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Influence is a pin drop
The two columns
The exercise takes one sheet of paper. Draw a line down the middle, label one side concern and the other influence, and write down whatever has been occupying your waking hours. The thoughts that keep you from falling back asleep land on the concern side: social media, the news, everything you can't control.
Then turn to the influence side. It rarely holds more than one entry, and that entry is yourself: how you think, how you talk to yourself, how you plan your day, and how you manage your time. Everything on it traces back to what you directly control.
What you control
You have no control over what happens to you in life, and you have complete control over how you respond. Being scared or concerned about something does nothing to its outcome, while everything on the influence side does. It is startling how much lands on the left and how little on the right.
Social media keeps stretching the left column, since old classmates, former coworkers, and distant crises are always within reach. Engaging with an algorithm is still optional. Done every week or every month, the exercise comes to mind whenever a news story starts pulling someone down a rabbit hole.
Where does the influence exercise come from?
Stephen Covey popularized the two circles in his 1989 book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He called the larger one the circle of concern and the smaller one inside it the circle of influence. Covey argued that people who spend their energy on the inner circle see it grow, while people who dwell on the outer one see it shrink. His publisher reports that the book has sold more than 40 million copies.
Why does bad news grab attention so hard?
A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by Stuart Soroka, measured the physiological reactions of 1,156 people as they watched news clips. Negative stories produced stronger responses in skin conductance and heart activity than positive ones. The pattern is often called negativity bias, and it is thought to reflect a long history in which threats demanded faster reactions than pleasant surprises. The study covered participants in 17 countries and found the same tilt toward negative stories.
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