When “Being Responsible” Is Actually Your Inner Control Freak

Learning the difference between agency, control, surrender, and the capacity to navigate uncertainty.

For much of my life, I’ve done a LOT of dancing (and, if I’m honest, wrestling) with the tension between being “responsible” and actually trusting life.

For many years, being responsible meant showing up. Working hard. Thinking ahead. Anticipating what could go wrong. Doing my part. . . and sometimes trying to do everyone else’s part, too.

Hellooooo, codependency and martyrdom!

I was very invested in trying to make good things happen. . . and do my best to prevent bad things from happening.

Basically, I was telling myself I was responsibly participating in life while I was actually trying to control the whole damn thing.

And to be fair, it kind of worked.

Good grades. Achievements. Checking the boxes. Doing the things. Being competent. Being prepared.

But life has also offered me plenty of moments of what I now think of as forced surrender.

Moments when no amount of planning, effort, intelligence, responsibility, or good behavior could guarantee the outcome I wanted—or, in some cases, prevent the ones I very much didn’t want.

And while I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen all of those lessons (and definitely have zero desire to repeat them), they taught me something I couldn’t have learned from the comfort of the life I already knew:

There are possibilities we can’t access while we’re busy trying to control and predict what happens next.

When responsibility quietly becomes control

Control tendencies make a lot of sense when we understand how the brain and nervous system respond to uncertainty.

Our brains are, in many ways, prediction machines. We draw on past experience, familiar patterns, and strategies that have worked before to anticipate what might happen next.

That can be incredibly useful.

It can help us prepare. Plan. Problem-solve. Protect ourselves.

But when our nervous systems are looking for safety through familiarity, that same tendency can become limiting.

We start reaching for what we already know because what we already know feels safer than what we can't yet predict.

And suddenly, what looks like responsibility from the outside may actually be an attempt to control uncertainty.

We plan more.

We anticipate more.

We try harder.

We make more lists.

We analyze every possible outcome.

We try to get everyone on the same page.

We attempt to eliminate the possibility of disappointment, failure, rejection, conflict, or surprise.

And underneath all of it can be a very human message:

“If I can just figure this out well enough, I can make sure everything turns out okay.”

The problem is that life doesn't work that way.

The 30 LEGO blocks problem

I've been thinking about this like using the same 30 LEGO blocks over and over again to build “new” things.

We can rearrange those familiar pieces in all kinds of creative ways.

But we're still building with the same 30 blocks.

Meanwhile, there are countless other pieces, shapes, colors, structures, and entire sets that we don't even know exist yet.

That's what control can do.

It can keep us creatively rearranging what is already familiar while convincing us we're creating something entirely new.

When we loosen our grip on prediction, something else becomes possible.

Curiosity.

Experimentation.

Receptivity.

Surprise.

And, perhaps most importantly, new information.

Agency isn't the same as control

This distinction has become increasingly important in my own work around Imaginal

Change and Imaginal Intelligence.

Because the alternative to control isn't helplessness.

It isn't passivity.

And it isn't giving our power away.

There is a profound difference between agency and control.

Agency says:

I can participate.

I can make choices.

I can tell the truth about what I want.

I can have the conversation.

I can make the offer.

I can take the risk.

I can create something.

I can love someone.

I can pursue the work that matters to me.

Control says:

And then I need to know what happens next.

That's where things get interesting.

How do we show up fully to participate in what matters without insisting that our participation gives us control over the outcome?

How do we make intentional choices while remaining open to a direction or possibility we couldn't have predicted?

How do we know when agency has quietly tipped into control?

And how do we know when what we're calling “surrender” is actually passivity, avoidance, or giving our authentic power away?

There isn't a tidy answer.

Super annoying, I know.

The dance between agency and surrender

I think this is a lifelong dance. . . between agency and surrender.

Between co-creation and feeling alone in the face of what matters.

Between using the intelligence, experience, and strategy we already have while also staying receptive to information and possibilities beyond what currently seems familiar, logical, or predictable.

And our capacity to stay in that dance matters enormously right now.

It matters in our relationships.

In the choices we make for ourselves.

In our businesses and creative work.

And in how we lead and contribute in a world where certainty is increasingly difficult to come by.

This is part of what I mean by transformational leadership.

Leadership isn't only about having a plan and executing it.

Sometimes it's about developing the capacity to stay present and responsive when the plan no longer fits the reality in front of us.

It's about being able to hold complexity without immediately collapsing it into an either/or answer.

It's about staying connected to ourselves and to other people while we navigate

uncertainty.

And it's about remaining available to what is emerging.

We don't need to become better at predicting the future

At this point in my life, I don't think our job is to become so good at predicting what happens next that the discomfort of uncertainty magically disappears.

I think the work is less about control through prediction and more about capacity to create space for emergent intelligence.

It's about building enough nervous system capacity to stay present, responsive, and connected inside the not-knowing instead of waiting to get to the other side of it.

That means learning to recognize when tension has us scrambling for control - without judging ourselves for the very human impulse to find solid ground.

It means building trust in our own capacity to respond wisely.

It means staying curious long enough for new information and possibilities to become available.

And it means allowing ourselves to discover that we may not need certainty in order to still move forward in the direction of what matters.

A different kind of personal power

Most importantly, I think we can use our agency to participate wholeheartedly in what matters while leaving enough room for the intelligence of life to participate, too.

That, to me, is a very different kind of personal power.

And a very different kind of leadership.

Not passive.

Not controlling.

Responsive. Participatory. And fully available for something new to emerge.

This is also at the heart of what I now call the Convergence Window: those pressurized spaces where the old story isn't quite working anymore, the next one hasn't fully arrived, and our protective instincts and creative potential are activated at the same time.

We don't necessarily get to control what emerges from those moments.

But we do get to participate in who we become inside of them. . . and build trust in the creative intelligence that naturally emerges when we give it space to breathe.

An encore conversation with Heather Gates

I recently had the chance to explore this nuanced, messy, very human dance with Heather Gates, host of Stand in the &.

The conversation was so rich that I wanted to bring it into The Imaginal Change Podcast as an encore episode.

We talk about control, surrender, agency, nervous system capacity, connection, paradox, uncertainty, and what becomes possible when we participate fully in our lives without insisting that we already know how they're supposed to unfold.

If you're navigating a transition, questioning an old way of doing things, leading through uncertainty, or simply noticing your own relationship with control, I think you'll find something useful here.

Listen to the conversation on The Imaginal Change Podcast.

And if this work resonates, you can also explore more about Imaginal Change, Imaginal Intelligence, transformational leadership, and Meghan's work with leaders, organizations, and changemakers on meghan-omalley.com.