Empower Yourself and Gain Energy by Shifting Focus to What You Can Control

This image was inspired by management guru Stephen Covey who introduced the concept of Circles of Concern versus Circles of Control. I love it for so many reasons, including that it’s really helpful for visual learners.

If you want to live your life on purpose and be proactive, spend the bulk of your time, energy and attention on the light pink inner Circle of Control. However, what many of us do is spend the bulk of our time, energy, effort and thought life on the dark pink outer Circle of Concern.

I love that Covey called the outer circle the Circle of Concern because we have every right to be concerned about those things. They’re important. But we can’t control them.

When we’re proactive, we have a small Circle of Concern and a large Circle of Control. That is, we spend a lot of time and energy focused on issues that are within our control. When we’re reactive we have a large Circle of Concern and a small Circle of Control. That means we’re expending so much energy on things outside of our control that we have almost no energy left for things that are within our control.

In recovery language, we’d say the Circle of Concern is “people, places and things” and that this is a good depiction of the Serenity Prayer. We need courage to deal with…