82. Pep Talk: Control Enthusiasts
A love of control is a tendency that is especially prevalent in the interior design industry. But the truth is, we can't control everything. So it's time for a pep talk about what you can and can't control in your interior design business, and every other area of your life.
Your enthusiasm for control is why you're good at what you do. You pay attention to detail. You think ahead and anticipate potential obstacles. You have high standards for how things should be, and you like things to turn out exactly the way your clients expect. But when your enthusiasm crosses over from a gentle desire to control into an illusion that you can actually control everything and everyone, that's when it becomes a problem.
Tune in this week for a pep talk around your enthusiasm for control. I'll share why it's important to have a clear idea of what you can actually control in your interior design business. You'll learn exactly what you can and can't control, so you can influence the things you can control, and start letting go of the things you can't.
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why wanting control is not a bad thing and is a natural part of our human nature.
How full control is an illusion that's impossible to achieve.
What you can and can't control in your interior design business.
Why an understanding of what you can and can't control in your interior design business is vital.
How to own your influence over who you are and how you show up, while letting go of what you can't control.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 82. It’s a pep talk day today. This is the one for all of you control enthusiasts out there. And let’s face it, we all have that tendency at least a bit. And I think the trait runs high in the interior design industry. So let’s talk about what you can and can’t control in your interior design business, and for that matter, in every other area of life.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you all are having an incredible week. It is a very rainy day here today. I’m getting ready to go out for a walk, the rain has finally died down, and I’m also seeing it’s quite windy still. We have this beautiful wind sculpture we had made on a trip out to Utah and it sits out in our prairie area. And I love to watch it. You can always tell what the wind is doing. Sometimes even there’s this imperceptible amount of wind that you wouldn’t say that there’s any wind, and you can slowly see the sculpture rotating. But today it’s definitely spinning. So hopefully I don’t blow away.
Today I have a pep talk for you. I haven’t done one in a while and I thought I should do one. Specifically this is a pep talk for all of you control enthusiasts. I know a lot of you designers refer to yourself as control freaks, I just think control enthusiast is a much more pleasant way to think about it. And I have to say, in many ways your enthusiasm for control is why you’re good at what you do.
You pay attention to details, you think ahead and anticipate what could go wrong, you have high standards for how things should be, and you like things to be just so for your clients. The problem is when your enthusiasm crosses over from a gentle desire to control to an illusion that you can actually control everything and everyone. There is a difference, and that’s what we’re talking about today. What you can and can’t control, and why it’s so important to know and accept the difference.
As a reminder, the podcast giveaway is still in progress. You can leave a rating and review for the podcast and submit a quick form in the podcast show notes and you will be entered to win a one-on-one coaching session with me. And you can use that session for anything and everything that you want help with.
This is my little thank you for taking those few moments, it really will only take a couple of minutes to do this, out of your day to help me share this podcast. Every time I get a review, I love, love, love to hear from you, and it also lets the podcast platforms know, hey, this is a good one, we should keep sharing it with people.
As we dive into talking about control enthusiasm, what I want to clear up first is wanting control is not a bad thing. I think it’s a very natural part of our human nature. The brain craves certainty because it equates certainty with safety. So of course that’s something that we’re going to lean towards because the brain believes that certainty comes from control. Except control is a lie that we actually believe. It’s just an illusion.
We want to believe that full control is possible, but that’s really where the trouble lies. The grasping to the illusion of control expends so much energy. We spend so much internal angst and frustration and resistance. And this often is just played out, not even just in the energetic drain, but also the time you spend trying to control, whether that’s your projects or other people or yourself even. And no amount of clinging to that illusion is actually going to guarantee the control you’re trying so hard to create.
When I work with designers on planning and scheduling and time management, so often there’s a desire to fully control the daily plan. And we want everything to go just so, and nothing can be moved around or nobody can interrupt. And if that happens, then everything is for naught. But that’s not really how it goes.
Or we want to control how other people act or respond to us. So we spend all sorts of time with whether it’s project partners, other designers, clients, staff, overextending ourselves, or doing things that we really shouldn’t be doing or that we were maybe even never asked to do in the first place, or haven’t been compensated for, all of that people pleasing that shows up there.
Or we want to control our goals and know that if we do X, Y, and Z, then that automatically equals the result we want. And until we know that X, Y, and Z is going to equal that result, then we’re not going to take action.
So you can see there’s so many things that we’re trying desperately to control and using our time and energy and attention, when the control really is an illusion. I really do believe that our desire for control comes from a good place. We aren’t trying to manipulate others or outcomes through bad intentions. Definitely not.
Often the desire for control comes from genuine care. You want to make sure nothing goes wrong on a project because you care about the clients, you care about the work. And often that desire for control is protective too. We have to acknowledge that. You want people to like you. You want your clients to be pleased. Or maybe if you’re talking about employees, you want people to do what you ask them to do to make your life easier.
And with all of these, and I’ll talk about this more in a bit, it’s not to say that you go from being a total control enthusiast wanting to control everyone and everything to being like, well, fine, whatever happens happens, there’s so much gray zone in there. But we do need to remember that control really is a lie.
We really have so little control. We can’t make people different. We can’t force them to do or not do. Of course, if this is an employee situation, we can set expectations, hold them accountable and have consequences for people doing or not doing in certain relationships.
You can set boundaries, of course. I’m not talking about letting people treat you however, or act and do whatever they want and you can’t do anything about it. But I do think it’s important to remember that when you as the human are involved and other humans are involved, there’s going to be inconsistency and incongruencies.
I mean, let’s face it. We can’t even control ourselves a hundred percent of the time. I think we can all think of things where we’ve said or done something where after the fact we’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe that. So we definitely can’t expect ourselves to control everything and everyone around us. What you can do though, is you can own your influence. And what I mean by this is control what you can control.
This is something we’ve been talking to my 10 year old son about a lot. About how you’re going to encounter so many different people, personalities, environments, circumstances, and the constant is you. You are the one thing that you can achieve the greatest level of control. Again, I don’t think it’s a hundred percent control, but you can own the influence that you can contribute to your own personal situation or to a circumstance that you’re participating in.
When you own your influence, you can still be that control enthusiast, but it is with a much lighter grip. You can prepare and plan to increase the likelihood of things going well, or as you hope. You can choose how you respond to circumstances and experiences. You can practice self-awareness to redirect your thoughts and actions, make the best choices you can in that moment.
You can evaluate how things are going and make new decisions and choices. You can get clear on your values and do your best to live in accordance with those values. You can choose what you say or don’t say, how to say it, when to say it. And if you don’t have control over the original version and kind of make a mess, you can control and own that influence about how you clean up your side of the street.
You can always separate out the facts of the current situation from that dramatic story and choose acceptance instead of resistance to what is. And you can always decide, you can influence who you want to be and how you want to show up in your relationships.
There’s a lot you can influence, but very little that you can actually control. Let me just say, we’re all bound to forget this. I know I forget it on a daily basis. But whether we like it or not, we’ll continue to have reminders of control and its illusion.
So this week, instead of using all of your time and energy to plot out exactly how you can guarantee an outcome or make someone do or stop doing something, experiment with this idea of owning your influence, the one thing you have the most control over.
This is really an opportunity to get yourself off the hook for a level of responsibility that you cannot uphold. Take ownership of what you can and play with lessening the grip on what you cannot control. And this one is big, take ownership of your ability to handle any outcome or future. That type of ownership starts with self-trust.
Self-trust is what will lessen your need for such a high degree of control. Trusting in yourself and your own capabilities, independent of all the other events and people, is really a way to create certainty in yourself. And again, it’s not to say you’re never going to have self-doubt, but we’re going to work on creating that trust in yourself.
And if you remember, we associate control and certainty, and that’s why self-trust, certainty, and owning your influence are all so complementary. This is really where you have control and it’s in how you build your relationship with yourself.
A great episode to listen to as a follow-up to this one is episode 76. It’s titled Best Case Scenarios. And I also cover worst case scenarios in that one, which is another reason we have a high desire for control, right? Because we want to avoid the worst case. And I talk a lot about how we can navigate both of those scenarios and that type of thinking. So definitely check that one out.
And while you’re looking for that episode, be sure to leave a podcast rating and review, share your favorite episode, tell me what you’re loving and let the podcast platform know this is a show more designers need to know about.
That’s what I have for you today. I will be back next Wednesday with a brand new episode. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you’ll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won’t take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you’ll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can’t wait to select a winner and it might be you. I’ll talk to you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you all are having an incredible week. It is a very rainy day here today. I’m getting ready to go out for a walk, the rain has finally died down, and I’m also seeing it’s quite windy still. We have this beautiful wind sculpture we had made on a trip out to Utah and it sits out in our prairie area. And I love to watch it. You can always tell what the wind is doing. Sometimes even there’s this imperceptible amount of wind that you wouldn’t say that there’s any wind, and you can slowly see the sculpture rotating. But today it’s definitely spinning. So hopefully I don’t blow away.
Today I have a pep talk for you. I haven’t done one in a while and I thought I should do one. Specifically this is a pep talk for all of you control enthusiasts. I know a lot of you designers refer to yourself as control freaks, I just think control enthusiast is a much more pleasant way to think about it. And I have to say, in many ways your enthusiasm for control is why you’re good at what you do.
You pay attention to details, you think ahead and anticipate what could go wrong, you have high standards for how things should be, and you like things to be just so for your clients. The problem is when your enthusiasm crosses over from a gentle desire to control to an illusion that you can actually control everything and everyone. There is a difference, and that’s what we’re talking about today. What you can and can’t control, and why it’s so important to know and accept the difference.
As a reminder, the podcast giveaway is still in progress. You can leave a rating and review for the podcast and submit a quick form in the podcast show notes and you will be entered to win a one-on-one coaching session with me. And you can use that session for anything and everything that you want help with.
This is my little thank you for taking those few moments, it really will only take a couple of minutes to do this, out of your day to help me share this podcast. Every time I get a review, I love, love, love to hear from you, and it also lets the podcast platforms know, hey, this is a good one, we should keep sharing it with people.
As we dive into talking about control enthusiasm, what I want to clear up first is wanting control is not a bad thing. I think it’s a very natural part of our human nature. The brain craves certainty because it equates certainty with safety. So of course that’s something that we’re going to lean towards because the brain believes that certainty comes from control. Except control is a lie that we actually believe. It’s just an illusion.
We want to believe that full control is possible, but that’s really where the trouble lies. The grasping to the illusion of control expends so much energy. We spend so much internal angst and frustration and resistance. And this often is just played out, not even just in the energetic drain, but also the time you spend trying to control, whether that’s your projects or other people or yourself even. And no amount of clinging to that illusion is actually going to guarantee the control you’re trying so hard to create.
When I work with designers on planning and scheduling and time management, so often there’s a desire to fully control the daily plan. And we want everything to go just so, and nothing can be moved around or nobody can interrupt. And if that happens, then everything is for naught. But that’s not really how it goes.
Or we want to control how other people act or respond to us. So we spend all sorts of time with whether it’s project partners, other designers, clients, staff, overextending ourselves, or doing things that we really shouldn’t be doing or that we were maybe even never asked to do in the first place, or haven’t been compensated for, all of that people pleasing that shows up there.
Or we want to control our goals and know that if we do X, Y, and Z, then that automatically equals the result we want. And until we know that X, Y, and Z is going to equal that result, then we’re not going to take action.
So you can see there’s so many things that we’re trying desperately to control and using our time and energy and attention, when the control really is an illusion. I really do believe that our desire for control comes from a good place. We aren’t trying to manipulate others or outcomes through bad intentions. Definitely not.
Often the desire for control comes from genuine care. You want to make sure nothing goes wrong on a project because you care about the clients, you care about the work. And often that desire for control is protective too. We have to acknowledge that. You want people to like you. You want your clients to be pleased. Or maybe if you’re talking about employees, you want people to do what you ask them to do to make your life easier.
And with all of these, and I’ll talk about this more in a bit, it’s not to say that you go from being a total control enthusiast wanting to control everyone and everything to being like, well, fine, whatever happens happens, there’s so much gray zone in there. But we do need to remember that control really is a lie.
We really have so little control. We can’t make people different. We can’t force them to do or not do. Of course, if this is an employee situation, we can set expectations, hold them accountable and have consequences for people doing or not doing in certain relationships.
You can set boundaries, of course. I’m not talking about letting people treat you however, or act and do whatever they want and you can’t do anything about it. But I do think it’s important to remember that when you as the human are involved and other humans are involved, there’s going to be inconsistency and incongruencies.
I mean, let’s face it. We can’t even control ourselves a hundred percent of the time. I think we can all think of things where we’ve said or done something where after the fact we’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe that. So we definitely can’t expect ourselves to control everything and everyone around us. What you can do though, is you can own your influence. And what I mean by this is control what you can control.
This is something we’ve been talking to my 10 year old son about a lot. About how you’re going to encounter so many different people, personalities, environments, circumstances, and the constant is you. You are the one thing that you can achieve the greatest level of control. Again, I don’t think it’s a hundred percent control, but you can own the influence that you can contribute to your own personal situation or to a circumstance that you’re participating in.
When you own your influence, you can still be that control enthusiast, but it is with a much lighter grip. You can prepare and plan to increase the likelihood of things going well, or as you hope. You can choose how you respond to circumstances and experiences. You can practice self-awareness to redirect your thoughts and actions, make the best choices you can in that moment.
You can evaluate how things are going and make new decisions and choices. You can get clear on your values and do your best to live in accordance with those values. You can choose what you say or don’t say, how to say it, when to say it. And if you don’t have control over the original version and kind of make a mess, you can control and own that influence about how you clean up your side of the street.
You can always separate out the facts of the current situation from that dramatic story and choose acceptance instead of resistance to what is. And you can always decide, you can influence who you want to be and how you want to show up in your relationships.
There’s a lot you can influence, but very little that you can actually control. Let me just say, we’re all bound to forget this. I know I forget it on a daily basis. But whether we like it or not, we’ll continue to have reminders of control and its illusion.
So this week, instead of using all of your time and energy to plot out exactly how you can guarantee an outcome or make someone do or stop doing something, experiment with this idea of owning your influence, the one thing you have the most control over.
This is really an opportunity to get yourself off the hook for a level of responsibility that you cannot uphold. Take ownership of what you can and play with lessening the grip on what you cannot control. And this one is big, take ownership of your ability to handle any outcome or future. That type of ownership starts with self-trust.
Self-trust is what will lessen your need for such a high degree of control. Trusting in yourself and your own capabilities, independent of all the other events and people, is really a way to create certainty in yourself. And again, it’s not to say you’re never going to have self-doubt, but we’re going to work on creating that trust in yourself.
And if you remember, we associate control and certainty, and that’s why self-trust, certainty, and owning your influence are all so complementary. This is really where you have control and it’s in how you build your relationship with yourself.
A great episode to listen to as a follow-up to this one is episode 76. It’s titled Best Case Scenarios. And I also cover worst case scenarios in that one, which is another reason we have a high desire for control, right? Because we want to avoid the worst case. And I talk a lot about how we can navigate both of those scenarios and that type of thinking. So definitely check that one out.
And while you’re looking for that episode, be sure to leave a podcast rating and review, share your favorite episode, tell me what you’re loving and let the podcast platform know this is a show more designers need to know about.
That’s what I have for you today. I will be back next Wednesday with a brand new episode. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you’ll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won’t take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you’ll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can’t wait to select a winner and it might be you. I’ll talk to you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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