The Circle of Control

A simple framework for dealing with stressful situations, and building resilience.

Simon Cross

Jul 31, 2023

TL;DR:

Circle of Control: Focus your time and energy on these things, as you have direct control over them.
Circle of Influence: Do your best to sway things in your favour, but don’t stress if things don’t go your way; you never had the power to choose.
Circle of Interest: Follow events, but recognise you can’t control or influence them. Instead, find the subset of things you can control or influence.

In November this year, as I was winding down from my time at Meta, the company announced its first ever round of layoffs. Suddenly, my focus shifted from winding up my projects to helping people process what was happening and why.

Over those last two weeks, I had many many of conversations which followed the same form: Why is this happening to me? What can I do about it? What could I have done to prevent it?

To navigate these discussions, I dusted off an old framework I’d learned about more than a decade earlier: The Circle of Control.

Several folks told me later it was one of the most useful tool they’d used to frame the situation in which they found themselves. It helped them refocus their energy onto the things that really mattered - the areas where they could make a difference.

Not only did it help people in this situation, it’s useful in life in general - so I thought it might be useful to share here.

The technique is to group things that are causing you anxiety or stress into three simple categories. Each one gives you a mental model that helps you modulate your approach - and clear actions you can take to navigate the situation.

Imagine three concentric circles:

Circle of Control — These are the things you can directly control. You should worry about the things in this circle because you can control them.
Circle of Influence — This is where you place the things you can’t directly control, but you think you can influence. You should do your best to influence them, but if things don’t go your way, don’t waste energy stressing about it — it was never in your control in the first place.
Circle of Interest — These are things that affect you, but you can’t influence or control them. Don’t waste energy trying to stop them happening — you can’t. Instead, focus on ensuring you’re prepared if they do; invest your time only on the things you can control.

These three categories are simple but insanely powerful.

Anxiety is often driven by feeling powerless and helpless. What this framework gives you is a way to simplify things, identify what you can and can’t do, and start taking actions accordingly.

Similarly, resilience is about being able to handle whatever gets thrown your way. For me, that’s about having frameworks that turn situations which are messy and complex into ones which are simple and clear. The Circle of Control can help with that.

Let’s look at a few example:

Earthquakes. You can’t stop earthquakes happening, and you can’t influence their timing, strength, or location. Earthquakes are firmly in the Circle of Interest. But you’re not entirely powerless. You can control if you live in a seismic area, or you can control if you have an earthquake survival kit ready at home. Perhaps you’re able to influence local government policy to ensure new buildings are earthquake-ready, or mandate people take out earthquake insurance.
Layoffs. Unless you’re in senior management you can’t control if your company needs to lay people off. And you can’t, generally, control who they choose to lay off. You may be able to influence the need for layoffs (by building and selling great products), or perhaps influence the company’s decision to keep you on (by being a high-performer). What you can control are things like keeping your resume and linked-in profile up to date, maintaining or growing your network by attending industry events such that in the event that the worst happens, you’re well positioned to find your next role.
How you spend your workday. If you’re a knowledge-economy worker you probably have at least some control over your calendar. You might be required to attend some meetings like All Hands (circle of interest), but most you can probably move or decline (circle of control). Some others you might be able to owner the owner to move, skip, or decline if your attendance isn’t required (circle of influence).
Diet. One of the areas you have most agency over is what you put in your mouth. This is very clearly in the circle of control. If you’re going to a friend’s for dinner, and if there’s things you don’t like you could ask them not to cook them for you (circle of influence). Or your attending a conference and there’s buffet lunch. You can’t control or influence the selection (circle of interest) but you can choose what you eat. If you have very specific requirements (e.g. a nut allergy) perhaps you anticipate this and bring your a packed lunch of your own (move this problem back into the circle of control.
Roadmapping. Your latitude here will depend on your role & level — You perhaps can’t control or influence your company’s planning cadence and timeline (e.g. quarterly) but you might be able to change how the process runs (circle of influence), and you can likely determine how your own team will roadmap (circle of control).
Remote Work. You might not have any say over your company’s approach to remote or hybrid working (circle of interest), but perhaps you can decide which days you go into the office (circle of control), or which days your team agrees everyone should go in (circle of influence).

What goes in which circle depends a lot on who you are, what your role is, and the powers you have available to you.

But I cannot tell you how many times this framework has helped me (and many others) get my head around a stressful situation, and distill it down into:

Things you can control,
Things you can’t control but can try and influence,
things you can’t control or influence — and identify the things you CAN do to prepare.

You are very rarely powerless.