Change is in your hands – or is it?

Customers who annoy you with their excessive demands; colleagues who are always late; family members who leave behind a mess. What seems hopeless at first can be changed with a few tricks.

Text by Mathias Maul

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Image: © gece33/istockphoto.com

The goal of the brain dump described in tcworld issue 2/22 was to find out what is going on in our mind and to enable first changes through systemic observation. In that article, I mentioned that you can only influence what "happens within yourself, not in others."

Provided we are in good health, we have direct control only over our own thoughts and our own bodies. Outside ourselves, a gray area begins: I usually have more influence on a coffee machine than on my teenage son; I can have a deeper impact on a helpful colleague than on a grumpy customer. The extent of what we can actually influence depends on the context and the mood of the day. But one thing remains constant: We have direct control only over ourselves.

Every time I present this basic insight to clients or a team, it feels like I've fed them a toad for lunch. Unfortunately, this insight causes even bigger problems: If you ...