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I need help. If you are feeling stressed and need some help sorting through the noise, this episode is for you. Welcome to the Upside podcast, where we help you get unstuck in life and business by elevating your thinking and provoking meaningful change from the inside out. Have you found that when you start to feel stressed or anxious or overwhelmed that much of the time it really has to do with. With feeling like things are out of control? I can tell you when I start to get that kind of pit in my stomach, start to feel anxious, start to feel stress, most of the time it's because I am focusing on things that I can't control the outcome for. And so, you know, I. I don't necessarily think that we're stressed or exhausted most of the time because life is too full. I think we're gripping things that sometimes we're not meant to carry. One of my very favorite books is by Stephen Covey, and it's a book that you, I'm sure, have heard of, called 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And if you have not read that, I. In my opinion, it's one of the best productivity classics of all time. It's been out for, I'm not sure, over 25 years. And if you haven't read it in a while, it might be one to pick up and dust off. But he teaches about the circle of concern and the circle of influence. And the way he describes that is think about the circle of concern as a huge circle. And it's everything that concerns you, everything that is important in your life, everything that you would care about in your life. So your family, the outcomes of your business, your finances, the world, politics, your business, your team, everything that is of concern to you falls into that circle of concern. But then there's a smaller circle inside that circle of concern, and that's called the circle of influence. And the circle of influence is smaller because that involves only the things that you have influence over. I want to take it even one step further and tell you that there is another circle inside the circle of influence, and that is your circle of direct control. See, there are things in our life that we have absolutely no control over. That's our circle of concern. There are things that we have influence over, meaning if we act or operate a certain way, we can affect the outcome, yet we don't necessarily control the outcome. We can influence it, but we don't control it. And then there's this small circle that is our circle of direct control. Small circle, ladies and gentlemen. And it really has to do with only things that involve me or only things that involve you? If it has to do with anybody else, we don't have direct control. So these would be things like our attitude, our mindset, what we choose to believe. We don't have control over our situation or our circumstance, but we do have control over the story that we tell ourself about it. We have control over our choices. We have control over our habits, what we choose to do, what we choose to respond with, the tone that we use. All of that falls into our direct control. So let me give it to you like this. So in business, let's just say in real estate, the market is our circle of concern. It matters to us when we're in. If you're in real estate, it matters, the market matters, it affects your business. And yet we don't control the market. Nothing that we do will control whether sellers are ready to sell, buyers are ready to buy. We don't control interest rates and everything around that. Our circle of influence, though, has to do with. We can educate our clients. We can have great consultative conversations that help them move forward. We can uncover their motivations, and yet we can influence them to make the right decisions that are gonna help them achieve their goals. But at the end of the day, it's their choice. So there's a circle of influence there. Inside of that, in our business, there's the circle of control that has to do with our skills, our preparation, our practice, our learning, our mindset, the approach that we have, the kinds of conversations that we have with those clients. So that's kind of how it looks in business. Think about it. In parenting, though, okay, being our concern is the choices that our kids make, especially as they get older. How. Who are these little people going to choose to become? What are they going to do with their lives? So that is all our circle of concern. We have influence as a parent about how they turn out. Right? We have influence around what we teach them. We have influence with the kind of environment that we set in the home. We have the influence around the energy that we create around certain hard conversations around discipline, around the freedoms that we give. But at the end of the day, we're only influencing. They're still making their choices. So what is our direct control that we have? Well, we have control over our time we spend with them. We have control over the tone we use, the words that we say. We have control over how we model and live authentically in front of our kids. That's a really much smaller circle, though, that we actually have direct Control over. Think about this. In leadership, if you're leading a team of people, let's say maybe you have a. An employee that's underperforming and it's causing great anxiety or stress to you. You're losing sleep over the fact that they're maybe not doing the job to the optimal performance. That's in your circle of concern. The circle of influence is how you have. You're able to do coaching conversations with them, right? You're able to give them the tools that they need, but yet they still have to respond and step up. What do you have in your circle of control is clarity around their role, clarity around their goals, specific metrics that they need. Right? All of those things are within your control. But so many times we lose sleep. Whether it's in our business, whether it's in our relationships at home, or whether it's in our leadership, we lose sleep. Sleep over the circle of concern or the circle of influence. So let's start with the circle of control, the very inner circle. And this is what we talk about all the time. On the upside, everything starts inside. If we want to see great results happen externally, it always happens inside to outside. This is where your power lives. Your circle of direct control is where your power lives. I can't control the market. I can control how prepared I am in the market. I can't control somebody else's reaction, but I can control my response to it. So when I'm stressed, almost always I've stepped outside, focusing on my circle of direct control. And sometimes when things get really uncertain and we're feeling like everything is spinning out of control, we try to grab onto things to control. We clean to feel in control. We micromanage, we organize. We do things to try to feel in control because feeling in control calms our nervous system. But realize that peace is not found in controlling everything. It's found in faithfully controlling what is yours to control. It is that direct inner circle of taking care of us. So when I control my tone, for example, I influence the temperature of the room. When I control my preparation, I influence confidence in the people around me. When I control my consistency, I influence trust with a client or a colleague or a spouse. If I cannot lead myself, I can't lead others, right? It's inside to outside. We've got to focus on the things that we can control. Remember, influence is earned. It's not forced. Sometimes we start and we try. We say we know we can't control the circle of concern, so we try to start with the Circle of influence. It's not where you start. You start with the circle of direct control. So the, the outer control, the outer circle of concern. It was spend just a moment here. These are again just to recap. These are the things we just really have no control over. You have no control over the weather, you have no control over the economic conditions of the country. You have no control over other people's opinions, what they choose to do, how they act, how everything turns out. We have control over activities, but outcomes oftentimes are a bit out of our control. So here is the hard truth. When we live in the circle of concern, when we live in the things that are not in our control, we will be reactive. We start blaming other people. Anxiety rises and influence will always shrink. If you desire to grow your leadership, get out of the circle of concern. Because influence increases when you focus on the first interior circle, that circle of direct control. So this is where most stress lives, is in that outer circle of concern. It's not in responsibility, but it's in misplaced responsibility. And here's what can happen. One of two things will happen. Either we sit here and it protects us almost from having to do anything because if we could just say, well, it's the market, or it's my husband's fault or my kids just won't do it, then it keeps us in a place of being a victim and it holds us hostage and we kind of like, well, I really can't do anything about it anyway, so what will be, what will be? Or we start trying to control things that we were never meant to control and we become a martyr. And both of those will SAP our energy and it will diminish our influence. Your life will work from the inside out every single time. So when you control what is yours to control, your influence will grow. When your influence grows, it's going to create less stress. And when you release the things that were never yours to control anyways, that's when you're going to find peace. So I just want to encourage you to take a moment to and to identify what is causing stress for you right now. Maybe it's a business situation, maybe it's financial, maybe it's something in one of your relationships or with your children. And write down what is causing you stress and then draw the three circles and say, okay, what about this? Am I caught having anxiety and stress over that is just not even in my control at all. What do I have influence over? And then what is in my direct control? What here is actually mine? What action can I take today? And then what do I need to release? And I have found in my life, when I start to feel stress, if I can identify exactly where that stress is coming from, it puts me back in the driver's seat. It puts me focused on the things that I need to focus on and helps me to release the things that really aren't mine to carry. So you don't need to control everything to live a powerful life. You just need to be faithful to do and control what is yours. And so that is what we have today for the Upside podcast. I am rooting and cheering you on as always. And we will do a teaching guide for this episode. It will come out on Thursday. And so if you have not subscribed to Teresa flood, there's a flood.com Be sure to do that and I'll send you a link to the training to the teaching guide on Thursday. And this is great for you to take as part of your journaling and your personal growth and to take it to the next level. I would encourage you to to take this content and to teach it to others. So if you're leading a team, if you're leading huddles, if you have coaching groups, take this content, make it your own and turn around and teach it, because that's how you will really internalize it and it will help you in your personal growth. As always, thank you for listening to the Upside. When you invest in your growth every single day, it will yield you great returns. Keep living on the Upside.