Tag Archives: “Circle of Influence”

Why are you distressing your friends?

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Rants

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I’ve recently found that well-motivated people do like to spread the word through social media about issues that they find disturbing. This is all too frequently done through the inclusion of a video of whatever it is that causes this emotional upheaval. Societally the convention is that this is considered a ‘good thing’ because (they say) it ‘raises awareness’. The awareness it has raised in me is annoyance. Why so?

Well, consider it like this. If something makes me angry, upsets me, or even worse distresses me – why on earth do I want to visually inflict it on my friends and cause them anger, upset or distress?

The news channels, the newspapers, the charities and so on already provide this information copiously. There is rarely a day goes by without some bead news being visually communicated to me, often by a charity justifiably seeking funds. In their defence they do so with more measured video snippets because they believe that distress should not be inflicted by accident. If something IS likely to distress, they warn us.

(Have you noticed the repeated charity adverts saying the ‘situation is getting worse’? If that’s so, the money already sent isn’t working, so why send more? OK, that’s a bit tongue in cheek, but Michael Sheen is starting to get on my pip. See also an interesting article on why Ethiopia continues to breed an ever-larger population while still having no food and water.)

Anyway, social media users – if you like me enough to consider me your friend, here’s a suggestion.

If you really feel strongly about an issue, provide a link instead of a video, and let me decide if I want to see it. Provide it so that it doesn’t automatically upload the video e.g. put a gap between the . and the com. Don’t force upsetting scenes on me. Start a conversation about it with me, and see if I engage. If I am interested, let’s talk – if not, let’s move on. Or just use a poster raising the issue, one that doesn’t anger, upset or distress people, but just raises that awareness.

PLUS – and here’s just a thought – please don’t try to involve me unless you intend to do more than just spread the word. If you want to actually DO something, DO IT! Otherwise you’re just pointing and saying, “Oooh, look what they did!”

And that’s the Daily Mail’s responsibility.

In the end, it’s simply a case of your Circle of Concern v my Circle of Influence. If one or neither of us is willing and/or able to do something about the issue other than just shout, let’s waste no further time on it.

 

In the zone – in the Circle.

19 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by in General, Purpose and Service

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“As long as we are working in our Circle of Concern, we empower the things within it to control us. We aren’t taking the proactive initiative necessary to effect positive change.” Stephen R Covey.

We all live in two circles, one lying within another. The outer circle is called the Circle of Concern and contains everything we know about and which has an influence on our lives in the sense that things happen in it that relate to our existence. It includes things like the weather, international politics, the economy and this morning’s commuter traffic. Within that circle is the smaller Circle of Influence, which contains the things over which we can exert a little or even a lot of control. It includes our behaviours, our home environment, the way we drive our cars. The Three Resolutions lie within the inner Circle of Influence.

CoI

 

The idea of successful living is to spend as much time in the smaller circle, dealing with things, events and circumstances over which you can exert influence – making things happen, and making them happen the way you want them to happen. At the same time, it means spending as little time as possible on the outer circle’s content because you can’t influence them. They are there but you can’t do anything about them.

Living in the Circle of Influence means not whining about things that you can’t do anything about, AND trying to do something about the things that irk you. Thinking like this, you can bring some of the ‘Concern’ circle into your ‘Influence’ circle through engagement in focus and protest groups, relevant industry bodies and so on. That is a great way to execute on the Third Resolution. But if you aren’t willing or able to get involved, don’t spend any more time dwelling on the matter.

The press – my favourite punch-bag – seems to exist solely to anger us by winding us up about things we are not willing to do anything about and which, in the main or most of the time, do not directly influence our time or our behaviour.

This morning, Oxfam has declared that soon, 1% of the Earth’s population will own 99% of the planet’s wealth. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it. You might be someone who is in a position to address this apparent inequity. Or you can think, “Well, that’s Oxfam’s job, to make us feel guilty about having money while others don’t.” The truth is probably somewhere in between your experience and the focus group’s perception. The objective of the newspaper headline, if not the Oxfam report itself, is to vilify the wealthy because they aren’t happily giving away all their money to those who can’t earn it – and to those who won’t.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about tax evasion, about rich people using clever accountants to help them avoid paying income tax. Not one of the reports ever questioned the arguable fact that in a perfect world we wouldn’t pay tax at all. It is, after all, legalised theft. The state decides how much of what you earn it is going to take, and you have one vote twice a decade to decide if (in the UK) 1/600th of the people stealing your money should keep on doing so. You have as much influence over what they spend it on. (Or you can leave the country – rarely a viable option and it just changes the tax regime in any case!)

I’m not suggesting tax is wholly evil, just wondering why no-one ever questions why a millionaire not paying £1,000 in tax (through evasion) is such a big story when s/he probably still pays £400,000 of every £1m s/he earns – s/he earned – because the government decided that they needed/wanted it. It’s not as if you get anything more for your money than someone who pays nothing at all, is it? They get the same roads, street lamps, defence – and they take credit for the international aid your work paid for, too.

And perhaps this reminds me of my point.

I can’t do a lot about the government’s tax raising regime, and my one vote won’t make any difference at all. So I shan’t spend any more time worrying about Oxfam’s report because I don’t care and cannot influence it, and the newspapers won’t change that.

I’ll focus today on what I can do something about. Writing this blog, 1,000 pages of another book, and looking after my family.

You do what you can do, and don’t worry about what you can’t.

Covey’s THIRD Circle

08 Saturday Mar 2014

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We are all familiar through one source or another with the concept of the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. They were introduced by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and in a nutshell they are explained thus: The Circle of Concern contains everything that concerns you but about which you either can’t do anything or you choose not to. Occasionally it contains what Charles R Hobbs (in his own pre-7 Habits book ‘TimePower’) would call

• things we think we can do nothing about, but we can and don’t, and
• things we know we can do something about, but won’t.

Let’s not even go there because we know we all have things that come under one of those headings.

The Circle of Influence contains the things which concern us, and about which and upon which we can exert some level of influence – we can do something about them, if we want to. Again, as Charles Hobbs might put it, the things we think we can do something about, and do.

For the life of me I cannot understand why everyone who quotes Dr Covey invariably stops there – at Circle 2, so to speak. Because (pardon the grammar) Dr Covey wrote about a third Circle.

In the follow-up to the 7 Habits he wrote that effective weekly goals are in our Circle of FOCUS. This Circle contains what we are concerned about, that are aligned with our Personal Mission Statement, and are timely – of the moment, now, urgent AND important. To quote Dr Covey, “To spend time and effort in any other Circle diminishes our effectiveness. When we operate in our Circle of Concern we basically waste effort on things we have no ability to control or affect. When we operate within our Circle of Concern we do some good, but what we do may be at the expense of something better. When we set and achieve goals that are in our Circle of Focus, we maximise the use of our time and effort.” (First Things First, p.151)

Remembering that ‘good’ is the enemy of ‘best’, perhaps a little more thought should be given to deciding, when we plan our weeks and set our goals, whether they lie in our Circle of FOCUS. And decide that if they do, then focus is what they’ll get.

Like you I have difficulty with such a focus, because life gets in the way. For example, in the middle of my writing this I was interrupted by a phone call, and that call was interrupted by another (no message on an unidentified number, thanks a bunch). As it was, the first call was in my Circle of Focus so no harm no foul.

Personal planning enables the Circle of Focus. Haphazard To-Do lists only expand the other two circles. Focus, people – FOCUS!