Hey everyone, and welcome to today's episode of Developer Team.
My name is Jonathan Cottrell and my goal in the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective and purpose in their careers.
Today, we're talking about control.
We're talking about control, and when I say control in this particular sense, I don't necessarily mean you having a direct manipulation of outcomes.
Instead, I'm talking about a more kind of a more academic version of control.
Specifically, we're talking about locus of control in today's episode.
So when psychologists talk about locus of control, they're describing where you believe control of your life and outcomes in your life comes from.
So if you lean external, all right, so you have internal and external locus of control.
If you are, if you, if you uh believe that your uh, that control happens uh, outside of you, that you don't control your outcomes, that largely, whatever happens to you um, is it's by luck or it's by some external forces or factors that mostly shape your life, then you have an external locus of control.
And then, if you lean internal, then you believe that your own actions, or your choices, your effort, your intentionality, that is what controls the most of the outcomes in your life.
So, of course, the truth is that both of these things are true, that you influence the outcomes in your life and there are external influences on the outcomes in your life.
Why does this matter, though?
Which one of these is better?
Which one of these is more helpful to you in your career is what we really care about.
We don't necessarily care about identifying the perfect ratio to reflect reality.
Instead, we want to adopt a mindset that is useful.
It's helpful in our careers.
So hopefully you can see that most likely, if you were to develop an external locus of control, then the error that you might make okay, this is very important to understand and why we're going to talk about, why we're going to kind of push you in one direction in this episode.
It's not just descriptive, it's actually instructive.
In other words, you think that everything that happens to you is the result of some random effect, some external influence that you do not necessarily have input into it.
If that was your perception, then the error you might make is not taking action when you care about the outcome on something that you do have control over.
Remember, base reality, you do have influence on outcomes in your life, right?
How much influence is highly dependent and fluid, but you certainly have influence.
And so if you were to develop a universal belief that external, you know that locus of control is externally located.
In other words, You are not the primary determinant of outcomes in your life.
If you believe that universally, then the error you make is you don't necessarily believe that any of your actions affect your outcomes, even when they do.
Now, let's look at the opposite.
Let's make a wager here.
Which one of these is better for you?
Imagine that you believed that all outcomes were your own responsibility, that no external factors played into them at all.
Which one of these is better?
Well, in that case, you may go over the top with your actions.
And the things that you can't control.
Perhaps you incorrectly attribute your actions to some failure, even though it didn't necessarily have anything to do with what you chose to do.
But you don't miss out on the opportunity to impact or influence in the areas that you can.
This is a very simplified model, of course.
There are certainly trade-offs if you were to go extreme in either direction.
The trade-off in going extreme to the internal is that you may burn yourself out.
You may try to do more than you really have the influence over, or you may do more than you necessarily need to.
You're working kind of into a void because certain parts of your work is going nowhere.
It's not really necessarily having any impact at all.
Yeah.
And of course, we're ignoring the fact that some of these things are may interact with each other.
In other words, the effort that you spend on things that you don't have control over may change the things that you do that you do have control over.
Right.
But in a very simplified model.
If you had a fully internal versus a fully external locus of control, then you're more likely to impact, to have a positive impact on the outcomes that you care about.
If you were to just leave it up to chance, then you are much more likely to have no impact on those outcomes.
Now, because the average person.
There's an airplane flying overhead, so you all can hear that the average person is more likely to experience success in their life, as a People who tend to be successful also tend to have more of an internal locus of control.
So this kind of suggests that it is probably a good idea for us to shift our locus of control to be more heavily internal.
Essentially, all this really means is developing a belief that you have influence and impact over the outcomes in your life.
So, in other words, you are faced with a scenario and the simplified way of thinking about this is is that thing happening to you, or are you interacting or acting in that situation?
Most people would intuitively say well, of course I'm acting in the situation, but they may not necessarily have a full understanding of the impact they can have in that situation.
I see this all the time in my career with engineers who feel like they're stuck in their careers.
They feel like they're stuck in their role at a given company, that they're stuck with bad processes, for example, on their team.
And they have not necessarily explored many routes at all for improving those processes.
They haven't really had a conversation with their manager, for example, about what they would like to do to help make things better.
My guess is that the avenues that they've explored have been largely the ones they believe they have control over.
But they haven't really necessarily interrogated whether the things they have control over might be more expansive than they originally thought.
And I'm here to encourage you as, whether you're a manager, an engineer, maybe you're not an engineer yet and you want to become one.
I want to encourage you by saying you have more influence than you think you do, first of all.
This is almost universally true.
Most people underestimate their influence.
You probably have more influence than you think you do.
Even if you don't currently have it, it's likely that more influence is accessible to you.
This is a very important point.
Locus of control is not a fixed quantity.
This is not something that can't change.
This is not something that is inherited or genetic necessarily.
Certain aspects of it certainly are impacted.
In our childhood we can develop a sense of agency or control over things, or a lack of agency or control.
Different events in our life may inform us of this.
But there's very good research saying that people's locus of control.
Even without trying to change it, it can be impacted.
So it's very likely that if you intentionally try to change your locus of control, you could have a measurable impact on that.
So how are we going to do this?
We're going to do a couple of exercises.
I'm going to give you a couple of exercises to do.
And these are based on research.
There's not a ton of research on the idea of intentionally changing a locus of control, but it is mixed in with other types of reframing research.
You know, one good example of this and this is not something that I can provide, certainly not something you can get through a podcast but cognitive behavioral therapy CBT, is shown to improve locus of control, especially for people who have kind of like a learned helplessness.
You know, those are situations where you may want to seek actual professional help and it is effective.
Particularly CBT has been shown to be effective.
And we're going to do another kind of... It's an attribution exercise.
And what this exercise does...
I want you to take out your calendar or review.
You know, the last kind of two or three events that occurred, maybe in Slack or something, somewhere where you felt like.
And another good example is you go back and look at the cards that you may have added to a retro.
Let's say you're on a team and you have sprints and you do retros at the end of your sprints, or you do retros during every month, or something like that.
Go back and look at the cards that you've put in your retro.
These are good kind of barometers for your personal locus of control.
Does the card kind of approach or does your retro interaction kind of approach things from the perspective of here's things I would like to change.
Or does it approach things from the perspective of here's what's happening to me?
It's possible that that's reflective of your locus of control.
So What we're going to do is we're going to look at two aspects, okay?
Two aspects.
One is whether or not your efforts will change things, right?
And two, are things changeable, right?
So will my effort change it?
And is it changeable?
People tend to have an automatic response or an automatic kind of fast evaluation of a given circumstance.
And they may believe you know by default that things are not changeable, that most of our outcomes are a result of fate, right?
That it's a fixed outcome, right?
And so it's very stable, a stable outcome.
And that my skill set can't adapt to the point where I could change that outcome.
So the wall is immovable and I'm unable to move things.
Either one of those kind of fundamental beliefs may limit your ability to to impact the situation.
And again, this is not necessarily reality.
It may be that you actually do have the skill or the necessary capability to change things.
And it may also be that things are changeable, right?
That the outcome is actually fluid.
It's unstable.
So that's the opposite.
The opposite.
You know, kind of the representation of an internal locus of control.
Might be that I am capable.
And then if I'm capable, it is also movable, right?
The outcome is changeable.
It's dynamic.
It is an unstable outcome.
In this world, we actually want unstable outcomes because that means that they can be influenced right.
So I want you to take a look at these, these events or retro cards, whatever it is that you choose to kind of review, right?
Don't, don't try to look forward because um, or at least yet, you want to look back at your behavior and interrogate yourself.
Write down, uh.
One way to do this is to write down one part of the situation that was external to you and write down two or three parts that were within your control.
Even though you discounted it.
If you were to really actually think about it, if you were to really consider whether there's anything you could do, that it would go on this list.
And so what this should do is it should reinforce that it's very unlikely that any given thing that you experience in your career is fully out of your influence, fully out of your control.
There may be occasions where the outcome is largely impacted by something out of your control, but in most day-to-day circumstances you have more influence.
You have more capacity or capability of changing things and the outcomes are more unstable than we believe they are.
So what this does over time is it helps you interrogate your default beliefs.
And hopefully the next time you encounter a similar circumstance, you may trip over your thinking.
That's the intent.
We're trying to throw tripwires into our automatic beliefs.
So then we can kind of begin to rewire, begin to interrogate.
And begin to question and recalibrate to what may actually be more true.
And even if it's not necessarily, because again, it's hard to say exactly what is true here.
But it is more useful to believe that you have the capacity to change things, right?
And that's because of that wager that we talked about at the beginning, that it is, generally speaking, more preferable for you to try to change things and some things not be changeable, than to not change anything or not exert any effort and miss out on opportunities where things are indeed under your influence.
So I want to be clear about something here.
These outcomes that we're talking about, we're not necessarily talking about changing the world for the better or something like that.
This isn't just altruism.
This is also things that you care about personally, outcomes that you are invested in.
Right.
So this is anything that you may want in your career or you may want to be true in the world.
It is likely that you have more potential for influence than than you think you do.
So this, this first exercise, is this attribution exercise that you're going to kind of try to identify that the outcome is more unstable than you originally thought and that you are more capable than you originally thought.
There's some good research showing that if you can focus on your strengths, then you're more likely to believe that you have more control.
And the reason for this is that there's kind of an underlying connection between your effort and the visible outcomes of your effort.
You being able to see that when I did this thing, I had some impact on my environment.
I had some impact on the outcome.
And so if you observe that happening over time, especially repeatedly, and if you observe yourself improving or being able to handle more and more complexity, more and more difficulty harder bigger, more things, then you're more likely to believe that your efforts actually do matter to your outcomes.
Well, if you can align your actions to your strengths, then you're more likely to have efficacy in your actions.
This is a very simple idea.
Do the things that you're good at and you're more likely to succeed at those things.
Right.
So when you succeed, it kind of begins this cycle of, well, I did something.
It went well.
Therefore, I impacted the outcome.
So you want to kind of determine what areas have you had success in?
What areas have you been effective in?
And try to operate in those areas as often as possible.
This will help you continue to develop more and more of a sense of an internal locus of control.
So the first exercise again is this attributional or attribution exercise, where you're looking specifically at the stability and your capability in a given circumstance.
The second exercise is to look at your... You can look at the same events.
You could look at maybe, your future work and try to identify which of that work feels like it's aligned to what you're naturally good at, things that you feel like you can have a very good, a strong impact because that's going to reinforce that internal locus of control belief.
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea.
Hopefully you can kind of understand what the value is of an internal locus of control and that you believe that you can shift that over time.
My goal here is not necessarily to convince you that you have control over every circumstance.
That is actually very much so not the case.
We very often are impacted by random events, by effects outside of our control.
But the question remains, what should we do?
What should we do in a given circumstance?
How should I behave?
How can I operate in a way that is going to be most effective to getting the things that I care about?
And this internal locus of control, I believe is one of the most important ways of thinking about how you should behave given a circumstance.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you enjoyed this episode, please join us in our Developer Tea Discord community.
Head over to developertea.com slash discord.
You can join totally for free.
It will always be free.
You can also find us on YouTube.
If you're listening to this as a podcast, there's also a YouTube video up for this.
And, of course, you can subscribe to the podcast and whatever podcast app you're listening to currently.
Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, enjoy your tea.
