Many family business leaders assume the goal is to eliminate stress and uncertainty altogether.
Fewer surprises, fewer curveballs, more control.
In our experience, that’s the wrong target.
There’s always going to be something you can’t control: bad weather before a big event, fuel prices climbing without warning, a shift in the market nobody saw coming.
The real skill isn’t controlling everything. It’s being able to discern what’s actually yours to control, and what isn’t.
In this week’s conversation, Price Ferguson sat down with Rob Ferguson, Scott Wheelock, and Brandi Marek to talk about exactly that: how to tell the difference, and how leaders build the ability to stay level when they can’t control the outcome.
You can watch the video below, or scroll down to read the conversation.
Price Ferguson: When I was a football coach, I used to tell my players all the time: control the controllables.
I found myself saying it most when there was bad weather in the forecast and we had to go play in the snow or the rain, and they were freaking out about it.
You can’t control the weather. So how do you help someone figure out whether the thing that’s stressing them out is actually something they can do something about?
Rob Ferguson: It starts with asking the question and getting real about the answer.
Can you control the weather? No. So what can you control? Your attitude. Your skills. The way you handle the situation. That’s exercising discernment.
Too many people get fully distracted by the things that were never in their control to begin with, and that’s what causes worry. Worry doesn’t cause action. It actually causes inaction, and it can create real stress, physically and emotionally. A lot of the anger we see show up in family businesses traces back to exactly that.
So, the goal is shifting your focus to what you can control. Take fuel prices going up. You can’t control that. But you can control whether you start talking to your customers about passing that cost through.
Scott Wheelock: I love what you said there, Rob. It’s pretty common for us to dwell on what appears to be outside of our control, instead of focusing on what we can actually influence. Even the uncontrollables can sometimes be influenced. It’s not always one or the other.
What I’ve found is that when you de-escalate the emotional reaction to something uncontrollable and approach it with a little more logic and a little less emotion, you usually discover you have a lot more influence over your situation, or your environment, than you thought.
Some of the best and most successful leaders are great at compartmentalizing their emotions. Inside, they might be upset, concerned, or frustrated. Outside, they’re cool, calm, and collected.
If you’re panicking, everyone around you is panicking too. That just adds complexity to a challenge you didn’t need, without getting you to a solution any faster.
Rob Ferguson: That reminds me of Sully, the captain who landed the plane on the Hudson.
What always stuck with me about that story is how calm the passengers said he was. He came over the loudspeaker and told them, essentially: we’re going to be landing in the river, here’s what you need to do, follow your flight attendants’ instructions.
He stayed in control the entire time. He got the plane down safely, everyone survived, and he was the last person off the plane.
Part of that was maintaining his composure under pressure most of us will never face.
Part of it was that he was an extremely experienced, well-trained pilot so he had muscle memory to fall back on. Leaders build that same muscle memory.
Most business leaders aren’t dealing with literal life-and-death situations like that one, but the principle holds: there were things Sully could control and things he couldn’t, and he focused entirely on what he could.
Brandi Marek: This is actually the area where I’ve needed the most personal development.
My husband likes to describe me as someone who gets on a roller coaster truly believing that if I try hard enough, I can steer it in a different direction. The roller coaster is already moving. The track is already laid. No matter how strong you are, it’s not going to go left when it’s built to go right.
What’s helped me is speaking directly to that muscle memory.
Putting myself in situations where I don’t have control, and practicing what it feels like to sit with that.
Meditation is a good example. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t want to sit still, I don’t want to be quiet, I’d rather be commanding the room. But surrendering to someone else’s facilitation, in a space where I don’t think I’m getting much out of it even though I really am, has been powerful.
For three years running, my “word of the year” was surrender. It took me a long time to get comfortable with that idea. But some things really do require surrendering to the experience. No matter how hard you try to steer it, the track is already going where it’s going.
Stress is inevitable. Burnout is avoidable.
Every leader experiences stress from situations that are both inside and outside their control.
The difference between the leaders who burn out and the ones who don’t usually comes down to how quickly they can separate the two. And how deliberately they’ve practiced staying steady when they can’t control the outcome.
If you’re dealing with a situation that feels uncontrollable and you’d like some outside perspective to work through it, we can help.
Book a complimentary and confidential call with one of our experienced advisors →