8 Steps to Regaining Control of Your Life in an Uncertain Society

The quickening or the unravelling of the world as we know it leaves us with a sense of being out of control in an uncertain society. Many of us experience anxiety, worried about what will be, depression, experiencing hopelessness, weighed down by the heaviness of the big and pressing issues of the day and isolation – not least because it is daunting to engage with an uncertain world and so we withdraw into our own. But in these experiences are the clues of what each of us needs to regain a sense of direction in our lives:

Anxiety (mainly as regards the future and how the present evolves into it) 

Depression (mainly as regards what is, but also about the past and its effects on the present)

Isolation – disconnected

What follows are eight steps you may find helpful in effortlessly regaining a sense of control, or more precisely, power in recognising an inner awareness and direction in your life.

1. Recognise that fear is a spell

Fear is a spell. Once it served as an inner warning signal. Now, fear is for the most part an emotion that keeps us caged. Don’t feed the fear. To break free, you will need to come out of the trance that fear places you in.  Find out what sends you into this trance and how you can notice you are under its spell. Snap out of it. Choosing whether to stay under the spell cast by fear or to emerge from its grip…is only available to you once you notice that the bars on your cage are fiction. A big part of your power is to act. Carve out what you can do.

2. Locate your power within and not externally

Locating power outside yourself leads to anxiety and despair. Power is not an external force but an inner ability. Every time you see an institution as powerful, what you see is the reflection of your own power that you just gave it. When you give social media your time, scan it for trends or locate yourself, you are giving your power away. Corrupting your power into a force exerted against yourself. Locate your power within. Find what empowers you.

3. Place yourself at the centre

Being of service, being selfless, might seem noble. That’s because it is. But often, it leads to forgetting that we are part of the context that we are being of service to. To attend to ourselves as part of, rather than as outside, of that context it is helpful to place yourself at the centre, or, as David Whyte enjoins us in his poem, ‘Stay Close In’ – always stay close in to your thoughts and feelings. Regaining control of your life depends on having access to the information held ‘close in’ within your body and emotions.

4. Go with the flow

Resistance keeps us locked in an old dynamic. To go with the flow is an inner experience. It is not one of aligning yourself with external forces or people. To quote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi “The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.” (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience) Go with the flow, not as in ‘let things happen’ or ‘let other people tell you what to do’, but as you stay close in, notice the path of flow from where you are to where you wish to be. Rather than trying to control what happens, spending your all in the process, follow the river’s way and allow it to carry you downstream.

5. Dream the future

We invest so much energy in looking back with a critic on our shoulders; looking at what is and finding fault. Dreaming the future into being is to invest our energy in what we want. The dilemma we face is how to be attentive to all that is happening while being grounded in reality and actual personal experience. The key is to simultaneously dream bigger – “stepping into the shoes of our future selves’ as psychologist Hal Hershfield explains “is akin to being able to realise ..the ramifications of our decisions.” (2009 study in Judgment and Decision-Making) Guide the choice of where you want to aim not by your fears but by what you value. Create the future from there.

6. Get comfortable with the unknown

Getting comfortable with the unknown is an attitude and intention on an axis of love (to paraphrase Jimmy Hendrix). It takes a daily discipline of love to separate the wheat from the chaff, the feelings based on what is happening in the here and now from the feelings that are triggered by a past memory, or just feelings that come up in a fleeting moment and almost immediately move on. As you rise up on the axis of love, you will become increasingly comfortable with the unknown.

7. Trust in your future self

To trust in your future self is to develop confidence in your own future behaviour.  This is a struggle between the present and the future. It may be that the human brain prioritises immediately rewarding options over a later payoff, but when we trust ourselves enough that we believe we won’t give in to a craving or temptation, the craving stops.  Trust in our future selves to do what the future requires, is also a trust in the ability of our future selves to read the landscape, assess it correctly, decide what is needed and act on it with the more accurate information that will be known in that time.

8. Create or maintain a routine

Routines establish a pattern of evidence your brain then observes. It allows us to hope and imagine the change we want to live in. If you want to become a transformative self, able to change what you want, you will want to create or maintain a routine. Any routine will do – so long as you replace a downward spiral with an upward one.

Here’s how it works:

Step one: Choose a simple rule for yourself, one so simple and clear that you can’t possibly fail.

Step two: Make sure you follow step one.

To find out more about regaining your sense of self-trust by creating a routine, read Jeff Wise in To Change your life, learn how to trust your future self’

I hope you will find the discipline and generosity that allows you space to explore these eight steps. To hold in equal measure the poles of dreaming the future and being really present in the now, will create the space for you to lead yourself into a future that is within your reach today.

Author’s Bio

Lea Misan is an accomplished consultant in systemic psychotherapy and process-oriented psychology who is passionate and dedicated to helping people involved in conflict, abuse, trauma and in leadership positions. She is also a Facilitator, Trainer, Coach, Founder, and Director of the mental health charity Act for Change.

A firm believer in continuous learning and development, Lea holds an LLB in Law from the London School of Economics. She is a Fellow in Holocaust Education with the Imperial War Museum and a Fellow with the School of Social Enterprise. Lea is the author of two books, ‘A Body’s Call to Presence’ and ‘The Tribe Within’ (publication due in June 2023).

Website Link https://leamisan.com/