Mental Skills Monday: Control the Controllables

What's up, Cadre? Happy Monday. Here for another edition of mental skills Monday with myself, Garrett Westwell, your residential expert in sport and performance psychology. Just had a great workout on Martin Luther King Junior day. Had some off time. So wanting to just have a productive day, which I've done so far, I wanted to talk to you all about something that I think is really important, something I've talked about on here, but I think just could always use repeating and it's one of my favorite phrases to use it, and it encompasses so many different things because it's just great.

And that phrase that I want to share with you all is control the controllables. Maybe you've heard it before, maybe you haven't. I think either way, it just is a good reminder of what's important. All that phrase really mean is, means is it's pretty self explanatory and straightforward. Control what's in your control in your life? There's a lot of things that we get distracted by that we let our attention get pulled by that is outside of our control, simply put. So it's really important to, one, bring about the awareness of what is in my control.

And then number two, having the consistency and the discipline to continually put your focus towards those things and not let your distractions go towards things that are outside your control. So I work a lot with athletes and some examples for them in terms of what's in their control is similar to what a lot of us have in our control. That's our attitude, those inner sunglasses which I've talked about before, our effort, our preparation, all those different things, our behaviors, our actions, all those things are in our control.

And that's where our focus needs to lie. For athletes, a lot of things that are outside their control that they often get distracted by or frustrated by. Excuse me, are the weather. If you're playing football and the ball is wet, that sucks. But you need to adapt to it and control your preparations leading up to it. Or the referees, the judges, the umpires, you can't control them. Your teammates, you can't control them. The coaches and their decision making. You can't control them. The outcome, you can't control it.

The results. You can't simply can't control it. And I know it's an example for an athlete, but I think it applies to all of us. You can't control in the same way an athlete can't control their teammates for you. You can't control your co workers. You can't control directly their actions, their personalities. You can't control your response to them. You can't control in the same way an athlete can't control their, their coach. You can't control your boss. Or maybe you are the boss in your role and you can't control your employees directly.

What you need to do is focus on your behavior, your actions, and figure out what's in your control. Consistently apply your focus to what's in your control. Last thing I'll say for you all, unless anybody has any comments throughout this live, is I think it really helps to control your controllables because it all comes down to what you attribute things to. By controlling the controllables and focusing on what's in your control, you don't play the blame game. If something goes wrong, whether at work, personal life, family fitness, any, any domain of life, if something goes wrong, a lot of times we'll blame external factors.

We'll blame that person. We'll blame, oh, I didn't have time. We'll blame just so many different factors, right, that are outside of our control. And when we do that, it might make us feel better in the short term, but in the long term, we're not able to grow because we're focusing on things outside of our control. We can't fix them. Whereas if something goes wrong and there's parts of it that are in your control, number one, identify those, and number two, work on it to fix it. Okay? So if there's, if there's an issue at work in your family life, there's probably going to be a bit of external and internal factors that are outside your control or inside your control, right?

If struggling to come up with an example right now, but let's say, let's say your kid or your child, say your parent, your child comes home and they got a bad grade on a test. Hey, how'd your test go? I didn't do well. I got a dude. But the, you know, the teacher is just terrible. I don't like the teacher. It's all the teachers fault, right. I think either you can relate to that personally or you parenting a child who's done that. We've all kind of probably done a version of that. You can easily blame the teacher.

You can easily blame their teaching strategies, right? Ultimately, the teacher is their own person. You can't control them. What you can control is your effort within those classes and how you interact with and respond to that said teacher. You can control your preparation. So maybe go up and talk to the teacher. Have you tried that? Right. That's a lot better way. And you're going to get more done, and you're going to feel more in control, and you're not going to play the blame game with attributing all the things that happen in your life to factors outside of our control.

So that's all I have for you all today on this great Monday. It applies to athletes, it applies to performers, but I think it applies to all of us in that we can all do a better job, myself included, of controlling the controllables. It's one of my favorite phrases for a reason. So hopefully that simple and succinct phrase helps you all, and I appreciate you all being here, and I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you. Go out there and control the controllables.