Control the Controllables Is a Trap

An audio transcript discussing why the common advice to control the controllables is incomplete and can become a trap for athletes.

By Scott K. Wilder · Mental Toughness and Readiness

Speaker 1: [00:00:00] Imagine you just got demoted from your absolute dream job.

Speaker 2: [00:00:04] Oh.

Speaker 1: [00:00:04] Brutal, right? Or. Or maybe you just suffered a massive injury right before the biggest moment of your career. And a reporter shoves a microphone in your face, or, you know, your colleagues are all staring at you, waiting for your reaction. Pressure's on. Exactly. And you take a deep breath, look them dead in the eye, and calmly reply, I'm just focusing on what I can control.

Speaker 2: [00:00:25] Which, I mean, that sounds like peak mental toughness right here.

Speaker 1: [00:00:29] Yeah. The ultimate mature response. But welcome back to another deep dive where today we are going to completely dismantle that idea.

Speaker 2: [00:00:36] Yeah, we're taking it apart. Today we.

Speaker 1: [00:00:38] Really are. We have a fascinating piece of source material on the table. It's an excerpt from an article titled control the Controllables Isn't Enough, and it's written by Scott Wilder, who is the founder of Game Ready mindset.

Speaker 2: [00:00:49] And he's got decades of business leadership and elite sports coaching under his belt.

Speaker 1: [00:00:55] Yeah, exactly. And the mission of this deep dive is to explore why this universally accepted advice, you know, controlling the controllables is actually incomplete. In fact, he argues, it can secretly become a massive trap.

Speaker 2: [00:01:09] It's a really provocative premise because that phrase is so deeply ingrained in our culture. I mean, we use it as a shield almost.

Speaker 1: [00:01:17] We do.

Speaker 2: [00:01:18] But knowledge is most valuable when we look closely at how it's actually applied in high stakes environments. And the core tension in the source material is the incredibly subtle but highly dangerous difference between passive acceptance, which, you know, merely looks like mental toughness and actual forward looking ownership.

Speaker 1: [00:01:36] Okay, let's unpack this because the scenario he paints is one literally every single person listening has faced.

Speaker 2: [00:01:41] Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1: [00:01:42] You hit a wall, you experience a setback, and you tell yourself to just control what you can and move on. You think you're protecting your peace.

Speaker 2: [00:01:49] Right? You think you're doing the healthy thing.

Speaker 1: [00:01:51] Exactly right. But Wilder asks a much harder and honestly, a much better question. What can you make controllable?

Speaker 2: [00:01:59] Yes. And that one word changes the entire paradigm.

Speaker 1: [00:02:03] Make right. Make it shifts you from a defensive posture to an offensive one. When we simply accept what we can't change and just, you know, move on, it can easily masquerade as resilience.

Speaker 2: [00:02:15] It looks good from the outside it does.

Speaker 1: [00:02:18] But underneath, without us even realizing it, it is quietly devolving into pure resignation. You aren't overcoming the obstacle. You're just figuring out how to comfortably live next to it.

Speaker 2: [00:02:29] Wow. Comfortably living next to the obstacle that is. Yeah. That's heavy. To really prove why stopping at control the controllables is so dangerous, the source takes us straight into professional sports with a highly publicized real world example.

Speaker 1: [00:02:44] Yeah, this is a great case study.

Speaker 2: [00:02:46] Let's look at the story of Anthony Volpe. Now, if you follow baseball, you know the hype around this guy was just astronomical.

Speaker 1: [00:02:52] Off the.

Speaker 2: [00:02:52] Charts. He was supposed to be the next great Yankee, the homegrown shortstop. The franchise had literally been desperate to develop for an entire generation. The crazy part is he actually delivered early on. I mean, he won a Gold Glove in his rookie year, which is a monumental achievement. But it's one that instantly establishes an almost suffocating level of pressure and expectation for every single season that follows.

Speaker 1: [00:03:17] Right. The bar is set so high and then the wheels completely fall off. He hits a wall. And we are talking about two brutal, highly scrutinized seasons by 2025. His batting average has plummeted to 0.212. Oh yeah. And to put that in perspective for you, out of 145 qualifying players in the league, he ranked 144th.

Speaker 2: [00:03:39] Dead last, basically.

Speaker 1: [00:03:40] Basically dead last. And add to that a torn labrum surgery. And then the ultimate blow for a professional athlete, a demotion to Triple-A.

Speaker 2: [00:03:47] And we really have to look at the specific context of that demotion, because it wasn't just a matter of him going down to the minor leagues to rehab a shoulder injury.

Speaker 1: [00:03:55] Not at all. While he was out recovering, someone else stepped up and played their way into his starting job.

Speaker 2: [00:04:00] Which is a psychological gut punch.

Speaker 1: [00:04:02] A massive one, and he only got recalled back to the major leagues because that replacement player ended up breaking a finger.

Speaker 2: [00:04:07] Right? It was sheer, unpredictable luck.

Speaker 1: [00:04:10] Exactly. It had absolutely nothing to do with Volpi's performance. So he's back. He is standing in front of the New York media, and they ask him how he's approaching this whole chaotic situation.

Speaker 2: [00:04:20] And his response is the exact phrase we're dissecting today.

Speaker 1: [00:04:24] Here is the quote. If I've learned anything out of all of this, it's that there are things I can control and things I can't.

Speaker 2: [00:04:31] Sounds very enlightened, right?

Speaker 1: [00:04:33] On paper, that sounds incredibly level headed, but I want to introduce an analogy here, because reading through Wilder's analysis, it really hit me, isn't stopping at controlling the controllables in that situation a bit like standing outside, shrugging your shoulders when a massive storm rolls in, and just accepting that you're going to get soaked.

Speaker 2: [00:04:51] Instead of figuring out how to build a roof.

Speaker 1: [00:04:53] Yes, like, sure, you can't control the rain, but resigning yourself to getting wet doesn't seem like the mindset of an elite performer. So why is this seemingly mature response actually flawed?

Speaker 2: [00:05:04] Well, what's fascinating here is the psychological mechanism behind that diagnosis. Wilder argues that acceptance without action turns that phrase into a ceiling rather than a starting point a ceiling.

Speaker 1: [00:05:15] Yeah, when someone says, I can't control it, what often happens neurologically is that the effort completely detaches from the action required to move forward.

Speaker 2: [00:05:24] Oh, wow. So you just stop trying.

Speaker 1: [00:05:26] Exactly. You are no longer trying to solve the problem. You are dedicating all your mental energy to managing your emotional reaction to the problem.

Speaker 2: [00:05:34] You are soothing yourself instead of strategizing precisely.

Speaker 1: [00:05:38] You're basically conceding territory to the circumstance. So if passive acceptance is the trap, the immediate question is, well, how do truly high performers reframe these inevitable setbacks?

Speaker 2: [00:05:51] And to find that answer, the source actually pivots away from the baseball diamond and takes us straight into the corporate boardroom.

Speaker 1: [00:05:57] Yeah, this was such a good shift.

Speaker 2: [00:05:58] This was one of the most compelling parts of the deep dive for me. Wilder shares this incredible story from early in his career when he worked alongside Brad Smith. Now, Brad Smith is the former CEO of Intuit.

Speaker 1: [00:06:09] Huge software company.

Speaker 2: [00:06:10] Massive and Smith ran that company for over a decade, and he had a strict, uncompromising, zero tolerance policy for one specific phrase inside his organization. And it wasn't a curse word.

Speaker 1: [00:06:22] It wasn't a curse word. It wasn't insubordination. The banned phrase was simply, it's beyond my control.

Speaker 2: [00:06:29] Yeah. And Smith banned it for a very profound reason. He recognized that phrase as the ultimate symptom of learned helplessness.

Speaker 1: [00:06:37] Now learned helplessness. That is a heavy psychological term. What does that actually look like in a day to day work environment? And why is it so destructive?

Speaker 2: [00:06:47] So it's actually a neurological loop. Learned helplessness occurs when an individual's effort repeatedly fails to change their reality.

Speaker 1: [00:06:55] Okay.

Speaker 2: [00:06:56] And when that happens, enough times the, the brain literally rewires itself to conserve energy. It shuts down the drive to try convincing you that the environment is entirely dictating your fate.

Speaker 1: [00:07:07] It just turns off the effort switch completely.

Speaker 2: [00:07:09] And in a corporate setting, it is insidious because people don't stop performing because they suddenly became lazy. They stopped taking initiative because they've internalized the belief that their actions simply no longer connect to their outcomes.

Speaker 1: [00:07:23] Things are happening to them, not because of them. So uttering it's beyond my control is the verbal manifestation of that neurological rewiring. It's basically waving a white flag.

Speaker 2: [00:07:33] It is a white flag, which is why Brad Smith demanded his team use a different word entirely ownership. But he was incredibly precise about how he defined that word.

Speaker 1: [00:07:44] And this is where Wilder draws a critical distinction in the text outlining the difference between ownership and blame. But I have to be completely honest with you here. I read the specific section of the source material like three times because my instinct was totally rejecting it.

Speaker 2: [00:08:00] Yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow at first.

Speaker 1: [00:08:02] Let me push back on this a bit, because if a teammate completely outperforms you or, you know, if you get a terrible injury, like a torn labrum or say the economy tanks and your department loses funding, isn't it technically not your fault, right?

Speaker 2: [00:08:15] You didn't cause the economy to tank.

Speaker 1: [00:08:17] Exactly. So taking ownership of a freak accident or someone else's superior performance feels like carrying unnecessary toxic baggage. How is that helpful?

Speaker 2: [00:08:26] Well, that struggle you just described is the exact trap most people fall into. They confuse ownership with fault.

Speaker 1: [00:08:32] Okay, so how are they different?

Speaker 2: [00:08:33] Here is the synthesis of Wilder's argument. Ownership is absolutely not about past fault. Blame is what looks backward. Blame is obsessed with the past. Who did what? Why the market crashed. Whose responsibility the mess is.

Speaker 1: [00:08:48] Blame demands an audit of history.

Speaker 2: [00:08:50] Yes. Beautifully put. Ownership, on the other hand, looks entirely forward.

Speaker 1: [00:08:55] So wait. That distinction completely shifts the perspective. You aren't owning the car crash. You are owning the physical therapy that comes after it.

Speaker 2: [00:09:03] That is a perfect way to put it. An athlete or an executive or a parent who owns a difficult situation is not accepting responsibility for the torn labrum itself. They aren't owning the demotion or the macroeconomics. Right? They are accepting total, uncompromising responsibility for what comes next. They are claiming their future agency blame asks why did this happen to me? Ownership asks what am I going to do about it?

Speaker 1: [00:09:26] You're taking the pen back to write the next chapter. Even if you had absolutely no say in the setting. That's incredible. And to really demonstrate what this forward looking ownership actually looks like in practice, Wilder pivots again. We leave the elite CEOs in the multi-million dollar athletes behind, and we look at a story that I think will resonate deeply with you as you listen to this.

Speaker 2: [00:09:48] Yeah, it strips away all the press conferences and gets down to the raw human element of resilience.

Speaker 1: [00:09:54] It's an everyday example, but it perfectly illustrates this transition from passive acceptance to active ownership. So Wilder tells the story of a high school freshman.

Speaker 2: [00:10:03] Just a normal kid.

Speaker 1: [00:10:04] Just a 14 year old kid. Springtime rolls around, baseball tryouts happen, and he gets cut from the team. And the detail that really twists the knife here is that he wasn't just the last guy off the bench. He was one of only two players cut from the entire roster.

Speaker 2: [00:10:18] Oh, man. That creates a very specific, intense kind of isolation for a teenager.

Speaker 1: [00:10:23] It is heartbreaking. The coaches call him over at the end of practice to deliver the news, and Wilder notes that the kid fought back tears not just because he loved the sport, but because the whole reason he played was to be with his friends.

Speaker 2: [00:10:35] Of course, that's why you play at that age.

Speaker 1: [00:10:37] Exactly. And his dad was waiting for him out in the car, and for the entire drive home, the dad just held his son's hand in silence. Now, in that moment, the default path for that kid is so glaringly obvious.

Speaker 2: [00:10:54] The default path would have been completely socially acceptable to.

Speaker 1: [00:10:57] Absolutely. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just quit, to say the coach just didn't like me, or I'm a late bloomer. I'm not big enough yet. Or simply it was out of my hands.

Speaker 2: [00:11:09] Nobody would have blamed him.

Speaker 1: [00:11:10] No one would have blamed him for walking away and playing video games or trying a different sport. Passive acceptance would have been the completely normal reaction.

Speaker 2: [00:11:18] But he doesn't take the normal rev. He doesn't choose the circumstance of getting cut. I mean, that was forced on him by an external authority, but he actively chooses his response.

Speaker 1: [00:11:27] Wilder lays out exactly what this freshman did next. The kid is up at six in the morning hitting the weight room. He seeks out a track coach to work specifically on his speed and agility. And every single afternoon he is out on an empty field, spending 2.5 hours doing deliberate, focused work on his hitting, fielding and pitching mechanics.

Speaker 2: [00:11:48] Now we have to look at the underlying mechanics of why this specific response works so effectively. Why is this different from just, you know, working hard, right?

Speaker 1: [00:11:57] What's the secret sauce here?

Speaker 2: [00:11:59] What the freshman executed was a brilliant shift in his cognitive load. He moved completely away from outcome obsession, worrying about making the team agonizing over what the coach thought of him. By dropping that unresolvable mental weight, he freed up the bandwidth to move entirely into a process. Focus.

Speaker 1: [00:12:16] Are. He stopped asking, why me? And started asking, what now?

Speaker 2: [00:12:20] And by doing so, he didn't just look at his limited options and say, well, I guess I'll just control my attitude. No. He actively expanded his circle of control every single day.

Speaker 1: [00:12:28] He went hunting for it.

Speaker 2: [00:12:29] Yes, he went out and found new variables to master his fast twitch muscles, his swing plane, his sprint times. He wasn't waiting for the high school coach to realize a mistake. He wasn't hoping the situation would magically resolve itself.

Speaker 1: [00:12:45] He was building the roof. And what is so empowering about this story is that the freshmen didn't just stumble into this mindset by sheer luck or genetics, he utilized a framework that can actually be trained and replicated.

Speaker 2: [00:12:58] Which is the best part.

Speaker 1: [00:12:59] Which brings us to the most actionable part of our deep dive today. Wilder lays out a highly practical four step methodology. So you can actually apply this exact process to your own life.

Speaker 2: [00:13:10] This is crucial because, as Wilder points out, the hardest part of his job isn't that people lack the desire to succeed. It's that most of us have been unintentionally trained by society to just wait.

Speaker 1: [00:13:20] We're conditioned.

Speaker 2: [00:13:21] For it. We really are. We wait for the economic slump to break. We wait for the hiring market to improve. We wait for a partner to change their behavior, and we trick ourselves into thinking that waiting is a virtue.

Speaker 1: [00:13:30] We call it patience.

Speaker 2: [00:13:32] Exactly. We call it patience, but it isn't patience. It is surrendering your agency when your agency is still very much available to you.

Speaker 1: [00:13:39] So let's break down Wilder's playbook. Step one. Name what you can't control and name it specifically. Now, Wilder uses a phrase I absolutely love here. He calls it the vague fog of things not going my way.

Speaker 2: [00:13:53] That is such a great visual.

Speaker 1: [00:13:55] Think about that imagery. It is impossible to fight a fog. You were just swinging your fists at a ghost, and it's paralyzing because the threat has no edges.

Speaker 2: [00:14:04] When the brain struggles to process ambiguous threats, when you are caught in that vague fog of failure, your amygdala stays highly active. It's pumping out stress hormones because it doesn't know where the boundaries of danger. Are.

Speaker 1: [00:14:15] Right? It's just general panic.

Speaker 2: [00:14:17] But when you name the unchangeable facts specifically, you know, I got cut from the team or I lost my biggest client or my budget was slashed by 30%. It becomes finite.

Speaker 1: [00:14:27] It has boundaries and you can't put down a fog, but you can put down a specific finite fact, which leads right into step two, the two columns exercise.

Speaker 2: [00:14:36] I love this one.

Speaker 1: [00:14:37] If you're listening to this right now and you are currently agonizing over a project at work that is completely off the rails, or maybe a personal goal that feels entirely out of reach, this is exactly what you need to do. When you pause this deep dive.

Speaker 2: [00:14:51] Yeah, it's so simple, but so effective. You take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left side, you write down what is genuinely outside your influence the macro factors, other people's decisions, the past.

Speaker 1: [00:15:04] The uncontrollables.

Speaker 2: [00:15:05] Right. But on the right side, you list everything you can actively pull into your control through preparation, effort, and focus.

Speaker 1: [00:15:13] And the key here, as Wilder notes, is that most people are shocked by how long that right column gets once they actually start looking, because you have to go looking for these controllables, they aren't going to politely present themselves to.

Speaker 2: [00:15:23] You know, they definitely hide from you.

Speaker 1: [00:15:25] They do look back at the freshman. His right column was packed, his sprint mechanics, his physical strength, his fielding reads, his mental routine before every single rep. He identified the exact levers he could pull.

Speaker 2: [00:15:37] But having a list on a piece of paper doesn't immunize you from the chaos of reality. Life still happens. Things still fall apart in the heat of the moment.

Speaker 1: [00:15:45] Which brings us to step three, the Arc Reset arc. Wilder uses this three step methodology with elite athletes when they feel themselves spiraling out of control during competition. So let's walk through the actual mechanics of AAC, starting with A.

Speaker 2: [00:16:01] So the A stands for acknowledge. You have to name what just happened cleanly in the moment. No minimizing it, but also no catastrophic spiraling.

Speaker 1: [00:16:09] Just the facts.

Speaker 2: [00:16:10] Right? I made an error. I just bombed that slide in the presentation. As Wilder says, acknowledgement is the very first act of ownership. It stops the brain from denying reality.

Speaker 1: [00:16:20] Because you simply cannot fix what you refuse to admit just happened.

Speaker 2: [00:16:23] Exactly.

Speaker 1: [00:16:24] Then comes R, which stands for release. And this requires a tangible physical action, like a deep, deliberate breath, adjusting your uniform, tapping your desk, something to act as a physical cue.

Speaker 2: [00:16:34] This is deeply rooted in physiology. When you make an error, your body gets a massive spike of cortisol and adrenaline. That physical cue of releasing acts as a pattern interrupt for your nervous system.

Speaker 1: [00:16:47] It breaks the circuit.

Speaker 2: [00:16:48] It does. You cannot fully concentrate on the future while your body is still physically carrying the tension and the biochemical baggage of the past.

Speaker 1: [00:16:56] You literally have to drop the last play to be capable of making the next one.

Speaker 2: [00:17:00] Yes.

Speaker 1: [00:17:01] Which brings us to see. Concentrate. You immediately, relentlessly return your focus to the very next controllable action, not the grand outcome of the season. Not winning the championship or getting the promotion. Just the next pitch.

Speaker 2: [00:17:16] The one single thing directly in front of you that is yours to own, right? It is intensely granular, and the profound insight here is that the arc process does not magically fix the external situation. The error still happened. The bad presentation is still on the record.

Speaker 1: [00:17:30] You still dropped the.

Speaker 2: [00:17:30] Ball, right? But arc fixes your relationship to the situation. And it's that relationship how you interface with the setback that dictates everything you do next.

Speaker 1: [00:17:40] Fixing your relationship to the setback. That is incredibly powerful and it ties perfectly into the final step. Step four make ownership a daily standard, not a crisis response.

Speaker 2: [00:17:52] This is where the rubber meets the road.

Speaker 1: [00:17:53] You do not wait for the wheels to fall off to start practicing this. The executives and athletes who bounce back the fastest aren't suddenly discovering the concept of ownership in the middle of a disaster.

Speaker 2: [00:18:04] No, they are practicing it every single day when absolutely nothing is on the line. The 14 year old freshman isn't grinding in the weight room at six in the morning, because the championship game is tomorrow, right? He's doing it in the quiet, mundane moments because he has made a fundamental decision about his identity. He has decided who he's going to be.

Speaker 1: [00:18:23] The habits you build in the quiet moments are the only ones that survive the pressure.

Speaker 2: [00:18:27] Pressure doesn't magically build character or, you know, conjure new skills out of thin air. It simply reveals the habits you built when no one was watching.

Speaker 1: [00:18:37] Here's where it gets really interesting. I want to circle all the way back to Anthony Volpe, the Yankee shortstop whose demotion we talked about at the very beginning.

Speaker 3: [00:18:45] The control, the controllables guy.

Speaker 1: [00:18:47] Exactly. We criticized his quote about controlling the Controllables as potentially being passive acceptance. But Wilder actually points out that Vajpayee said something else in that exact same interview, in the exact same breath, something that showed he was actually pointing himself in the right direction despite using the cliché.

Speaker 2: [00:19:06] Yeah, the second half of his quote reveals the underlying mindset.

Speaker 1: [00:19:09] Yes. After talking about what he couldn't control, Volpi immediately told the reporters, it's been day to day how I can get better, how I can improve.

Speaker 2: [00:19:18] There it is.

Speaker 1: [00:19:19] He didn't just wallow in the uncontrollables, he immediately pivoted to his daily standard. He was asking the exact right question.

Speaker 2: [00:19:26] He was executing the exact same mental process as the high school freshmen. The freshman was just answering the question much louder through sheer, undeniable daily action. But the mechanism is identical. He was shifting from outcome to process.

Speaker 1: [00:19:39] And that brings us to the ultimate thesis of Scott Wilder's work.

Speaker 2: [00:19:42] Which is this there is always something you can control. Always. The job is not just to passively notice it, but to actively hunt for it, find it, and then own it completely. Wow. According to the source material, that is what being truly game ready looks like in any domain. It is never a state of passive zen. It is a state of active, relentless ownership.

Speaker 1: [00:20:07] So as we wrap up today's deep dive, we always like to leave you with something to mull over. We've talked a lot about how radical ownership changes your own internal landscape. But think about this from a completely different angle. If you start practicing this, how does it change the people around you?

Speaker 2: [00:20:22] Oh, that's a great question.

Speaker 1: [00:20:24] Think about your team at work or even your family dynamic. If you're the one person in the room who refuses to say, well, it's out of my hands, and instead constantly looks for the next actionable lever to pull. Does that radical ownership become contagious?

Speaker 2: [00:20:37] I bet it does.

Speaker 1: [00:20:38] Does your refusal to be a victim secretly force everyone else around you to level up their own agency? It's a really fascinating dynamic to consider. Thank you so much for joining us as we unpack this material. Go find your Controllables own them completely and we'll catch you on the next deep dive.

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