If It’s Out of Your Control, It Deserves Peace From Your Mind
A few years ago, I said something to a close friend at the gym who was going through a difficult time.
I don't remember exactly how the conversation got there. I don't remember what I said immediately before it or what we talked about afterward.
But I remember the sentence:
If it's out of your control, it deserves peace from your mind.
At the time, I don't think I understood how much that sentence would eventually mean to me.
I've carried it for roughly three years now, and somewhere along the way it became more than something I said to a friend.
It became a filter for how I try to live.
Not Everything Deserves Your Bandwidth
I think part of this philosophy developed during my years in corporate America.
Large organizations make large decisions.
Sometimes those decisions affect your job, your team, your schedule, your responsibilities, or something else you care deeply about.
And I watched people receive information about a decision they had absolutely no control over and allow it to consume them.
They'd spend the rest of the day talking about it.
Then tomorrow.
Then the next week.
They'd replay it, complain about it, speculate about why it happened and discuss all the reasons they disagreed with it.
And I remember thinking:
What is all of this costing you?
The decision hasn't changed.
The person who made it probably isn't even in this building.
Your anger isn't reaching them.
But you're paying for the decision twice—once through whatever consequences it actually created and again through the amount of your life you're giving it afterward.
At some point, I decided I didn't want to participate in that.
My time matters too much.
My emotional well-being matters too much.
My peace costs too much.
Peace Does Not Mean Passivity
There's an important distinction here.
Giving something peace from your mind does not mean ignoring things that are difficult.
It doesn't mean suppressing anger, sadness, disappointment or fear.
It doesn't mean shrugging your shoulders and saying, Well, I can't control anything, so why bother?
Psychology has a term called psychological flexibility. At a basic level, it describes our ability to remain open to what we're experiencing while still behaving in ways consistent with what matters to us. Research on acceptance-based approaches supports an important distinction between accepting difficult internal experiences and simply trying to avoid them.
That's much closer to what I mean by peace.
Peace does not mean passivity.
Acceptance does not mean giving up.
It means understanding what belongs to you—and what doesn't.
Build a Filter
I don't know that I consciously developed this, but I've realized that I have something like a filtration system now.
Something happens.
I still have the emotional response.
Someone cuts me off in traffic and maybe my immediate reaction is, What the hell are you doing?
Someone says something that bothers me.
A situation doesn't go the way I expected.
Information enters the filter.
Instead of immediately allowing the emotion to determine what happens next, I try to get curious.
Why is this bothering me?
What do I actually know?
What am I assuming?
Am I looking at the entire situation, or only my interpretation of it?
Because one thing I've learned is:
Perspective does not represent totality.
I don't know why the person cut me off.
I don't know what happened before someone walked into the room.
I don't automatically know why someone said what they said.
I know how I interpreted it.
Those aren't always the same thing.
Then eventually the filter gets to the most important questions:
Can I influence this?
Can I change this?
Is there something available for me to do?
If there is, then I have responsibility.
If there isn't, I have a different decision to make.
When There’s a Fire, Run Toward It
There's another philosophy I've carried through leadership and coaching:
When there's a fire, run toward it.
On the surface, that might seem contradictory.
If things deserve peace from your mind, why run toward the fire?
Because they're two sides of the same philosophy.
Don't avoid what requires your action.
Don't carry what doesn't.
If someone I love is struggling, I run toward it.
That doesn't mean I can fix what's happening.
If my friend is going through a divorce, I can't make the divorce disappear.
But I can call him.
I can show up.
I can sit in the mud with him.
Sometimes agency isn't solving the problem.
Sometimes agency is deciding who you're going to be while the problem exists.
And once I've done what is actually mine to do, I have to recognize where my responsibility ends.
You Cannot Control Another Person
Relationships taught me this more than almost anything else.
You can love someone deeply.
You can communicate.
You can be vulnerable.
You can tell someone when their behavior hurt you and say:
Help me understand.
You can listen to their perspective.
You can establish boundaries.
You can work on yourself.
You can do everything within your power to be the person you want to be in that relationship.
And they are still autonomous.
You cannot force someone to change.
You cannot force someone to understand you.
You cannot force someone to stay.
That realization could make relationships terrifying.
For me, strangely enough, it has become freeing.
Because if I cannot guarantee another person's choices, then I don't need to organize my entire life around trying to control them.
I can focus on mine.
Was I honest?
Was I vulnerable?
Did I communicate?
Did I show up authentically?
If I can answer yes, then eventually I may have to accept that the rest belongs to them.
That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
It means I've reached the boundary of my agency.
Some Things Need to Be Carried for a While
This philosophy also needs an important caveat.
Imagine telling someone who just lost a person they love:
Well, you can't control it. Give it peace from your mind.
That's not wisdom.
That's insensitivity.
There's beauty in grief.
There's beauty in heartbreak.
There's something to be learned through disappointment.
Some experiences deserve to be sat with.
Research on emotion regulation also gives us reason to be cautious about equating emotional health with simply suppressing what we feel; greater habitual emotional suppression has been associated with poorer interpersonal outcomes, and the broader literature distinguishes suppression from more adaptive ways of relating to emotion.
There isn't a stopwatch telling someone how long they're allowed to grieve.
For me, the question is whether I'm processing an experience or simply existing inside of it.
Am I learning?
Am I understanding?
Am I healing?
Or am I replaying the same thing over and over, hoping my thoughts will somehow rewrite something that already happened?
There is a difference between sitting with pain and building a home inside of it.
I Still Have to Practice This
I don't want to write this as though I've mastered it.
Bodybuilding exposes me constantly.
Am I lean enough?
Am I muscular enough?
Am I symmetrical enough?
Am I enough?
Those questions can consume an enormous amount of bandwidth.
And there's an interesting conflict inside me when they do.
The reasonable part of me knows I'm showing up.
I'm training.
I'm following the plan.
I'm doing what is available to me.
But another part still wants certainty.
That's where I have to use the same filter.
What can I do today?
Train.
Eat according to the plan.
Recover.
Practice posing.
Listen to my coach.
Execute.
I can influence the outcome tremendously.
I cannot demand that reality guarantees me one.
So I return to my inputs.
Again.
And again.
And again.
That's why I don't think peace is somewhere you arrive.
It's something you practice.
Put Your Energy Where You Have Agency
I see the opposite problem in coaching all the time.
Someone wants to lose weight.
They're crushing the gym.
Training is the thing they're good at, so that's what they want to talk about.
Meanwhile, their nutrition is struggling badly.
So when the conversation turns toward food:
Yeah, yeah, the diet is pretty good…but I'm absolutely crushing my workouts.
Great.
But we're talking about the wrong thing.
We're putting more attention into the area where you already have high agency because looking directly at the area where you're struggling is uncomfortable.
Leadership can work the same way.
A leader can spend enormous amounts of energy complaining that employees are ungrateful.
But can you control someone's gratitude?
No.
So let's move the conversation somewhere useful.
Did we hire the right people?
Are expectations clear?
Have we communicated the vision?
Do people understand the target?
Have we created an environment where people can actually thrive?
That's where your agency lives.
And that's where your energy belongs.
Your Peace Costs Too Much
Maybe this entire philosophy comes down to knowing the boundary between responsibility and control.
There will always be things you cannot determine.
What someone thinks of you.
Whether someone stays.
A decision made above you.
Something that happened ten years ago.
The exact outcome of something you're working toward.
You don't have to stop caring.
You don't have to stop feeling.
And you certainly shouldn't stop acting where action is available to you.
Get curious.
Ask questions.
Communicate.
Set the boundary.
Do the work.
Run toward the fire.
Sit in the mud with your people when that's all you can do.
But eventually, you may reach the edge of what belongs to you.
When you do, recognize it.
Because your attention is valuable.
Your emotional bandwidth is valuable.
Your time is valuable.
Your peace is valuable.
If it's within your control, it deserves your attention.
If it's within your influence, it deserves your best effort.
And when you've done everything available to you and the rest is no longer yours to carry, it deserves peace from your mind.
Sometimes It Helps to Have an Outside Perspective
Knowing what deserves your attention isn't always easy when you're standing in the middle
of it.
Sometimes we're so close to our own patterns that it's difficult to distinguish between what we can change, what we can influence, and what we're simply carrying.
That's a large part of what I do through My Disciplined Mind coaching: help people step outside the noise, get curious about what's actually happening, and put their energy toward the behaviors and systems where they have the greatest agency.
If you feel like you're putting a lot of energy into your life but aren't sure it's going toward the right things, I'd be happy to have that conversation.
Learn more about coaching with My Disciplined Mind:
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