"Control the Controllables" Isn't Enough
Discover why "control the controllables" is incomplete advice and how true ownership drives future agency in sports performance.
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SPORTS PERFORMANCE | MENTAL READINESS | LEADERSHIP
“Control the Controllables” Isn’t Enough
Taking ownership when the situation isn’t your fault
3 KEY TAKEAWAYS
1 "Control the controllables" is sound advice — and it is incomplete. The more important question is what you can make controllable.
2 Learned helplessness sounds like mental toughness when it uses the right vocabulary. The difference is whether you stop there.
3 Ownership is not about past fault. It is about future agency. There is always something you can act on.
I want you to notice something the next time you hear a coach use the phrase “control the controllables.”
Notice what happens right after it. Nine times out of ten, the conversation stops. The phrase lands, everybody nods, and the room moves on. Because it sounds like the right answer. It sounds like mental toughness. It sounds like someone who has come to terms with a difficult situation.
But here is what I have learned working with athletes and organizations for over thirty years: the phrase is not wrong. It is just incomplete. And incomplete advice, delivered at the wrong moment, can quietly become a ceiling.
VOLPE AND THE PHRASE
Anthony Volpe was supposed to be the next great Yankee. He won a Gold Glove his rookie year, looked like exactly the kind of homegrown shortstop the franchise hadn’t developed in a generation. Then two difficult seasons, a .212 batting average — 144th out of 145 qualifiers in 2025 — a torn labrum, surgery, and a demotion to Triple-A. Not because he was hurt. Because someone else played his way into the starting job while Volpe was away.
He was recalled this week only because that someone broke his finger.
Volpe stood in front of reporters and they asked the obvious question: how are you going to approach this?
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“If I’ve learned anything out of all of this, it’s that there are things I can control and things I can’t.”
I’ve heard that answer hundreds of times. In locker rooms and boardrooms, from athletes and executives at every level. And every time, I think the same thing: that’s the beginning of the right answer. Not the whole thing.
WHAT BRAD SMITH TAUGHT ME
Early in my career, I worked with Brad Smith, who led Intuit as CEO for over a decade. Brad had a zero-tolerance policy for a specific phrase inside his organization — not a curse word, not disrespect. The phrase was: “It’s beyond my control.”
He had a name for what it represented: learned helplessness. When people stop taking initiative, stop believing their effort connects to outcomes, and stop asking what they could do differently, performance declines — not because they are lazy, but because somewhere along the way they learned that their actions didn’t matter. Things happened to them, not because of them.
The word Brad returned to was ownership. And he was precise about what it meant. Ownership is not blame. Blame looks backward: whose fault was this? Ownership looks forward: what’s mine to act on now? An athlete who owns a difficult situation isn’t accepting responsibility for the injury, the demotion, or the teammate who outperformed them. They are accepting responsibility for what comes next.
It is not about past fault. It is about future agency.
That distinction changed how I think about mental performance in sports entirely.
THE SOPHOMORE
I want to tell you about a different athlete — one who was handed something harder than a demotion.
A high school sophomore got cut from his baseball team this spring. Not the last player kept. One of two players cut from the entire roster. He could have said the same thing Volpe said — there are things I can control and things I can’t — and walked away from the sport entirely. Nobody would have blamed him. He could have tried something else, moved on, told himself the situation was beyond his control.
He didn’t do any of that.
He is up at six in the morning in the weight room. He is working with a track coach on speed and agility. Every afternoon he is on a field working on his hitting, fielding, and pitching — about two and a half hours of deliberate, focused work per day. Not waiting for someone to call his number. Not hoping the situation resolves itself.
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What he is demonstrating is what I call the RPM Advantage — the three elements that separate athletes who recover from setbacks from the ones who don’t.
Routines. The daily habits he is building now, before any pressure arrives, before any coach is watching. Six a.m. is a choice nobody asked him to make.
Process. His focus is on the work in front of him, not the outcome. He is not thinking about making next year’s team. He is thinking about this swing, this rep, this morning.
Mindset. He has chosen an interpretation of his situation. Not this happened to me — but here is what I am going to do about it.
He did not choose his circumstances. He chose his response. And that response is expanding his circle of control every single day.
HOW TO ACTUALLY DO THIS
Teaching athletes to operate this way is one of the hardest parts of my work — not because they lack desire, but because most have been trained, unintentionally, to wait. Wait for the coach to adjust. Wait for the slump to break. That kind of waiting can feel like patience. It isn’t. It’s learned helplessness in a uniform.
- Name what you can’t control — specifically.
The vague fog of “things not going my way” is paralyzing. Get specific. I got cut. I lost my starting job. I got hurt. When something is named clearly, it becomes finite. And when it’s finite, you can set it down.
- Ask what you can make controllable — and write it down.
Draw two columns. On the left: what is genuinely outside your influence. On the right: everything you could pull into your control through preparation, effort, and focus. Most athletes are surprised how long the right column gets. The sophomore’s list is full — his speed, his mechanics, his strength, his fielding reads, his mental routine before every rep.
- Use ARC to reset in the moment.
Because things will fall apart. That is not pessimism — that’s baseball, and it’s life. ARC is a three-step reset I use with every athlete who has told me they felt out of control in the moment.
Acknowledge — name what happened, cleanly. Not minimizing, not spiraling. That was a bad at-bat. I made an error. Acknowledgment is the first act of ownership.
Release — a breath, a physical cue, a deliberate reset. You cannot concentrate on what’s next while you are still carrying what just happened.
Concentrate — return to the next controllable action. Not the whole season. The next pitch. The one thing directly in front of you that is yours to own.
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ARC does not fix the situation. It fixes your relationship to the situation. And that relationship determines what comes next.
- Make ownership a daily standard, not a crisis response.
The athletes who recover from setbacks are not the ones who find ownership when everything falls apart. They are the ones who practice it every day when nothing is on the line. The sophomore is not grinding at six in the morning because the season is at stake. He is doing it because that is who he has decided to be. Habits built in quiet moments are the ones that survive pressure.
THE RIGHT QUESTION
Volpe said something else in the same breath that pointed exactly where he needs to go: “It’s been day to day — how I can get better, how I can improve.” That’s ownership. That’s an athlete who hasn’t stopped asking the right question.
The sophomore never stopped asking it either. He just answered it louder.
There is always something you can control. The job is to find it — and then own it completely.
That is what game ready looks like.
About Game Ready Mindset
Game Ready Mindset™ works with high school and collegiate athletic programs to build mental readiness as a daily practice — not a one-time session. Scott Wilder brings 30 years of business leadership alongside coaching certifications from Georgetown, NFHS, and Brian Cain. Learn more at
gamereadymindset.co
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About the author
Scott K. Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset™, a program and platform for teams and athletic programs, working with players, position groups, and teams in baseball, soccer, softball, and volleyball. He holds a Master’s from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University), an MBA from New York University, and a Master’s in International Studies and Conflict Resolution from The Johns Hopkins University, with coaching credentials from Georgetown University, Brian Cain’s MPM Program, the National Federation of High Schools, and FC Barcelona Football Club. He is the author of Millennial Leaders, Find What Energizes You (just published), and Compete in Any Weather.