We live in an era in which it seems that we have to have answers for everything: to know what will happen with our job, with our partner, with our children, with our finances, and even with what has not yet occurred. We want to anticipate. We organize, project, forecast scenarios, and try to minimize uncertainty. And although planning is healthy, there is a point where that need for control stops protecting us and begins to exhaust us.
In the consulting room I often see people who arrive tired not only because of what they are going through, but also because of everything they are trying to prevent from happening to them. That’s why I usually ask them a very simple question: “How much of what worries you today is actually happening, and how much is taking place only in your head?” The difference can be enormous.
The brain wants certainty
In the face of uncertainty, our mind tries to fill the gaps: it imagines scenarios, anticipates conversations, calculates consequences, and looks for answers. The problem arises when we confuse anticipation with preparation. Preparing means taking care of what we can act on; compulsively anticipating, instead, is trying to resolve today situations that do not yet exist.
That’s why I often tell the people who come to see me: “Don’t try to solve Thursday while you’re still living Monday.” There are conversations that haven’t happened yet, decisions that haven’t been made yet, and problems that perhaps never appear. Yet we can spend hours—even nights—trying to solve them mentally. That does not prepare us: it wears us out.
There is a fairly ingrained fantasy: “If I manage to control all the variables, I’ll be calm.” But life doesn’t work that way. We can organize our finances, take care of our health, work responsibly, and plan our future, and all of that is necessary. What we cannot do is guarantee how others will act or know exactly what will happen six months from now.
That is why there is a distinction I work on a lot in coaching and psychology: to differentiate control from responsibility. Being responsible means taking charge of my own affairs; controlling means trying to take charge of things that are not up to me. And when we try to control the second, a huge energy drain appears.
Three questions to return to the present
When someone arrives at the consultation room burdened by worry, we often focus on three questions: what is actually happening today, what part of this situation depends on me, and what is the next concrete action I can take? Not ten actions or solving the next six months: the next one.
Maybe it’s making a call, sending an email, organizing the accounts, keeping a pending conversation, asking for help, or simply resting and returning to the problem tomorrow. When we find that next action, anxiety tends to lessen because we stop fighting an imagined future and we regain the ability to act in the present.
Life is also built step by step
Over years of guiding people, teams, and executives I learned something I keep seeing again and again: many meaningful transformations don’t begin with a big decision, but with small, sustained choices. Getting a bit better at sleep, setting a boundary, tidying up finances, resuming a conversation, getting back to training, asking for help, saying no or finally mustering the courage to say yes.
We don’t need to have our life completely resolved to start feeling better; we need to regain the sense that we can handle the next step. That’s why there’s another line I repeat often in the office: “You don’t need to know how the movie ends. You need to know what your next scene is.”
Sometimes we confuse letting go with resigning. But letting go of control doesn’t mean stopping action: it means acting with all our capacity on what depends on us and accepting that there is a part of life we cannot manage. Paradoxically, when we stop trying to control everything, we regain something far more important: our ability to choose how we want to live what we are going through.
Perhaps we cannot decide all circumstances, but we can ask ourselves every morning: What depends on me today? And start there.
*Santiago Bras Harriott is an executive coach
