Are you constantly trying to control everything around you? I dive deep into the roots of control issues—where they come from and how they silently sabotage your relationships, work, and inner peace. This isn’t about calling you a control freak—it's about uncovering the trauma beneath the control and learning how to finally let go.Looking for daily motivation?Get free inspirational messages straight to your phone, plus exclusive podcast recommendations and updates on my free workshops so you never miss out.It’s simple: just send "Quotes by Rob" to this link here 👉 https://my.community.com/robdial Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube
Chapter 1: What are control issues and how do they manifest?
Today, we're gonna be talking about all of your control issues that you have. Have you ever felt like you're just trying to control everything? You're trying to hold the whole world together with your bare hands. You're always managing or planning and fixing and overthinking everything.
Chances are, if you clicked on this episode, there is a chance, a small, small chance that you might have some control issues. And I want you to understand, I have identified with myself years ago that I had control issues. And this was back in 2018, 2017, when I really identified that I had control issues.
Chapter 2: How do childhood experiences influence control behaviors?
And I had this big awareness and I started working more on myself and working more on myself and I had this awareness that I had control issues because when you look at my entire childhood, if you were to put one word over my childhood with having a father who was an alcoholic and passing away when I was 15 and all of that, that the word over my childhood would be uncertainty.
And the only way to fix uncertainty is to try to control everything. But I had this realization that if I try to control everything, it's going to ruin almost everything in my life. It's going to ruin my relationships. It's going to ruin my business, all of that. And so I started really working on my control issues.
And that made me better at delegation in my business, which I don't think that anywhere near the amount of success we would have in my business if I had not worked on my control issues, because I was really bad at delegating. I was really bad at micromanaging as well.
And I also don't think that I would have the relationship that I have now with my wife if I didn't get better at fixing my control issues and opening myself up to being more vulnerable. And I want you to realize that control issues are behavioral adaptations that you learn in childhood. More than anything else, it's a protection mechanism that protected you in some sort of way.
A survival strategy that started in childhood long before you ever had the words for it or knew what you were doing, you just unconsciously created this mechanism. And it's a coping mechanism. It's not like a character flaw. And I want you to understand that. So if you say, oh, I'm a very controlling person, it's not a character flaw. It's a coping mechanism.
Control issues don't just show up out of nowhere in adulthood. They are often early behavioral adaptations of a child that was in an environment that felt unsafe or unpredictable or emotionally chaotic. And so as a child, your brain had to figure out some way to make sense of the world.
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Chapter 3: Why is control a coping mechanism?
And when adults around you were inconsistent in some way, whether they were emotionally unavailable or maybe they were severely overwhelmed themselves, what you did was an intelligent thing to do that any sensitive kid would do. You took on control on yourself unconsciously as a way to feel safe. And you did not feel safe, so you had to create some sense of safety on your own.
So let's pause here because it's a really big deal for you to understand. Children are wired to adapt. We're all wired to adapt. And so if the environment feels emotionally or physically unstable or unsafe, the child doesn't think to themselves, my parent is unsafe. Most of the time, the child thinks to themselves, I must do something to fix this.
That's the innocence of childhood is children tend to blame themselves so that they can keep the parental attachment intact. This is the reason why a lot of times when parents get divorced, children think it's their fault is because a lot of times they put it on themselves. That's the innocence of childhood. And so I want you to understand
That if you were in a situation that was maybe unsafe or unpredictable or had parents that were emotionally absent, a lot of times you don't think, oh, it's the parent's fault. You unconsciously think, I must fix this. So there's something wrong with me. And so we blame ourselves a lot of times so that we can keep that parental attachment intact.
So what does control look like when it's a child's tool for surviving chaos? Well, it could be something like being the good kid so that you don't rock the boat. It could be monitoring everyone's mood before speaking. It could be keeping your space really tidy because you feel like something was unstable. It could be trying to fix everyone else's problems that weren't yours to fix.
It could be becoming a people pleaser so that peace was kept in the house and nobody fought in any sort of way. And this wasn't about being mature for your age, which I know many of us hear when our children, oh, they're such a good child. They're so mature for their age. Really what this is is hypervigilance disguised as responsibility. Think about that for a second.
A child at five, six, seven, eight years old isn't necessarily responsible, but they become responsible as a way to keep the peace or as a way to feel more safe around everything that's happening. And it worked for a while in your childhood. It worked because you built it in some sort of way. And once again, the child is not unconsciously building this. The child is unconsciously building this.
But what's really important is, is just because something was useful in the past doesn't mean that it's serving you right now. What protected you back then a lot of times traps you now. Because as an adult, this strategy kind of morphs and changes into perfectionism or micromanaging other people or anxiety when things aren't planned out.
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Chapter 4: How do control issues affect personal relationships?
or the inability to trust others to quote-unquote do it right, or guilt when you're not on top of everything, or becoming a helicopter parent. Control, control, control, control. That's how it morphs from childhood into adulthood. And when you control, control, control, control, control other people, what does it feel like? To the other person, it feels like being smothered.
It's not that you love control. It's that your nervous system associates control with safety. And that's what it really comes down to. This is deeper than habits and character traits. It's a wiring that happened in childhood. It's the operating system that's underneath your adult life. The little inner child inside of you never healed from what it went through.
So it keeps doing what it's always done. Get it? And like any other outdated system, eventually an outdated system starts glitching in some way. So you try to rest, but you feel like you're wasting time. You ask for help, but then you redo something that somebody else did because it's not quote unquote perfect. You say somebody to say somebody say, oh, I trust you.
But then your body really doesn't. It says otherwise. And here's the truth. It's not about being a type A person. It's a trauma response in disguise. And so it shows up many different ways in your life. In relationships, it can ruin relationships. You might avoid vulnerability. You keep emotional walls up because letting go is really risky in some way.
Chapter 5: What impact do control issues have on work and productivity?
You fear being maybe too much or not enough for another person. So you kind of perform and be the person that you think they want you to be versus being yourself. You try to anticipate needs of other people before they're ever spoken to keep the peace. Or you manage other people's emotions while ignoring your own. Or you're a people pleaser and you forget all about yourself.
Or you call someone over and over and over and over again because you haven't heard from them in two hours? This is how control problems will ruin relationships. How does it show up in work? Well, maybe you've got this idea of you've got to perform. You've got to overwork. You've got to overdeliver. Not to be great, but to not disappoint. You know, you don't just meet expectations.
You obsess over exceeding expectations. And the validation that you get from others at work becomes a substitute for the connection that you can't feel. And you can't seem to, you know, you go on vacation and you're with your family and you just like can't seem to turn it off. So you're checking emails and you're on your phone.
You can't seem to turn off because you feel like there's something else you're supposed to be doing at all points in time, right? That's a coping mechanism. How does it show up in parenting? Well, maybe you try to be the perfect parent or, you know, redo what your parents didn't get right. Or maybe you set really impossibly high standards for yourself.
And then when you don't hit those standards, you beat yourself up over and over and over again. Maybe you say you want to protect your children from the chaos that you knew. But sometimes you forget that chaos isn't always harmful. Sometimes it's needed to grow. Or maybe you try to control every single part of your child's life.
And as they grow older, you start to notice how they start resenting you for it. How does it show up in your own relationship with yourself and your self-talk? Well, everything is either your fault or your responsibility. And you beat yourself up over a lot of things. You struggle to rest without feeling guilty about it. And even your internal voice sometimes sounds like a disappointed parent.
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Chapter 6: How do control issues manifest in parenting?
Why didn't you do more? You should have seen that coming. You can't let anybody down. Any of this sound familiar? It's exhausting. And more importantly, it's not really your fault. It was what you had to do to feel safe as a child. But now that you're an adult, you're allowed to rewrite it. And that's what's really important. And we will be right back. And now back to the show.
Why is your brain wired this way? Well, here's where neuroscience really comes in. Your developing brain in childhood is built around adapting to the environment for survival. When unpredictability was the norm, your brain learned, if I can anticipate or control everything, then I'll be safe. And so it creates this feedback loops of being over-controlling.
And because you're over-controlling, you get a brief sense of safety. Ah, you feel like you're controlling everything. Everything's okay for right now. Then the world feels unpredictable again. And then you feel the need for more control. And it's these feedback loops of more control and more control. And over time, you become more controlling. It's not just a mindset that's behind all this.
It's biology behind it. You know, and your amygdala, which is the fear center of your brain, becomes hyperactive early in life because of all of the chaos. Your prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision making, for logic, for emotional regulation, struggles to develop in environments that are full of stress. And over time, your body becomes the control system, not your conscious mind.
And so it's not about being a control freak. If you'd be like, oh, I'm a control freak. That's just the way of them. Or someone says that you're a control freak. It's about your nervous system doing its best with really, really outdated software. You might be 40 years old and this is something that you developed when you were seven.
And so the thing that's really important behind this that I really wanna talk about is we're talking about being a child here. And we're talking about the fact that you develop this system, I guess you could say, of control in your childhood because you did not feel safe in some way. And so you had to develop this control issue so that you could feel safe. Here's the hardest part of all of it.
Beneath all of this urge to control, a lot of times for most people is often grief. Grief for the childhood that you didn't get, grief for the caretakers who couldn't show up, grief for the safety that you had to create instead of receiving, which is what children should receive as a child. And when we finally stop and ask, why do I feel responsible for everything?
we start, or whatever it might be that kind of cracks us open, we begin to realize, oh my God, that little kid just didn't feel safe in some ways. Like, how sad is that? And it gives you a chance to really crack yourself open and to mourn what you might not have had and how you had to grow up too soon. And that's really when you start healing is when you allow yourself to feel those feelings.
Because in that moment, we stop blaming ourselves for how we are now and And we start realizing, oh, that was just something that I had to develop in childhood. And so we begin seeing our control issues for what they are, which is love in some way, longing for a better relationship, wanting more protection, the simple case of just trying to feel safe.
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