📍 This desire to have control makes so much sense when we look at our past with trauma or our neurodivergence, or even just the insane world that we live in, and our body's desire for certainty. But today, you're gonna learn the paradox of control. Why trying to manage everything triggers burnout faster.

Why leading from control backfires your and diminishes your nervous system capacity? And then the subtle difference between a clear no and self-protection and. You just trying to control things. 📍 So you ever had that thought process, and it might be like really subtle. You might not even notice it sometimes where it's like, I just kind of, I want everything to, I want to feel under control.

I want everything to feel under control. I want to wait until I have more space and then everything will feel under control. I want this person to do that because that will make me feel better. I want to even do personal development and clear my subconscious beliefs because that gives me a sense of control over other people's actions, and maybe then they won't reject me as much.

I've lived this myself. I catch myself in it every now and again, and I've seen. You see people in it all the time. My clients come to me with it. I see people out in the world with it. It's this idea that if we just kind of like manage everything better, our time, our emotions, our people, then we are gonna feel safer.

We are gonna feel clearer. We are gonna feel steadier, but this is never the answer. It's a natural human response to uncertainty. We push back to uncertainty. Uncertainty is scary for your nervous system, but trying to micromanage your world doesn't actually create safety. It gives you more things that you're trying to grasp onto, you're trying to hold down.

It is a protective mechanism. I get that, but it's not necessarily effective. And what I often do inside of somatic coaching with me is we use parts work. And what we try to do is we try to understand that this protective mechanism is coming from a part of us, not all of us, a part of us. Because when your nervous system is holding a lot of things under pressure, maybe some stress, maybe just craziness in life, your protector parts can often take over because they're trying to protect you.

They care about you. For some of us that looks like over-planning or overscheduling, staying busy or trying to maintain the perfect schedule, trying to make sure everyone's needs are met. Um, it looks like even trying to control what we eat, how we move our body, how perfectly organized everything's are, everything is, and perfectionism in what we write.

Procrastination,

trying to micromanage other people's. Thoughts and feelings about us. Make sure that they think that we are what we want them to think that, that we are trying to control their perception of us. But these tendencies you have inside of you are just simply trying to keep you safe in a system that is and feels quite unpredictable.

However, when done for long enough, and you've probably been doing it for a couple of decades now it starts to feel really tiring. Hey. You start running out of energy for it, and inside you reinforce this belief that if I stop holding everything up and keeping everything together, then it'll fall apart.

Which is ironic because the tighter you grip, the more disconnected you become from this deep inner resourcefulness that you have inside. This ability to take things in your stride. This ability to flow, this ability to make things work out, to not need to control. It's your creativity. Your creativity, your steadiness, your strategic thinking.

They do not thrive in a hypervigilant controlled system. They make you feel like you're under pressure.

This creativity in you thrives, and the resourcefulness in you thrives when your nervous system feels safe enough to relax these protectors. And there's a, a model of this that we use, and I use it with clients. There's, first, there's awareness of the cycle, right? Then there's. Spaciousness and a pause in that cycle means you're witnessing, ah, that was me protecting myself.

I'm aware of it. Now I can witness it. And then there's changing and choosing something else, and that's gonna feel scary at the beginning. But then if you do it enough times, your body begins to realize, okay, yep. I don't actually have to control what other people think of me, or how perfectly my schedule is, and things will still be okay.

And this is coming. This comes up a lot. I had this in a call a few weeks ago where a client said to me, I feel like I have to constantly regulate myself with self-talk just to stay on top of everything, and that's exhausting. Right?

I am gonna share with you a story,

and this is a real person. I'm gonna change their name, and it's somebody that, that I worked with, but c, she was in the messy middle of burnout. She was tired, she was second guessing herself. Um, she couldn't really advocate for herself. Get what she wants. She was like, should I leave my job? Should I not?

Should I start a business? Should I go to a different role? Should I do something completely different? And she came to me just looking for support, wanting to get back in touch with that creative side of her, um, wanting to have stable income, wanting to feel good.

And her path to letting go of control came in different ways. Number one, slower mornings. Immediately when she would get up, she wanted to control the day, so we kind of said, okay, could you be, could you have some uncertainty your morning? Could we increase your capacity for uncertainty and not plan immediately from the morning?

This meant that her cortisol decreased. She was able to do some movement. And she was able to be in silent without feeling anxious. And then when it came to money, she wanted to, she played with different income paths.

The one that really worked well for her was an Etsy store, and, but she wanted to control that as well. And every time she tried to control it, she found that, well, that actually relies on her creativity. So if she was going to control it, it just, it just wouldn't work. And her income would decrease. And so we had to use a somatic practice of feeling uncertainty in her body and pausing and stopping herself from doing things from control.

And we helped her identify in her body, okay, this, this urgent impulse comes from con wanting to control something. This urgent impulse comes from my intelligence. Which one do I take action on? And then we needed to get her back into a system. She needed some discipline and she needed some structure in her day because she has commitments.

So we had to relate and change the way and work with the protector parts of her and go and like work through some unconscious beliefs. From when she was a kid, from her parents, so that she felt, okay, I can be in a structured day without needing to control that structured day. And if it doesn't go well, well, I'm leaning back into trust.

And so a lot of this for her became finding ways that she could lean back into trust. This worked really well for her. Because her old employer actually invited her back into a job that made sense for her. She renegotiated the role, renegotiated her start date, the way she was working, if she was working from home, and everything got set up to fit her wellbeing.

This wasn't as simple as just figuring out the control aspect. We had to do a lot of work around yes and no and confidence, but now she's happy. And she gets to be and feel financially supported and also feel creative and have space for other things in her life.

Some future podcast recommendations that I would have for you, if that's a place where you're looking at being is number one, go back and listen to your relationship with the discipline. , Is it coming from your parents, from mom and dad? And then number two, download the burnout ideas with seven real stories of finding your way back.

, If you wanna read a little bit more about what this tangibly looks like, I'll link all that down below in the show notes.