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Radical Responsibility
Sigmund Freud focused on the unconscious mind and believed that much of our behaviour is driven by unconscious desires and conflicts rooted in childhood. But then there were a bunch of behavioural psychologists who started focussing on social context and cognition.
Locus of control is a concept coined by one of the behavioural psychologists and describes how much control people believe they have over the events in their lives. Think of Locus of Control as a scale. You don’t need to be 100% internal or external focused.
It’s clear that if believe that I’m in control of my own fate. Studying hard is taking matters in your own hands to influence a positive result.
If you aspire a more healthy lifestyle, focussing on more vegetables can help a lot. This is where you are in control of your own health as much as you can. It doesn’t guarantee that you will never be sick, it simply guarantees a more healthy lifestyle.
This is where you take things too far. A car accident is always unfortunate. Nobody starts his engine with the idea to be in a car accident a couple minutes later. It is unfortunate to be in that place at that time; but nobody could guarantee you that you wouldn’t have been in a car accident that day because you can’t control how others drive. Self-blame is unhealthy.
You win as a team and you lose as a team, simple as that. 4 games of football means 360 minutes of football. One moment in those 360 minutes doesn’t define that you were the reason why the team has lost 4 games in a row. Self-blame is unhealthy.
In this example, you might miss self-awareness. You believe that a promotion is given to you because somebody thought you deserved it despite you didn’t have the feeling you could deserve it. You leave your fate in the hands of others and sees what happens.
It feels that any excuse given would have been good enough to not go for a run. In this example you feel that you couldn’t go for a run; because the rain is blocking you from going.
Sometimes things are so huge that you can’t do anything about it. As a business owner, you have to follow the rules during a pandemic, there is nothing you can do about that. But accepting reality goes smoother when things are out of your control. This offers the opportunity to look faster towards other opportunities instead of dwelling on the bad luck.
Introducing the psychologist that developed the locus of control theory: Julian B. Rotter. Rotter typically is categorized under social psychology. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, cognitive psychology bloomed. But Rotter did something spectacular; he blended cognitive ideas with behavioural principles which eventually influenced social and cognitive psychology. His work, social learning theory, was foundational in bridging the gap between behaviourism and the cognitive revolution.
Rotter states that motivation of people defines their behaviour. But to understand the behaviour, it is important to take both the individual and the environment into account. Because people think and people react to the environment, their behaviour changes. Because of that personality and change is always changeable.
Keep in mind that Rotter developed the Locus of Control theory already in 1954.
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