In this article, we will study the circle of influence and how we can use it to deal with our concerns better. When we feel helpless, we can use this technique to get more control over our situation.
The circle of influence technique is often used by people when they need to focus their energies on whatโs important, and if your life feels a bit disoriented, try using this trick and read on!
What is a Circle of Influence?
Most people believe that they donโt have direct control over most things and therefore fret about them unnecessarily. Ultimately, that fretting leads to nothing productive, but people develop anxiety issues. Circle of influence is a technique using which one can determine the things one can do regarding their concerns.
You donโt need to figure out something to do regarding every concern of yours, but by doing this exercise, you will realize you do have a little control over your concerns.
How to Implement the Circle of Influence?
To implement a circle of influence first, you need to make a huge circle (use a paper or a board) and write every concern of yours in that circle. This will take a lot of space because we humans are so intertwined with our surroundings that we can easily find a million concerns.
Your concerns can be anything ranging from a family member, children, personal relations to career, job, taking personal responsibility and future. Write this all down in this circle. This circle is called the circle of concern. It has every concern of yours regardless of if you can do something about it or not.
The next step is the most important yet time-consuming one, to carefully think about each concern and figure out if you can remotely do anything about it?
For example, โ a co-workerโs attitude is seriously affecting your work life. If you think about it, you can change the situation by effectively communicating with that co-worker or talking to your manager about it.
Itโs not necessary that during this exercise, you will find some activities you can take about every concern. Example- you are concerned about when will this pandemic end?
You personally canโt create a vaccine (unless you are a scientist working on it) but what is important is to realize that you canโt do anything about somethings.
Once you have thought about every concern of yours, separate the ones about which you can even remotely do anything about and write them on a different circle. ย This circle, where you have listed concerns about which you can take some actions, is called the circle of influence.
Now all you have to do is one by one take those actions and work on those concerns. This exercise may not completely relieve off your tensions, but it will greatly help you reduce them.
Click here to read about important values in life.
ย Advantages of Circle of Influence
1. Determine Things You Can Influence
When you implement a circle of influence in your life and work on things you previously thought you had no control over, you become more aware and more in control of your situation.
You realize that you are not completely helpless, and in some cases, your actions can influence the outcome of a situation.
One important thing that the circle of influence helps us do is micro-manage tasks, and that gives us more command over our life.
Hence, you donโt have to count on events to turn out favorable for you on their own, rather, you become the driving force of your life.
2. Helps Confront Your Fears
One of the biggest fears of our life, something that often keeps us awake at night, is uncertainty. Not knowing about the future, whether itโs the future of your relation, career, or children, is the biggest tension for us humans. While motivational speakers often give the clichรฉ advice to try and live in the moment, we all know that itโs easier said than done.
Implementing a circle of influence can greatly help us confront our fear of uncertainty. It helps us influence the outcomes to a great extent. Fear of a breakup? Communicate with your partner, failure in exams? Study hard.
3. Make Life Easier
Micro-managing tasks are a huge part of implementing a circle of influence, and itโs this micromanaging that makes life a bit easier. When you focus on taking one step at a time, slowly but ultimately, you would have climbed a ladder.
Therefore, implementing a circle of influence makes your life more manageable and hence easier.
It also stops you from unnecessarily fretting over things and wasting time. Instead, you find yourself productively using that time on doing things and actually taking some meaningful actions. Just thinking about things does not get you anywhere; doing something about them does.
4. Great Way to Develop Resilience
Implementing a circle of influence helps you mature in your decision-making process and helps you develop resilience. When you take a concern, think about possible outcomes, and work towards the favorable one, you become hard-working and a bit more flexible.
When you realize that you have done whatever you can do to improve your situation, chances of success get high, and even if you fail, you know that you did everything you could, and there is no point in taking that failure to your heart.
All of this makes you more resilient, strengthen your personality, and make you a mature and aware human being and helps you improve your human nature.
Here is the list of successful people who failed on their first try.
5. Helps You Manage Your Priorities
While placing the things in a circle of influence, you figure out the things you have control over and the things you can do nothing about. This sorts out your priorities to a great extent.
You realize that itโs futile to worry about things you have no control over, so you prioritize things you can do something about.
This helps you create a flow chart, a plan regarding how you want to do things and what things are worth doing something about. One added benefit of implementing a circle of influence is it enables you to manage your priorities.
6. Makes You Pro-Active
When you donโt work towards your goal and your concerns and instead sit it out and wait for miracles, you practically sign up for failure. But when you act proactively and do whatever you can to get favorable outcomes, you ensure success. Implementing a circle of influence activity helps you achieve just that.
It makes you proactive. It teaches you to be more in command of your situation. It makes you realize the importance of spending time that you would otherwise waste by sitting and unnecessarily worrying.
7. Helps You Cope with Your Anxieties
Planning and implementing our actions according to our plan greatly helps us control our anxieties because then we feel more in control of our situation. The more the certainty, the lesser will be the anxieties, and the circle of influence helps us be more certain about the outcome.
Humans tend to overthink whenever there is a possibility for a โwhat ifโฆโ. The actions that you take while the following circle of influence changes a lot of those what ifs to โit will lead to this.โ In a way, it also proves beneficial for your health.
You can sleep better; your blood pressure is in control; you find time to exercise instead of worrying about things.
8. Find Peace of Mind
When you gain control over your anxieties and channel your energy on the right things, you feel more positive and peaceful. You can enjoy life better and live in the moment instead of overthinking about your past actions or uncertainty about the future.
A circle of influence indirectly helps you progress in your career and your personal life. You start enjoying things better when you donโt have a million concerns in your head.
This also positively affects your relationship with the people around you. You are able to invest your time and emotions better on things that truly matter to you. This provides you a different perspective on life.
9. Helps You Communicate Better
While forming actions regarding your concerns, you will realize that a lot of your problems can be solved just by effective communication.
Just talk to your partner about where you see yourself in the future or how you feel, communicate with your boss politely about something thatโs bothering you, and ask your friends why they have been acting distant nowadays.
Overthinking and deriving your own conclusion isnโt going to help you at all. Instead, it will ruin your peace of mind. Communicating and getting closure is way better than leaving everything to sort on its own.
Click here to read about the advantages of effective communication.
10. Helps You Plan Things Betterย
One should never underestimate the power of having a schedule and be disciplined enough to follow that schedule. Circle of influence helps us to incorporate that discipline better. It makes us work harder for things that we want in life and plan our actions efficiently in order to achieve those goals.
Efficient planning saves a lot of your time and helps you focus your limited energy in the right direction. This yields better results and improves your chances of success. ย ย
11. Be More in Control of Your Life
All the benefits of the circle of influence that we have discussed earlier ultimately lead to this. Controlling anxieties, managing priorities, and being pro-active gives you more control over your life. The consequences of a situation start depending more on you than on luck.
This enables you to enjoy the present better and focus on the now. It also lets you focus on things that count. Before your present becomes your past and you canโt change it anymore, utilize your present to its full potential and take the wheel of your car into your own hands.
12. Bring a Change in Your Life
One secret behind the success of some famous people is not a secret anymore; itโs effective planning and Circle of influence exercise does just that for you. If not immediately, you will see your life-changing for the better gradually, and thatโs because you made every moment count.
Success doesnโt come overnight. It requires patience, determination, and hard work. A circle of influence helps us figure out how to put our resources to use to have the maximum effect. All of this together will bring a change in your life for the better.
Click here to read about the key to success.
13. Increase Productivity
Earlier, the time you spent worrying about things is now being used to do something about things that are bothering you. This way circle of influence technique helps us increase productivity and helps you manage more tasks in a short period of time.
In todayโs fast-paced life, itโs one of the most important social skills to deliver more in less time, and thatโs not possible if your life is not sorted or you are not attentive at work. Proactive people focus on personal responsibility.
Use the circle of influence as a tool to achieve your optimum productivity level. When you filter out all the unnecessary things you have been focusing on, you will find that it is so much you are capable of and how overthinking was consuming your time and holding you back.
14. Makes You Feel Empowered
When good things start happening to you, you feel happy and empowered. Discipline and hard work change your perspective on life. They teach you to value time more and the importance of pro-actively working towards your goals.
With maturity, you learn the importance of planning and executing that plan efficiently. Itโs techniques like the circle of influence that helps you declutter your mind and your life.
Final Thoughts
Feeling circumstances, mostly turning in your favor, is empowering, and it is only possible if you work towards them. Even if you can remotely do anything that may help you achieve your goal, you should do it, and thatโs what the circle of influence technique teaches us.
God only helps those who help themselves, and one way to help yourself is to stop thinking and start doing. You need to let go of the perception that you are not in control of your life or on murphyโs law that states whatever can happen will happen. You need to plan and work hard to be successful.
-Edited by Steffy Michael|7/7/22
Last Updated on by Steffy Michael