try harder to exert control. The more you try, the worse it gets. If you did somehow wrangle the outcome you wanted, it was probably nothing like you imagined.

Maybe you’ve also experienced giving up on something, only to have it come to you in ways you never expected.

It’s one of life’s ironies that you often have to detach from something to get it. Most of us would benefit from practicing a little detachment. Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you don’t care.

It means you’re open to new possibilities.

Release the Need to Always be Right

Have you ever had a clingy friend or a partner? If so, you know how unpleasant it is, and how you get the urge to avoid them. Clinginess comes from a need to control and a fear of not getting what you want.

Detaching in a relationship might sound like something you don’t want. After all, you want to connect with other people, not distance yourself from them.

But in a healthy relationship, detachment serves a different purpose. As Dr. Barton Goldsmith says, it means learning to detach from the need to be right.

Let people be themselves without trying to coerce or change them.

Easier said than done, I know. But consider, if you force someone to do what you want, they’ll feel manipulated and put distance between you. Allowing them to make their own choices without pretending you know what’s best for them opens the door to a relationship.

And if you don’t approve of their choices, you have to decide whether it’s a deal-breaker for you.

Free Yourself From Outcomes

One of the hardest places to detach is with your goals. If you don’t care about the outcome, what’s the point?

The point isn’t to stop caring, but to stop trying to force specific outcomes.

There’s a difference between saying, “I’m going to change from a banking career to a writing career six months,” and “I’m going to take a writing course and post online every day so I can open opportunities to transition into full-time writing.”

One focuses on the goal, the other on the process.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to give up your hopes, dreams and desires. But when you release control of how your goals become reality, it frees you to find different ways to reach them.

Usually, when we set goals, we’re specific about how and when we want it to happen. We then do everything in our power to make it happen in our timeframe. But it rarely works because there are too many factors we can’t control.

When your hopes and dreams don’t hinge on a particular path or person, you free yourself to look for paths you never imagined.

Accept Your Faults and Limitations

What would happen if you accepted yourself as-is, rather than beating yourself up for not being able to change?

When you obsess over (i.e. try to control) all your limitations, they’re all you see.

Any time you try to force change, you’re going to meet resistance. Nowhere is the more true than in yourself. Steven Pressfield wrote an entire series of books about the maniacal force called Resistance, that works against any artistic, entrepreneurial, or developmental endeavor.

When you accept your faults and limitations as something to work with and not against, you stand a better chance at creating change.

Rather than focusing on all the reasons you can’t change, you can focus on creating a system that leads to success.

Can’t stick to a gym routine? Arrange your drive to work so you have to drive by your gym to get there. Are you a writer who doesn’t write? Start an email newsletter that goes out twice a week. When you create a system that acts as a forcing function, it gives you a higher chance of success.

Accept and work with your limitations.

Let Go of the Need for Certainty

You make a bout 35,000 decisions each day.

To help mitigate the stress of making tons of choices, we create routines in life so we can get through our day on autopilot. That’s usually good. You get certainty about what you’re going to experience on a given day, cutting back on decision fatigue.

In our complex and overly-scheduled world, you need some certainty. But spend a year — or ten — on autopilot every day? You’ll wake up one morning and discover you’re living the same day over and over as the years fly by you.

In an effort to rid our lives of uncertainty, we build our own prison.

There’s an infinite field of possibilities in your life. Even though you might feel trapped, one (potentially scary) decision to do something different can set you on a different path.

When you let go of the need for everything in your life to turn out a certain way, you open yourself up to getting what you want in unexpected ways.

Deepak Chopra calls this the wisdom of uncertainty. He says, “In our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.”

Uncertainty is power.

Ditch Your Need for Control

I wish it was as easy as making a decision to just care less.

The truth is, learning how to detach from getting the outcomes in life that you want is hard. It’s something you have to consciously choose, every day, where to release control.

Some of the best things in life come without force. You don’t have to abandon your goals. It’s about being open to different possibilities for getting there.

There’s more than one path to the things you want in life. And if imposing. your will keeps ruining your life, why not try detaching from things you can’t control anyway?