How to Focus on What You Can Control: The Question That Changed Everything

By Larry “Taterpop” Doxtater — 27-year U.S. Army officer, leadership educator, and certified John C. Maxwell coach

Learning how to focus on what you can control is close to the whole game of leadership — because nearly everything that exhausts a leader is energy spent on what they can’t. The shift that changes it isn’t a technique. It’s a single question, quietly swapped for a better one: from “Why won’t they change?” to “How do I govern myself when they don’t?” That turn — from managing everyone else to governing yourself — has a name. It’s the word this entire journey was walking toward: sovereignty.

This is the last stop on that road, so let me take you back to where it started.

How to Focus on What You Can Control: Start by Drawing the Line

To focus on what you can control, you first have to draw an honest line between what’s yours to govern and what never was — and then stop paying rent on the wrong side of it. Most stress lives on the far side of that line: other people’s choices, opinions, and reactions you were never going to command anyway.

The math is brutal once you see it. In one Penn State study, researchers tracked people’s worries and found that 91% of the things they worried about never actually came true (LaFreniere & Newman, 2020). Ninety-one percent. That’s a staggering amount of a leader’s finite energy poured into outcomes that never arrive — energy stolen from the small territory where you actually have power. Stephen Covey called this the difference between your circle of concern (everything you care about) and your circle of influence (the far smaller set of things you can actually affect). Effective people, he found, work relentlessly inside the smaller circle. Drained people exhaust themselves in the larger one. Drawing that line isn’t resignation. It’s where your power gets concentrated.

The Question That Quietly Changed

This whole journey began with a question that had nothing to do with leadership frameworks: Why can’t we just get along? I was watching disagreement curdle into hostility, and I wanted to understand it. I wasn’t trying to solve politics — politics was only the trigger. I was trying to understand people.

But every version of that original question pointed outward. Why won’t they listen? Why are they so angry? Why can’t they see what’s obvious? Each one kept my attention safely on everyone else — and safely away from the one person I could actually do something about. The turn came slowly and uncomfortably, when I admitted I had the same reflexes I kept diagnosing in others. The question rotated on its axis and became: How do I remain centered, clear, and useful when the people and the world around me don’t behave the way I want them to? That was no longer a political question, or even really a question about other people. It was a question of self-command.

What Personal Sovereignty Actually Means

Sovereignty is the word that finally tied it all together — but not the way it sounds. It doesn’t mean domination, independence from everyone, or control over what happens to you. Personal sovereignty means something far more demanding: accepting full responsibility for governing what actually remains yours.

And what remains yours is a short, powerful list: your attention, your energy, your responses, your decisions, your values, your behavior, your presence, your impact. Not the outcome. Not the other person. Not the circumstance. Those you influence at best. But the inner territory — how you show up, what you give your attention to, whether you respond or react — that is genuinely, entirely yours to govern. Most people surrender it without noticing, handing their state to whoever raised their voice last. The sovereign leader takes it back.

The Freedom in the Space Between

Here’s the part that turns responsibility from a burden into a freedom: between what happens to you and how you respond, there is a gap — and that gap is entirely yours. Viktor Frankl, who survived the worst circumstances imaginable, put it best: between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space lies our power to choose our response — and in our response lies our growth and our freedom.

That’s the whole thing. You cannot command every circumstance. You cannot control every outcome. You cannot make everyone agree with you or behave the way you’d like. But you can learn to govern yourself within those circumstances — and that governed self is the only stable ground a leader ever actually stands on. Taking full responsibility for your side of that gap isn’t heavy. It’s liberating, because it hands you back the one thing no circumstance can take: your ability to choose who you are in the moment.

Why This Was Never a Political Answer

I started by wondering why everyone else couldn’t get along. I ended up realizing the more useful question was how well I could govern myself when they didn’t. That shift — from external control to internal command — is the entire origin of this work, and it’s why it was never a political book. The world will remain noisy, divided, and largely beyond your control. That isn’t the problem to solve. It’s the condition you lead inside of.

Sovereign leadership doesn’t begin with fixing the world or winning the argument. It begins, always, with what remains yours to govern: yourself. Get that right, and you become the steady center other people can borrow from. Get it wrong, and no amount of controlling the outside will ever be enough.

Your 5-Minute Practice

Here’s the practice that holds the whole journey together. Take five minutes and draw two columns: on the left, what’s draining you right now that you cannot control; on the right, the piece of it that is genuinely yours to govern. Then move your attention — deliberately — to the right column, and take one small action there today.

That single move, repeated, is what self-command is made of. Notice, over the coming weeks, how much lighter you feel spending your energy only where it can actually do something.

That is the journey toward the Sovereign Center — from why can’t we just get along? to how well can I govern what’s mine? The full path, all Ten Truths and the practical work of walking them, lives in The Sovereign Leader: A Practical Path to Clarity, Energy, and Self-Command. If this six-part story spoke to something you’ve felt, the book is where it all comes together.

The world may stay exactly as noisy as it is. Your sovereignty begins with the one thing that was always yours.

What are you spending energy trying to control that was never yours to begin with?

Sources

• LaFreniere, L. S., & Newman, M. G. “Exposing Worry’s Deceit: Percentage of Untrue Worries in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Treatment.” Behavior Therapy (2020), Penn State — 91.4% of participants’ worries did not come true.
• Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) — the circle of concern vs. the circle of influence.
• Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) — the space between stimulus and response, and the freedom to choose one’s response.