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If you believe the events in your life are driven mostly by forces outside your influence, like luck, chance, other people, the system, fate, or even a self-abdicating label, then you operate from an external locus of control. Life happens to you, and you see yourself less as an agent and more as a witness, having little or no part in how your outcomes unfold.
If you believe the events in your life arise mostly from your own actions, interpretations, tolerances, and decisions, you operate from an internal locus of control. You see yourself as self-determining. Life happens through you. You’re the primary author of your outcomes.
Both positions can be applied to successes and failures alike. Someone with an external locus might believe they passed an exam not because of their preparation, but because the marker was in a good mood. Or if they failed, because the marker must have been in a bad one. In both cases, the power of outcome was attributed to something outside of their own making.
Someone with an internal locus is more likely to attribute outcomes to what they did: their effort, consistency, or discipline. They hold themselves to account.
Of course, reality is messier than either extreme. Life is always a complicated mixture of you and genuinely not-you. No human governs everything that happens to them, and nobody floats in the wind with zero agency either, even if they feel that way.
So the critical question isn’t whether external influences exist, because clearly they do. Nor is it whether you determine everything that happens before you, because obviously, you don’t.
The question is whether you are attributing responsibility accurately.
Because repeatedly attributing causes to something that doesn’t exist, or is no longer present, or doesn’t affect you in the way you believe, for the patterns you are fuelling beneath your awareness will keep you exactly where you are: trapped by your own making, and wilfully helpless to change it.
Blaming—the habit of relocating your power onto something not-you, and calling it the cause— is a prison of your own device.
You Are Always Authoring Yourself
I argue that no matter what you believe, you are always authoring yourself, even though you don’t know you are, and even when you could swear blind you’re not.
Beliefs precede behavior, behavior creates outcomes, and outcomes become evidence. This is how your chosen locus of control recruits its closest accomplice: the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Consequences prove the belief that produced them, because we are observers of the projections we create. And I don’t mean that in a hocus-pocus way. I mean it in the plainest, most practical sense.
If you believe you are powerless, you think and act as if you are. You will permit things to happen that you might have prevented or corrected. You will tolerate people and situations you could have challenged. When the outcome is poor, you can point to it as proof that you were right all along.
In other words, if you believe the cause of your outcomes lives out there, then you’ll experience it as such, but your belief in its power is still your decision. The power isn’t stolen from you: you consent to relocate yours outward, then witness it as if that’s where it came from.
Now consider the inverse.
If you believe you can influence what happens in your life, then you begin to think and behave as if your actions matter. You become proactive, you prepare, eliminate, intervene, you tolerate far less bullshit from people, you correct your own behaviour faster, and you fix or leave bad situations earlier. You stop waiting for permission from elsewhere and simply grant it to yourself.
When you act on your own behalf, situations start going the way you’d rather they went, and again, you collect evidence that your belief was right.
Both mindsets generate proof, but one blinds you to your own authority, and the other restores your sight.
The superior wager is to bias your beliefs towards an internal locus of control: subjectively, because it restores agency and feels more empowering, and objectively, because it aligns you to how cause and effect actually operates. Internalizing your locus of control means you and causality can now work on the same team.
Remember, you are never not choosing; you are only choosing from different lenses of awareness.
Of course, uncontrollable events do unfold. Life can be brutal, randomness is real, and other people can meddle. The point isn’t to pretend you govern everything, because this is as delusional as believing you govern nothing. But in these moments, it pays to know exactly what remains under your command anywhere you find yourself: you.
Keep the boundary between self and other. Leverage the sovereignty of your own mind.
In moments of external chaos, or loss, or pressure, I return to a meditation like this:
Everything outside of my mind is simply information, nothing more. Events, words from others, bodily impulses, and even pain are raw data. Only I ascribe what something means to me, and even then, I reserve the right to question it. The faculty of choice exists solely inside a protected space in my mind, which nothing else can enter. Only I determine who I am, how I am, and the quality of my actions. I authorise myself as free, no matter where I am, and that freedom requires I command myself.
It’s a hardcore stance, but it continuously pays for me.
You don’t control everything, but you do control your relationship to everything: through your interpretations, your meaning-making, your personal authority, your standards, your permissions, your next move. This realisation affords you buffers and boundaries between you and the not-you. Nothing gets to penetrate your mind unless you grant it entry. Nothing gets to stay unless you feed it. Nothing gets to leave unless you choose to release it.
And now for a harder truth.
That slow-drip, background ache of life you’ve been seeking to escape is often the natural byproduct of unexamined choices whose consequences you’ve been incorrectly attributing outward.
This isn’t your fault; it’s just an unhelpful belief, and beliefs can change.
But there is a price of admission.
Internalizing your locus of control requires clearing a difficult hurdle, especially after a lifetime trained into external explanations and instant gratification.
You don’t receive your upgrades first and then decide to work for them in arrears. This isn’t how cause and effect works. Life can’t upgrade itself for you and then hand you the wheel.
It works the other way around.
You decide first that you have influence, then repeatedly act on it, even when you don’t fully believe it yet, and even when reality doesn’t reward you for a long while. You take responsibility for everything you can control, then give reality time for the consequences of your new actions to compound. Only then do you receive proof.
This only works on a timescale that rules out any hope of immediacy: months, perhaps years. Tricky, especially for someone conditioned into addiction. But you don’t solve a shortcut problem with more shortcuts, and this is precisely how to decondition out of it.
Agency is a skill, and like any skill, it inherently contains early discomfort. New skills take multiple rounds of failure before you develop competence, which demands persistence and patience. So don’t quit in the phase where your new actions are only starting to change the scenery. Give it time, and the evidence will confirm the truth: you were the one creating it.
Internalize your locus of control, and allow your new, better consequences plenty of space to build in while the old, bad ones wash out.
When you inherit your life back from the mercy of the out-there, that tap stops dripping the misery you never had to live with. Joy may even start to drip through instead.
There’s no need to run from a life that no longer feels relentless.
Eventually, you’ll be able to say with full awareness:
I, with G-d's help of course, can make good things happen.
And as it turns out, this is exactly where I belong.
