Do you ever wonder why some people are able to move so steadily and successfully toward their goals? Their secret? They spend their energy and brain cells where they have impact! They work powerfully from within their sphere of influence while the rest of us are so often sticking our fingers in pies we will never be offered.

We squander a lot of our energy and create heaps of useless anxiety worrying over issues that are either out of our control or of incidental or irrelevant impact to our lives. It appears to be endemic to most of us to fret, meddle, angst and kvetch even when there is absolutely nothing to gain from this activity and when in fact, we are actually likely to be slowed or even derailed from our own successes by the effort. I am not writing of our response to large global issues over which we have no immediate control but which naturally and meaningfully engage our hearts and minds. I’m talking about the stuff of our daily lives that grabs our thoughts and distracts us from focusing on the goals we have set for ourselves. If you’ve ever worked on improving your balance, you’ll know exactly what I mean. You can try this simple exercise right now just to prove my point: With your shoes off stand on one leg and bend the other leg so that the sole of the foot lodges against the inside of the standing leg. If you’re very flexible you will be able to put the foot high up on the inside of the standing thigh. If you’re not so flexible, place it at knee level. Now, hold your balance while looking all around the room—let your eyes and your head turn as you notice anything that interests you. Look up, look around -- pretty wobbly, right? Now try the same exercise but this time, choose something to focus on and keep your eyes trained on the object. You probably found it much easier to hold your balance. You might even surprise yourself by how long you can actually hold the pose when your entire being is focused on one point. The same principle holds true in all our endeavors. We are good handmaidens to our own success when we stop looking around.

Learning how to let go of what you can’t control allows you to focus on what you can control. So the first step in regaining full energy and attention for your own initiatives is to get clear on what is outside your sphere of influence so you can discard it. Try these simple steps to help remind you of what is either irrelevant to your progress or perhaps relevant but entirely out of your own control. ï Restate for yourself what your goal is. If you are looking at your professional environment, whether the specific goal is short term ‘get this report completed by Monday,’ or longer term, ‘Increase fourth quarters sales by 20%,’ make sure you remind yourself of the task at hand. ï Look at where you are spending your time. Actually name the various activities that you are choosing to do—catch that distinction? If there are activities you must do because your boss has required them, so be it. So focus in on where you choose to spend your time and energy and rate both the relevance of these activities to your goal AND the degree to which your involvement can actually have impact. I like to use a simple 1 – 5 scale where 1 is low and 5 is high. So for every activity you will have two scores—one for relevance and one for impact. For example, let’s say you really want to push to reorganize the Marketing Department because you know this will have a great impact on the Sales Department where you work on commission. You are spending time and energy soliciting information and feedback from your peers about your idea, perhaps you are running budgets that explore what the financial upside of the reorg will be. These are both clearly of high relevance to your goal—maybe even 5s. Now let’s look at your impact. For starters, you’re not even in the Marketing Department and frankly, you don’t have much clout within the Sales Department either. It’s great to share your good thoughts but notice how they are received. The decision in this example is outside of your sphere of influence and you are better served to grow your sphere by choosing activities where your hard work has some impact. As soon as you get good at letting go, you will notice a remarkable thing: you will start to get equally good at assessing what you should hold on to!