Circle of Influence – Focusing on what you can control or influence

Circle of Influence

Once again, Stephen Covey has captured and popularised a profoundly helpful concept in a very simple way.

The Circle of Influence, as popularized by Stephen Covey, actually delineates two concentric circles: the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence.

He says that we all have a “circle of concern” which encompasses all the things we care about (or even worry about). These range from global issues like climate change and international geo-political tensions, though to personal worries such as health, relationships, finances and events in our workplace.

Though we’re concerned about all of these things, there is actually only a small sub-set of them that we have any influence over. Covey names this sub-set the “circle of influence”. This sub-set contains the things we can actually change, and might include things like our personal habits, relationships, work performance, attitude, and so on.

The core message of this model is that we nearly all waste a whole lot of our time and mental energy reflecting on and worry about things that we don’t actually have any influence over, and we should instead focus our energy on the sub-set of things within our control.

When we spend our energy thinking and worrying about things that are ourside of our influence, we are clearly wasting our efforts as we can’t influence these things. In fact, focusing on them is not only futile, but it can also increase our stress levels and reduce our wellbeing, as well as reducing the energy and effort we have to spend on the things that we can actually influence.

So the lesson is clear. We should try and use our limited attention and energy to on the things that we can actually have influence over. If we do this, then we will be more effective at what we do, and have higher levels of wellbeing and imapct.

In the world of work, letting go of the things that we have no influence over and focusing on the things in our sphere of influence can bring great benefits. Not only does it lower of stress levels, it also ensures we use our time more effectively, usually leading to higher levels of performance. It also tends (perhaps through our reduced stress and increased performance) to improve work satisfaction, support improved work relationships and improve our experiences of accomplishment and empowerment.

NB – though the Covey explanation only has two concentric circles, our diagram has three. As with many others who use this framework with clients, we find it helpful to draw a bit of a disctinction between the things that individuals can fully control, and the things they can just influence.

The Serenity Prayer

There is also a Christian prayer that captures a lot of the sentiment behind the circles of influence. This is known as the “Serenity Prayer” and it has gained widspread enough recognition in the western world to be used in secular settings and conversations.

We assume similar invocations exist in other major religions, but we simply don’t know them, so don’t reference them here.

The serenity prayer takes several different forms and (per wikipedia) was popularised in the west in the 1930s. The version that we quote is as follows:

If we can get better at being aware of when we’ve been sucked into focusing on things out of our control, then we have a better chance of breaking out of those unhelpful ruminations. We think there are some nice links to meta-cognition and meta-emotion here, as well as the amygdala-hijack and Emotional Intelligence overall.

It might also be worth reading up a bit on wellbeing and perhaps the wheel of vitality.

You can listen to our podcast on emotional intelligence below, which might be helpful too. It focused on a specific view of EI, though others also exist:

This is a pretty simple and very helpful concept that we enjoy using in workshops and coaching conversation. 

However, like many simple things it’s not that easy to do. Convincing our minds to not focus on things we’re concerned about is hard. Doing this is another form of behaviour change, and all forms of behaviour change are difficult, for many reasons we discuss elsewhere.

It’s worth noting that our natural desire to find and solve problems is no bad thing. As humans, we love to solve problems. It’s what we do. We have a brain that’s evolved to this it. It’s what helps us survive. But we think our instinct to do this is less helpful in the modern world, than it was in the past.

We speculate that in our evolutionary past, we probably came across a lower proportion of things that we were concerned about which were not in our zone of influence, than we do now. In a world of instant connection, of 24 hour news cycles, of social media, we are constantly being informed about things to be concerned about. As a result, we think many people get overwhelmed by this. And we think this is one of the challenges of the attention economy we’re in now.

Given the increasing amount of things that we are regularly told we should be concerned about, we think the circle of influence model and the prayer of serenity are more important than ever.

Covey, Stephen R. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.” Free Press, 1989.

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