UCanMakeItIfYouTry - You Can't Always Control What Goes On Outside, But You Can Always Control What Goes On Inside

You Can't Always Control What Goes On Outside, But You Can Always Control What Goes On Inside

-- Wayne Dyer

Life has a way of reminding us, often without warning, that we are not in charge.

The traffic jam that makes you late. The phone call that changes everything. The relationship that shifts. The plan that falls apart. The diagnosis, the layoff, the loss, the disappointment -- arriving on no schedule you approved, asking nothing about your readiness.

The outside world does not consult us. It never has. And one of the most liberating things we can ever accept is that it never will.

But Wayne Dyer, one of the most beloved teachers of personal growth and self-actualization, offered us the other half of that truth -- the half that changes everything:

You can't always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.

The Myth of External Control

So much of our suffering comes from trying to control what was never ours to control.

We try to control how other people behave. We try to control outcomes. We try to control the economy, the weather, the opinions of people we have never met, the pace of change, the behavior of institutions, the arc of events that were set in motion long before we arrived.

And when those things do not bend to our will -- which is always -- we feel frustrated, anxious, powerless, and afraid.

The problem is not that we care. Caring is human. The problem is that we have placed our sense of peace, our sense of safety, our sense of self-worth in things that were never stable enough to hold them.

External circumstances are, by their very nature, temporary and unpredictable. Building your inner life on top of them is like building a house on sand. The first storm reveals the problem.

The Power You Always Have

Here is what no circumstance can take from you: the power to choose your response.

Not your reaction -- reactions are automatic, reflexive, driven by habit and fear. But your response -- the conscious, deliberate choice about how you will meet this moment -- that is always yours.

You can choose how you interpret what happens to you. You can choose what meaning you assign to events. You can choose whether to let a difficult morning define your entire day, or whether to draw a line and begin again. You can choose to meet frustration with patience, fear with courage, loss with grief that eventually gives way to growth.

None of those choices are easy. But all of them are available to you, in every moment, regardless of what is happening outside.

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

Training the Inner World

Dyer spent decades teaching that the inner world -- our thoughts, our beliefs, our emotional responses, our sense of identity -- is not fixed. It is trainable. It is shapeable. It responds to attention, to practice, to the consistent choice to direct it rather than simply be swept along by it.

When you practice gratitude in the middle of difficulty, you are exercising inner control. When you choose to pause before reacting, you are exercising inner control. When you decide that your peace is not for sale -- that no person, no situation, no headline gets to determine whether you feel okay today -- you are exercising the most profound kind of control there is.

The outside world will keep doing what it does. Unpredictable. Indifferent. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, always beyond your full command.

But inside? Inside is yours.

You Can Make It

Whatever is happening outside your window today -- whatever circumstances you did not choose and cannot change -- remember this:

Your inner world is not subject to those conditions unless you allow it to be.

You get to decide what goes on inside. That decision, made again and again, is the foundation of a life that cannot be taken from you.

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Your Gift of Life Foundation is here to help you build that inner foundation. Visit us at www.yourgiftoflife.org.