> However, when I was in situations in life which were bad and totally out of my control and to the best of my ability I couldn't come out of them, I realized it's pretty much all just luck and circumstance.
The failure mode is when someone starts seeing almost everything as totally out of their control, even when it’s not.
When I was doing volunteer mentoring it was a common scenario for people to request help for their hopeless situation at work, then to resolve it through the simplest suggestions like “Have you tried talking to them?” Gentle questions like “What did they say when you asked them about it?” would reveal that most of the hopeless situations were only assumed to be hopeless or out of their control.
That’s not to say that every situation is in your control. However I’ve talked to enough people who erroneously underestimate their agency or control over situations to always question it on a situation by situation basis.
Some times it takes external encouragement to realize that a situation is not actually out of control or hopeless.
The failure mode is when someone starts seeing almost everything as totally out of their control, even when it’s not.
When I was doing volunteer mentoring it was a common scenario for people to request help for their hopeless situation at work, then to resolve it through the simplest suggestions like “Have you tried talking to them?” Gentle questions like “What did they say when you asked them about it?” would reveal that most of the hopeless situations were only assumed to be hopeless or out of their control.
That’s not to say that every situation is in your control. However I’ve talked to enough people who erroneously underestimate their agency or control over situations to always question it on a situation by situation basis.
Some times it takes external encouragement to realize that a situation is not actually out of control or hopeless.