Do you feel in control? 🤔 Does that matter?
As I interview lawyers for my book 📘 The Happy Lawyer, one of the things I'm interested in is CONTROL. How much control does each lawyer feel that they have over their life? Does that correlate with how happy they are? ☺
And (perhaps more importantly), if it does correlate, then is it also causative? If so, all we would need to do to increase someone's happiness is to increase their feeling of control?
Although some interesting stuff has been coming up, I'm not quite ready to say I've found an answer quite yet.
Fundamentally to all of this: WHAT IS CONTROL?
In his book Chatter, Ethan Kross talks about our perception of control and he describes control as "the belief that we possess the ability to impact the world in the ways we desire."
He says:
"In order for you to truly feel in control, you have to believe not only that you are capable of exerting your will to influence outcomes but that the world around you, in turn, is an orderly place where any actions you engage in will have their intended effect. Seeing order in the world is comforting because it makes life easier to navigate and more predictable."
So feeling in control requires the belief that:
You can exert your will and
The world is orderly and predictable.
I guess that makes sense. 🤔 Feeling the world is predictable but that you can't change a damn thing leaves you helpless. Feeling you can make a difference but you never know if the difference you're making is the one you actually want to make can leave you similarly frustrated. So basically, one without the other and you're still standing on shaky ground.
What do you think?
Did you feel in control in your life before reading this post? Does this framework of control change how you see anything?
And what's your hypothesis on whether a feeling of being in control is correlated with greater happiness?
This was today’s email. Like it? Join here: