Hey there Reader,
At the beginning of a coaching session, we always set the agreement.
This is a fancy way of working out what you want to leave with by the end of the session.
Last week, one of my clients said that she wanted to focus on self-care. She had recently been away from home and couldn’t help noticing that, during this time, she had found it much easier to look after herself.
Now that she was home again, the to-do list was a mile long. In the face of these competing priorities, her own needs slipped off the list.
She thought that one way to solve the problem was to create a plan.
But having worked with her for a while, and with many women like her, I challenged her by asking:
Have you made plans before?
Because, Reader, she was no stranger to making plans.
Many years ago, when I was doing a paper in Social Psychology, we learned about the concept of locus of control.
Broadly speaking, people with a more internal locus of control tend to believe that what happens in their lives is influenced by their own actions. People with a more external locus of control are more likely to see events as being shaped by things outside their control.
There’s no doubt that many Western societies prize the first of these.
Much of the way we think about life is built around the idea that, through effort, discipline, better choices or sheer force of will, we can put ourselves in a position to get what we want.
We’re much less comfortable talking about the external.
Focus too much on circumstances and it can start to sound like you’re making excuses. Like you’re giving away your agency. Like you’re allowing yourself to become a victim of your own life.
So much “self-help” is predicated on the idea that the answer lies with the self.
Heck, it’s even in the title.
And of course, sometimes it does.
We can change our behaviour. We can make plans. We can build habits, set boundaries, make different choices and decide that something matters enough to do something about it.
But sometimes our faith in individual agency stops us looking objectively at the impact, and sometimes the intractability, of the external conditions around us.
In the case of my client, the truth was that her to-do list was long.
She had a home that demanded a lot from her. Other people depended on her. Much of the work of keeping everyday life running fell to her.
There wasn’t some hidden pocket of unused time waiting to be discovered if only she bought the right planner.
And this matters!
Because if the conditions of your life are continually working against the thing you are trying to do, another plan may not be the answer.
You can schedule the daily walk after dinner.
You can put the long, hot bath in the calendar for Sunday night.
You can decide that this week, finally, you are going to prioritise yourself, your needs.
But if nothing about the environment around you changes, all those plans are being laid over the top of the same problem.
Perhaps my client didn’t need a better self-care plan.
Perhaps she was trying to solve an environmental problem with an individual solution.
🪞 Something to consider
We tend to ask ourselves questions like:
How can I be more disciplined?
How can I make this a habit?
How can I fit this in?
How can I get better at managing my time?
They’re useful questions.
But they all assume the problem is something we need to fix.
Sometimes a better question is:
What is it about the conditions of my life that makes this harder than it needs to be?
🧭 Try this
Think of something you have been trying to change for a while.
Perhaps you want to exercise more, cook better food, read more, spend less time on your phone, keep the house under control, see your friends more often or simply feel less rushed.
Before you make another plan, ask yourself:
What keeps getting in the way?
Then look at your answers and separate them into two groups:
Things within me
Habits, choices, skills, beliefs or behaviours that I can work on.
Things around me
My home, workload, routines, responsibilities, relationships, resources or other conditions that affect what is possible.
Then ask:
Is there anything around me that needs to change, rather than asking myself to keep getting better at coping with it?
That might lead to a very different kind of plan.
A final thought
We spend a lot of time trying to change ourselves.
But sometimes living better means changing what surrounds us.
Sometimes the thing that needs to change isn’t you.