What it is
Locus of control describes where you believe the outcomes in your life come from. People with an internal locus tend to believe their own choices shape what happens to them. People with an external locus tend to credit luck, fate, the system, or powerful others.
Neither one is healthy all by itself. An internal locus helps you act instead of wait. An external locus can protect you from blaming yourself for things that were never yours to carry.
How it shows up for me
Mine is internal, and sometimes too much. For a long time everything felt like it was happening to me. When I finally started treating my own choices as the thing I could change, everything reorganized.
Then I kept going. The internal locus of control, unchecked, became an internal locus of everything. I started carrying and absorbing everything, and calling it leadership. It wasn’t service. It was control wearing a sacrifice costume.
So now the work is splitting things in two: what I can actually move today, and what belongs to someone else or to circumstance.
Three questions I use
- What part of this is actually mine to move today?
- What am I calling acceptance that is really avoidance?
- What am I calling responsibility that is really control?
Go next
- On Leadership and Leadership-Adjacent Things, where I found the shadow in this.
- Honesty, because the questions above only work if I answer them truthfully.