We have all had the feeling: you are about to give a presentation, or meet a new person, or go to a party alone, and your palms are sweaty, you feel nauseous, and you think you look terrible. This is what being externally located feels like.
Your locus of control is an internal estimation of where you feel the control in your life is located. When you are internally located, you feel like you are the driver of your success. When you are externally located, you feel like you are looking at yourself from someone else’s eyes and you don’t really like what you see.
People who are internally located do better in every aspect of life. They have more success professionally, have more successful relationships, and generally have better overall well-being. Externally located people have more anxiety, seek fewer opportunities for advancement, and take fewer chances and risks.
Our locus of control is not fixed. We are all externally located in some things and internally located in others. The good news is, we can change from being externally to internally located.
This is Layer 2 work
Locus of control is one of the three programs in your Human Operating System (Layer 2), the psychological foundation that determines how you show up and perform. (Learn more about the Three Layers here.)
Your Externally Located Tells
The first thing you need to become aware of is when you are externally located. We all have our tells. For me, I know I am externally located when I become obsessed about what I am going to wear. In those moments, I hate all my clothes, and I need to go shopping immediately to find the right outfit so people will think… what am I trying to get them to think? I am looking at myself through other people’s eyes, and I have lost touch with myself.
How to Wrangle Your Locus of Control
When we are externally located, we are disconnected from our best self and the skill sets that make us successful. This comes with feelings of anxiety, depression, fear, insecurity, and envy.
To get out of that state and back into being internally located, you need to break down whatever you are externally located in into three levels of goals: Reachable, Stretch, and Hail Mary.
Let’s use public speaking as an example. Speaking in front of groups is very externally locating, and the more senior the group, the more stressful it can be.
Reachable goal: Know your material. If you have a reason to speak in front of a group, know what it is and what you are going to say. Practice until you know the material so well you can say it in your sleep. The reachable goal is to deliver the material in a clear and concise manner. Period.
Stretch goal: This is where you may add elements that are not only about the material. Perhaps you want to crack a joke, or look up and make eye contact with the audience every few seconds, or walk around the stage. Any of these are bonus features. You can deliver a successful talk without them, but you may want to add these in.
Hail Mary: This is the goal you are working toward but is not available yet. Perhaps you want to deliver your talk in such a comfortable way, having fun, engaging the audience, cracking jokes, that not only do you deliver the information, you look forward to public speaking and go out of your way to find opportunities.
The Hail Mary should be aspirational. The three-level goals to becoming internally located are, like locus of control itself, always moving. Once you get comfortable with the reachable, the stretch becomes the reachable, the Hail Mary becomes the stretch, and you create a new Hail Mary.
This three-goal system works for everything you will ever do that causes you to feel externally located.