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Cut the line on your boats
Conditionally supportive people are in someone's corner when the way that person lives serves their self-interests. As the path shifts and reshapes, their support dwindles. They advise being realistic, laugh at ambitions, and subtly belittle aspirations.
Self-limiting stories about capabilities once helped keep a person focused, and a paranoia of losing it all can even fuel success. When change becomes the clear desire, the same stories create paralyzing fear: being no entrepreneur, being bad with technology or sales, being incapable of all that.
An external locus of control is the belief that outcomes are determined by forces outside a person's control. It lets failures be explained away without accountability and lets the success of people who took the leap be put down to luck. That self-protection quickly becomes self-rejection.
The line can be cut with a clean break or with a slow reduction of the energy and attention given to each one.
Why do some people belittle others' ambitions?
In 1954 the psychologist Leon Festinger proposed social comparison theory, which holds that people judge their own abilities and choices by comparing themselves with those around them. When someone nearby takes on a bigger goal, the comparison shifts for everyone in that circle. Researchers have since linked social comparison to envy and to efforts to restore a sense of standing. The theory is one of the most widely cited in social psychology.
Why does an external locus of control matter?
Julian Rotter introduced locus of control in a 1966 monograph. He described people as differing in whether they expect outcomes to follow from their own actions or from outside forces such as luck and other people. A 2001 meta-analysis by Timothy Judge and Joyce Bono grouped locus of control with self-esteem, self-efficacy, and emotional stability as core self-evaluation traits. Those traits showed a positive relationship with job performance across the studies they reviewed.
Why do self-limiting stories feel so true?
Carol Dweck of Stanford has spent decades studying how beliefs about ability shape behavior. She distinguishes a fixed mindset, which treats talent as set, from a growth mindset, which treats it as developed through effort. In her studies, students with a fixed view were more likely to avoid challenges and to read setbacks as proof of a limit. The research became widely known through her 2006 book Mindset.