EP #16 Reclaim Your Power With One Important Question

Where does your power actually live? In this episode, Kindyl breaks down how easily we give our energy away by focusing on things we can’t control—other people, unfair circumstances, bad timing, the “wind,” and everything we wish would just change. If you’ve been feeling stuck, anxious, frustrated, or powerless, this conversation will help you bring your attention back to the one place real change begins: your response.

You’ll hear why an internal locus of control matters, how external focus quietly drains your energy, and why taking responsibility is not the same thing as blaming yourself. This episode explores how control, mindset, emotional resilience, relationships, work stress, and personal growth all intersect—and why asking a better question can shift everything.

If you’ve been caught in overthinking, resentment, frustration, or helplessness, this is for you. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Change doesn't start with what you do. Change starts with who you are. I'm your host, Kendall Keaton, and this is the Identity Advantage. All right, everybody, welcome back.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Today we're going to have a conversation about power, your power, specifically about where your power lives. Because you could be spending enormous amounts of your energy focused on the things you cannot control. And when we are able to shift this focus, everything else starts to change. And this matters because such a huge part of becoming the best version of yourself, feeling more fulfilled, feeling more content, feeling the freedom that we want to feel. It all comes down to this right here. Because most of us are chasing some version of the same thing. We all just want to feel better. Anything you want is because you think you will feel better in the having of it, right? We want to feel better. We want to feel more at peace, feel in alignment. We want to feel more fulfilled in our relationships or maybe your work in your bodies, just in your lives in general. But so many times we're trying to get there while we are focusing all of our attention on things that are outside of us, things that are that are outside of our control. What they did, what they said, what happened, what went wrong, this was unfair, what should have been different, the things we wish that would just change. And when all of our focus is on the things that are outside of us, it feels like all of our power is outside of us as well. It makes us feel exhausted. This is where a lot of anxiety comes from. And I want to talk about this. Just the other day, I was at my son's track meet. He's in middle school, he's eighth grade, and he was throwing, he he throws discus and shot. And just so you know, like I am not a track expert by any means. I'm just a mom standing and watching and taking pictures and video. So if I misterm things, I apologize. I am not a track guru. But he was throwing, and I could tell after he threw that by the way, just by the way he was carrying himself that he wasn't happy with it. So afterwards I asked him, I said, How do you think it went? Are you happy with with what you did? And he was like, I don't know it didn't go that good. I said, Okay, so what do you, what, what do you think the issue was? Right. And immediately he says it was the wind. And I knew I had to go about this carefully because I knew he was blaming the wind for what he did, but I didn't want to like come out straight out mom, like, you can't blame other things. So I had to kind of be careful about the way I approached it. Because I if he believe believes that the wind is the issue, what is he gonna work on? So I was like, okay, I was like, well, what is like, what'd you throw today? And he told me, and I said, Well, what's your what's your best throw? What do you normally throw? What did you expect? And he said a distance that was about 10 feet further than what he threw. I said, Oh, okay. He goes, but I was throwing that in warmups. And I said, Oh, so there was no wind during warmups. And he goes, Yeah, there was wind in warm-ups. And so I just kind of sat there. I was like, okay, so there was wind and warmups and wind in your throws, but yet you threw differently. So maybe the wind wasn't the issue. And he was like, Yeah, it was, because it was the wind. Because when you have wind, you have to like, you have to get a certain angle. I was like, okay, so maybe it wasn't the wind, maybe it was the angle. And he was still like, no, I don't like it was windy. And I think at this point he knew what I was getting at because he was just like, I just don't know why it has to be so windy. If it weren't windy, it would have been fine. And I said, Yeah, but can you control the wind? And he said, No. I said, but can you control the angle? And he just went silent. Because he knew. He knew that was right. Like, and I could see his like this little smirk on his face, like, okay, I'm done with this conversation. Because he wasn't about to say, Yeah, mom, you're right. And I could have said, Yeah, this was, this was a rough one, bud. And the wind was rough. And I could have tried to make him feel better because we do that, like, oh, it's fine. Like the wind was, the wind was rough. It was hard to, it was hard to do your best like that. Oh, you know what? The ump didn't know where the strike zone was. Oh, those refs were horrible. We want to make them feel better, but we take their control away because if it's somebody else's fault, if it's the wind, if it's the ref, if it's the ump, if it's whatever, what do they have to work on? What is in their control? Or are they just like, it's, it's without knowing it, we're making them feel powerless in the situation. And we do that to ourselves all the time. There's a difference between giving yourself grace and taking away your own power. If we protect our ego too much from being hurt, if we're trying to protect our friends, protect our family, protect whoever, those that are close to us when something doesn't go their way and say, oh, it's okay, it wasn't your fault. This happened, this happened, and this happened. Trying to make them feel better. It's also taking the control away from them that they might have to do differently the next time. If I allow him to blame the wind that is completely out of his control, what kind of power does he have to ever throw better the next time the wind comes up? He can't control the wind. He can't control what other guys are throwing. He can only control what he does and how he responds in that circumstance. How are we doing this in our own lives? How are you doing this in your own life? I've done it a million times. I catch myself all the time and I have to stop and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What can I control in this situation? Because we say things all the time like that, like the ref was terrible, right? The meeting was a mess. Your boss is impossible. It's just bad timing right now. Oh, you know how people are. We do this to ourselves and we do these to the people around us in an effort to mitigate the bad feeling emotions. Sometimes those things are true. I'm not saying that sometimes the wind isn't rough. I'm not saying this that sometimes doesn't know where the strike zone is. It happens. There are bad refs, right? There are bosses that are hard to work with. There are employees that are hard to work with. There are customers that are hard to handle. Those things exist. But if that's where you stop and you just leave it at that, then you also stop at the exact place where your power ends. Like you have nothing there. The explanation for why things are the why the way things are becomes purely external, outside of you, outside of your control, and your control disappears. And I want to be very clear that this is not about blaming yourself. And this is really important because this is not saying everything is your fault, fault, right? This is not self-attack, this is not shame. It's also not about pretending that circumstances don't exist, right? And that they don't matter. It's just about asking a better question. Not whose fault is this? Who do I have to blame? Why is this happening to me? Why are they being like this? The better question is what can I control here? What can I control in this situation? Because that question is what brings your power back to you. That question puts you back in the driver's seat. That question gives you something to work with. There was a researcher by the name of, and I, Julian Roder or Roder. And he did decades of research and it was about the locus of control, right? Locus just means location. Where do you believe your control is located? Do you believe that the control is outside of you? Do you believe the control is within you? You either have an external locus of control or you have an internal locus of control. An external locus of control says that life happens to me. Other people have the power to determine how I feel. They make me feel this way. When you do this, it makes me feel this way. It's circumstances determining what is possible. Look. The wind determines the throw. An internal locus of control says that my response matters, my choices matter, my actions matter, my preparation matters. How I show up matters. People, what they found was that people with an internal locus of control, they achieve more, they handle stress better, they experience less depression, right? They have better overall health. Like physical health outcomes overall are better for them. And not because their lives are easier, it can be the same situation as somebody else. And it's not because they get luckier, but it's because they have an internal locus of control. They believe that their actions, no matter how small, make a difference. When you believe that your actions, the things that you do, actually can make a difference, you act differently. You take ownership, you look for solutions, you adjust faster. You stay engaged, you don't give your whole life away to the wind. That belief having internal, an internal source of control, changes everything for you. Because if I believe there is something I can do, then I don't feel helpless. And helplessness is one of the most draining emotional states that there is, feeling like you, there's nothing you can do about it. It's a miserable feeling. It's anxiety, stress, frustration, resentment. It gets amplified when we feel like we have no control. Where do you feel like your control lives? So if we make this practical, let's talk about relationships, right? How many of us have been in a relationship, romantic or otherwise, where the entire thought loop is basically, God, if they would just stop this, or if they would just do this, if they would just communicate better, if they would just listen, if they would just stop doing that, if they would just, and we sit there and we stew and we wait and we rehearse and we get more frustrated and we tell ourselves the whole problem is them. But what can you actually control in a relationship? Because you cannot control the other person. You cannot force awareness into another person. You can't make them see how they are being. You can't make them change. You can't make them communicate how you want them to communicate. The only thing you have control over is how you show up in that relationship. That's it. But you can control how you speak, you can control how you regulate yourself before the conversation begins. What are you willing to participate in? What are you willing to tolerate? What are you willing to own? How clearly you communicate? Do you react? Do you respond? Are you showing up from fear, defensive, ego? Are you showing up with compassion, kindness, grace? Like, how are you showing up? That's your lane, that's where your power is. And there's parts of it that are uncomfortable because it would just be so much easier if we could just get everybody else to just be how we want them to be. But when we put our energy there, when we're putting our energy on someone else, hoping that will change, our power goes with that. We're putting our energy on someone else, we're leaving our power with somebody else. And the truth is, and I know because I have seen it, I have experienced it, I've seen it around me. When you do change how you show up, a lot of times the dynamic will start to change. Because they're responding to you as well. It's not always because they become like they're not going to become a different person overnight because you become different. But people respond to what is in front of them. When you start showing up differently, you create a different interaction. And things can actually start to strengthen, to change. That is where your power is. It's not control over them, it's control over yourself and your responses. Same thing at work. Work is a big one. If you're in a job that you don't love, maybe the environment is hard, the people are difficult, the pay's frustrating, expectations are unreasonable, right? You feel trapped in this workplace. Right. And those things can be real, those things can be valid. People can suck, environments can suck. I'm not telling you to pretend that none of that exists. But as long as your mind stays locked on all those reasons that you can't feel better until this changes, until the boss acts differently, until the company changes this policy, right? Until the schedule changes. As long as that's what you're locked on, that's why you feel stuck. Because your entire emotional state is tied to things outside of you and outside of your control. I know this because I lived this, right? I was in a job where I felt like I had zero control over my time. They told me when to be there, they told me what to do, they told me what got priority, they told me when to leave. I didn't even have a set leave time. It wasn't even like you're off work at this time. If they decided I had more work, I had to stay there. And if I had looked at that from a purely external place, which I did for many years, and it was miserable, and say, I have no control. This job controls my life. I'm just a cog in a system. I'm trapped here. I had to start asking, what can I control? I can control what I do on my lunch break. I have this 30 minutes of lunch and I have this 10 minutes of break, and I get can I get to control what I do during that time. What can I do during that time to make me feel better? Because I do have control over that. That might be a small piece of my workday in the midst of a sometimes a 10, sometimes a 12-hour workday, it used to be. But I had control over that. I can control how I use my mornings before I get to work. I have control over the time in my evenings after I get home from work. I can control what I think, what I believe. I can control the thoughts that I that I entertain during the day. I can control whether I see myself as powerless or as someone with a choice. I can control how I perceive the role I'm in while I'm in it. Even in that job, I was a UPS driver. I used to drive trucks. I used to drive the brown trucks, used to deliver the packages. And even in that job, I found moments that I could control.

unknown 14:04

Right?

SPEAKER_01 14:04

If I'm delivering a medication to someone, I can choose to see that as meaningful. I can say, I am the person who gets to deliver something that somebody genuinely needs. They asked for this thing. It's literally a life-saving medication, and I get to be the one to bring it to them. And I could choose to take pride in that. There were moments occasionally where I had a little bit of leeway in the delivery of an order. And I could choose to a certain extent to prioritize a stop that I knew might really help someone. If I have a business to deliver and I know that I have the option where I could deliver them at 4 p.m. or I could probably get this delivered before noon, it's going to help them if I deliver this before noon. I have the choice in that. That's something I have control over. And I get to help somebody by doing that. My big vision, even when I'm working for UPS, is to be doing what I'm doing now, to be speaking from stages, to be doing workshops, to be a life coach, an identity coach, to be helping people improve their life. And I could choose to see that reality even though I was driving a brown truck and delivering packages. I could choose to say, I'm getting to help somebody today. I'm getting to make this person's life easier by taking something that they asked for and being the one who gets to deliver it to them. That might seem like a small thing to you, but I'm telling you, just that small change in perspective changed how I felt during the entire day. My circumstances did not change. But I focused on what I had control over and how I perceived the actions I was taking. Am I doing the bidding of somebody else because they told me to and I have no power or control over it? Or am I choosing to do this thing and believe that it is having this effect? I can say, this matters. I matter here. The way I show up matters. And this changed the emotional experience while I was at that job, even though it was not the place I wanted to be, by focusing on the things that I had control over. It's not like the whole job magically transformed overnight, but because I stopped giving all the power away to the parts I couldn't control, I felt like I had more power. I felt more secure, and I started having more control over what I thought and therefore what I felt. And some of you need to hear that because maybe you can't change the whole situation today. But what can you control? And where is your focus? Maybe if you're building something on the side, if you're trying to learn a new skill, you can control the identity that you are practicing right now. Who are you and how are you showing up? You can control what meaning you assign to your current circumstance. You can control how you carry yourself and what you believe about yourself and what you believe about every action you take inside the life you have while you are building the life that you want. That matters more than I can even express to you right now. If you tell yourself it doesn't matter, if you tell yourself that none of it counts, if you tell yourself that there is nothing you can do, then you are just voluntarily handing your power over to all these things that you don't even like. The boss you don't like, the customer that gets under your skin, the schedule that you think keeps you trapped. You're just giving them your power and say, here, you can have complete control over what I feel and what I do and how my life evolves. And there are hard circumstances. There are hard things that we go through, devastating things, health issues, loss, trauma, completely unfair circumstances, things you genuinely did not choose to be a part of. But even in these circumstances, the question still has to be: what can I control? We can't control the past. Maybe you can't control the diagnosis. You can't control what happened. You can't control the circumstance itself. But can you control what support you seek? Can you control how you speak to yourself, how you speak to others? Can you control what habits you practice, what you put in your body, how you move it, whether or not you believe that matters, what meaning you assign to everything around you, what you choose to believe about yourself, what you choose to believe about your future, what you choose to do with the next moment. The moment you decide on one thing that you can control, you are no longer completely powerless. And I want to make a very important distinction because there is a very big difference, and we've talked about this before, very big difference between blame and responsibility. You are not taking blame for everything around you, right? Blame says this is your fault, you caused this, you should feel bad about it. Responsibility just says, I have the ability to respond. What do I do now? What do I do next? Blame is past focused, responsibility is future focused. That doesn't mean you don't ever look back. Sometimes you do need to look back and say, okay, what happened? What part did I play? Only to the extent so that you can then say, what can I do differently next time? And refocus it towards the future. The purpose of looking back is not to beat yourself up over anything. The purpose of looking back is to create a better response moving forward. That is responsibility. So you're not to blame for somebody else's behavior. You're not to blame for every circumstance, right? You are not to blame for the wind. It's not our fault the wind is blowing the direction that it's blowing. But what do we have control within that? What can we do to mitigate? Where is your control in the situation? And some people think this sounds harsh, but I think it sounds freeing, right? This is where freedom comes into play because it is hard to hear. Sometimes the things that are hardest for us to hear are the things that we really actually need to hear. We can bitch and moan and vent all we want about all the horrible things that we don't like. And there is a place for venting. Like sometimes you need to get that out, but then always follow that up and say, okay, but what do I have control over? Where does my power lie? Do you believe that your power is external? Do you think that life happens to you? Do you have an external locus of control? And are you letting other things and other circumstances determine your result? Or do you choose, because you have that choice, to have an internal locus of control and say, no, I have control over so many things, and I can exercise that control, and now I have the power to change things, to do something different, to say something different, to show up differently, and to believe that that will have an effect. You always have power over how you respond to something. That's your responsibility. The word itself says it response, ability, the ability to respond. That will always belong to you. And that is what I want you to hear. Your power is not in trying to control the wind, it's not in controlling the other people, it's not in getting life to just cooperate with you. Your power is in how you respond. Your power is in where you put your attention, in what you choose to practice, in what you choose to believe. Your power is in how you show up. Your power is in whether you keep handing your life over to the external or whether you begin reclaiming what's actually yours. Next time you feel like you're in a situation, next time something feels like it goes sideways, life is life. It happens. But pause before you react to this and just ask yourself. Self, just one question. What can I control here? Not whose fault is it, not why is this happening, not what should they have done differently, but what can I control here? What is in my lane, what is in my hands, what is mine to own, what is mine to adjust, what is mine to choose. This question will bring you back home to yourself, redirect it to you. Not because it's your fault, but because you are choosing to have power over it, not giving it to somebody else. When the next move is yours, the power is yours too. And that is the kind of power I want for you. That is the kind of power you need to be able to make the changes that you want to make. The kind of power that says, I'm not helpless, I have a choice. The kind of power that says life does not happen to me, life happens for me. There is something I can choose, there is something I can shift. There is a way I can lead myself through this. Because the moment you stop arguing with things you can't control when you stop arguing with the wind, now you have the energy to work with what you can. And that is where your change will begin. Thank you so much for listening. And if something you heard today made an impact or changed the way you think somehow, then share it with somebody you care about. Because sometimes it's that one moment, that one idea that changes everything. And until next time, remember if you want to do something you've never done, you have to become someone you've never been. That is the identity advantage.