“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not be reduced by them”.
Maya Angelou,Letter to My Daughter
Control is a difficult matter, either it is about ourselves or the others because no matter how organized and restricted is, it can’t be absolute. There will always be a gap that desire and other emotions or thoughts will find a way to be expressed and to be fulfilled. Self-control is about controlling emotions, desires and thoughts in order to achieve an aim. The main problem of self-control is time distance or generality of the reward. It’s easy to resist, when you know that the reward is near or it’s specific.
The problem starts when you must take decisions, opposite to your current habits, pleasures or comforts in order to accomplish general purposes, like good health, ideal weight and appearance, successful career, etc. Life takes a form a continuing struggle and the goal becomes a burden that we must rebel against of it.
As Kelly McGonigal Ph.D. points out in her great book, The Willpower Instinct: How self-control works, why it matters and what you can do to get more of it, the more of us don’t succeed in our decisions and our aims because we don’t study our weaknesses and the reasons of our every failure. We forget why we fail, as we forget what we want. Success may come if we achieve to surpass this “oblivion of the goldfish” and transform any thought, desire and emotion to a consciousness maintenance of who, where and how we want to be.
References
The Willpower Instinct: How self-control works, why it matters and what you can do to get more of it, Kelly McGonigal Ph.D., Penguin, 2011.