Understanding What You Control BY JOHN BRUMMITT
“Be careful for nothing, but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7). And all of God’s people said amen! But then they left church, and worry and anxiety climbed into the car with them and rode home. Many people are prone to worry. Anxiety is often the result of worrying about the future. Stepping into the unknown is unnerving. The way most of us deal with our worry is through a sense of control, or rather, through our locus of control. Locus of control is a basic concept Julian Rotter proposed in the 1950s. Do you control your life, or does something else? This concept can be either internal or external. Internal locus is the belief that personal decisions and efforts directly affect the thoughts and behaviors of a person—that is, you control your reactions to situations and your environment. External locus is the belief that behaviors and thoughts are determined by outside influences or environments. Embracing an external locus of control tends to make you more anxious, since most things we face every day are beyond our control: people we encounter, the weather, car accidents, traffic, news, or the latest market report. For example, if you get stuck
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in traffic, drenched in a rainstorm, and then fussed at by your spouse, many people would say you are having a bad day. Your environment and things outside of your control cause you to have a bad day. Allowing things beyond our control to affect our thoughts and behaviors becomes a problem because we tend to focus and worry about things over which we have no control. When we try to deal with our anxiety by clinging to our own sense of control, we remain in constant fear.
BY WORKING HAND-INHAND WITH HIS PLAN FOR US, WE LIVE SUCCESSFUL LIVES.
Focus for a moment on just the retirement side of things: you know the future. Instead of using internal locus of control, the market dictates