3 Ways to Increase Your Internal Locus of Control
If you feel like you’re in control of your life and your destiny, you may make a great entrepreneur. People with an internal locus of control generally feel this way. The opposite of this would be people who have an external locus of control. Those people feel like life happens to them. In other words, they feel they have little control over their future and that random or outside-generated events of life are the main causes of success or failure.
If you plan things in your life, believe that you are where you are because of your actions, and see a direct link between your behaviors and your success or failure in life, you may have an internal locus of control.
So how do you increase your internal locus of control? Here are 3 techniques you can apply:
1) Change the Blame Game
Reflect back to moments that caused you distress. When you dropped a bag of groceries, who did you feel was at fault? The time you backed up and bumped into another car. Was that the fault of someone in your car who was distracting you? When you did poorly on a test, was that because the teacher was a poor instructor?
We all have moments of distress in our lives, and how we justify the fault says a lot about our locus of control. If you found yourself in similar situations described above, now think of how you could’ve prevented the situation from happening. Did the grocery bag drop because it was poorly packed, or did you fail to carry it properly, poorly packed or not? When you backed up into the car, was it because you allowed yourself to be distracted instead of focusing on your effort to exit a parking lot? Was your poor performance on the exam a result of not adjusting to how the teacher instructs and that’s what led to your poor results?
The point is not to uncover the “truth” or feel guilt in each of these situations. Rather, what is the mindset you resort to when a moment of distress occurs? You can increase your internal locus of control by learning to taking responsibility of the outcome of a situation rather than shifting the blame to someone or something other than you.
Positive affirmation for young entrepreneurs.
2) Take Charge
Imagine your future goals and the path you’d like to take to get there. Does that path consist of thoughts like “if this happens”, “I hope they will see my effort”, or “ it will take some luck”? If so, you have an external locus of control. You see any future success in what you are trying to accomplish as dependent on someone else or an event to happen.
To increase your internal locus of control, change your thoughts to “when I make this happen”, “when they see my effort”, or “determination, not luck will take me to my future goals”.
A high school student asks questions about her project.
3) Embrace Failure
Take failure as an opportunity to learn. Failure is never welcomed, but it’s most likely to happen sooner or later when we try to accomplish something that’s challenging. People with an external locus of control look at situations and the probability of failure. If they believe there’s even a slight chance of failure, they’ll avoid the situation. But it’s difficult to accomplish much in life if the fear of failure drives you to avoid situations.
If you want to increase your internal locus of control, go out and do something that you know will result in failure. It may be running in a 10k race. Or asking a server in a restaurant to have your meal prepared differently. Over time, you’ll learn that having failed in an effort is not as bad as you thought it was going to be. And if you follow up after each failure and tell yourself the failure was a result of your poor preparation, lack of good communication skills, or something else you can improve, you’ll be on the path to increase your internal locus of control.
The stronger your internal locus of control, the more rewarding you will find life. You’ll no longer feel the need to blame others or be fearful of doing interesting activities, and you’ll find those around you will admire your sense of self and how you now are the master of your destiny.