Balance & Beyond Podcast

Episode Summary

#137: The Battle Between Control and Chaos That No One Wins

Anchored launches 6th March. Find out more here: https://www.balanceinstitute.com/anchored

Ever felt like control is the only thing keeping your life from tipping over, yet somehow it's also what's wearing you down?

We pull back the curtain on the habits that look like competence on the surface—rescuing teammates, smoothing conflicts, over-explaining, and shaving off your edges to keep everyone comfortable—and reveal the hidden cost to your energy, identity and nervous system.

Across a frank, compassionate conversation, we trace how control becomes a lifestyle: from micromanaging calendars and outcomes to carrying emotions and problems that aren’t ours. We explore why women are praised for over-responsibility and how that conditioning feeds anxiety, hyper-vigilance and burnout. You’ll hear a powerful boundary example from elite sport that reframes accountability, and a vulnerable story about self-validation that shows what changes when you stop outsourcing worth to approval, metrics and medals.

Then we offer a workable alternative: internal anchoring. Rather than swinging from grip to chaos, we show how to build a steady centre you can return to when outcomes wobble. Expect practical shifts—regulating your body before you respond, cutting the rescuer cord without abandoning care, and becoming the source of the words you’ve been waiting to hear. As you anchor within, you reclaim your voice, stop playing small, and act from presence instead of panic. The question stops being how to control more and becomes whether you can stay steady inside change—and that’s where real power lives.

If this conversation hits home, share it with a woman who needs it, and leave a quick review so more listeners can find the show. Your ripple helps other women trade white knuckles for an inner compass.

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Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for women who've outgrown the old model of success. The ones who look fine on the outside but know the way they've been living no longer fits. If you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming, this is for you. I honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in!

We are obsessed with control. But most of what we call control is actually just managing things outside ourselves. Time, calendars, conversations, other people's reactions. And the more life speeds up, the tighter we grip. What if there's an evolution beyond control, beyond white knuckling that most women don't even consider? That's what we need to talk about today.

There are a million and one things that we try to control. We spend so much of our time trying to control time, trying to control the calendar, what goes in it, where it sits, what we say, how we come across, what was that side-eye in the meeting that so-and-so said, and what was not said, looking between the words, other people's reactions.

We try to control metrics, likes, impressions, outcomes, other people's behaviors. We live in this world that has reinforced that, that control is necessary. Control is the only way to succeed. And you've turned control into a career. You've probably done a really great job of managing outcomes, of controlling time, of delivering things. And that's why this lure is so dangerous.

But what I'm seeing is there is some sneaky ways that control is playing out in these times, some of which we've glorified, whether it's through Hollywood, through conditioning, or through societal lenses. Rescuing, yes, hello, rescuer, hello, Marta, is chronic in women. And ultimately, it's a form of control. We don't like that the thing isn't going according to plan, whether it's the meeting or the project or the thing that the kids are doing in the kitchen.

And so because we have no trust in ourselves or the other person, and we're so afraid of things being out of control, that that discomfort in our nervous system is so great that we have to step in, that we literally can't help ourselves. And that sounds very visceral because it is. I want you to take yourself back to a moment where you can see a train wreck in progress.

And you can see yourself going, I want to step in. And then you're like, should I? I don't know if I should, should I, what do I do? They need to learn a lesson, but I can't fail. And that takes up so much of our energy, our headspace, and is driving us crazy and driving us to exhaustion. A few other ways that I'm seeing control, especially play out right now, is explaining for others or over-explaining. Rescuing can also look a little like softening.

So when we want to control a situation, we want to control someone else's actions. Well, if we're our full cells with someone and we come in and we go, hello, how are you? They're gonna have a reaction and they're gonna go, oh, either they're gonna go right back, hello, good morning, fabulous woman, or they're gonna go, oh my God, who put speed in her coffee this morning? And there's going to be reaction from that. And we don't know if we can control that reaction.

So we soften and we control around the edges and we shave them off a bit. So we're not brash, or we're not loud, or we're not full out, and we're just a little sanitized version of ourselves. And I get that you're not going to walk into a boardroom and going, good morning, fabulous people. There is context at play here.

However, how much of yourself are you controlling, softening in order to be accepted by others? And there's one last way that is just so chronic right now. And it actually came up at the Olympics, which I love. And this is taking responsibility, not just for other people's emotions, but also other people's problems that we didn't create.

Anyone ever been part of a cleanup crew or a firefighter's hat where you swoop in, this is part of rescuing as well. We swoop in and take credit, or we solve the impossible, or we do the thing. It's like, I didn't create this mess. But not only do we go in and clean it up, we then take personal responsibility, too much responsibility, too much accountability. We care too much for things that were never ours in the first place.

There's a difference between caring and carrying. And we carry so much that isn't ours, all under this guise of wanting to control it. It's a beautiful example recently from the US women's hockey team at the Winter Olympics, who won gold. And there was a kerfuffle with the US men's team and Donald Trump, and we don't need to go there. But she was asked at a press conference about the controversial behavior of their male counterparts. And everyone thought that she would launch into some diatribe and excuse it or whatever else.

Her response was a masterclass in boundaries and over-responsibility. She said, and I quote, everyone is expecting us to explain their behavior. That is not my responsibility. Amen, my God, that is not her responsibility to talk about or explain somebody else's behavior. Why aren't we asking the other party about their behavior? Why aren't we making them accountable? Why aren't we making them responsible?

So too often women are asked to expand their remit because it's part of caring. If you care, you carry it. But I'm calling bullshit on that because the control, the amount of control we have is now coming at a cost. Because the environment is changing so fast that there is now too much to control. So controlling when you're a kid is part of what we all do.

But there's a lot fewer variables. We join the workforce and now we're controlling ourselves and maybe a partner, maybe gym sessions, wine with girlfriends, and work. Then we're now controlling a family, partners, extended family, siblings, friends. And as we get more and more responsibility, all of this control turns into constant cortisol.

Huge amounts of hyper-vigilance, always looking for what's about to, what's about to drop, what do I need to fix? Where do I need to join the dots? We carry this deep-seated fear that we've missed something. This is why we have 40,000 tabs open in our brains because we've got to control all of it. I have to know all of it. I have to do all of it. No surprise, we're seeing record levels of anxiety, overwhelm, burnout that now are just a function of life.

You're a woman in midlife. Congratulations. This is now how you get to feel. But my God, we have to start saying no, we are not going to feel like this anymore. There is a cost to all this control and all this white knuckling we're doing. And white knuckling is when we're trying to control things so tight that our knuckles literally go white. When we have this hyperfocus, we play small.

Because we've shaved those edges off, we've become palatable. You edit yourself. You contort yourself and become a machameleon to fit in. In this process of fitting in, as Brene Brown says so beautifully, you abandon your own needs. You abandon who you are, what you want, what you might desire to keep everything outside stable. So every time we contort, we abandon a piece of ourselves.

We say to the little you inside, oh, you want sleep? You can't have sleep. Somebody else needs you. Oh, you mean you'd like lunch? No, no, no, no, no, no. This task here, that's more important than you. You don't matter. And so we go down and down and down the bottom of the list until we get to a point where we don't even hear ourselves anymore. All we hear is the noise. So, what's the alternative?

What tends to happen the moment we start talking about even loosening our grip just a little bit? Maybe go from white knuckling to just holding on. There's a whole range of fears that come flooding back in. And I can share these honestly because they are ones that I have had to contend with for many, many years.

This fear of dropping the ball. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a mistake. I'm gonna lose my edge because we've been fed this belief that my success comes from controlling everything. And therefore, everything will fall apart if I take my hands off the wheel because I don't trust myself, I don't trust life, it's all happening to me, I'm a victim.

So, of course, it feels impossible to do life any other way. So many women, just like, right, I'm gonna start researching more ways to be effective at what I'm controlling. Let me control time better, let me control my emotions better by shoving them down where the sun don't shine. I'm gonna grip tighter.

So, of course, more control but gets more control and we get stuck in this cycle. And it's really tricky to even step into this conversation about another way without all of this bias and judgment. But I'm gonna invite you now to see those fears, to witness them and say, okay, Joe, well, if control hasn't got me the life that I want, well then what's the alternative?

So if you're open to another way, let me share what is working for me personally and what I'm coaching women in my orbit to do. And it's two words that change everything. So the opposite of control isn't chaos. The opposite of control is internal anchoring. And that means knowing you've got you.

Now let's clarify a few things. If you take your hands off the wheel, you are not passive, you are not a passenger in life, you are not weak, you are not mean or non-caring or a bitch. They're all the things that come up straight away. Having your internal anchor means you are regulated, your nervous system, your emotions, even if the outcomes wobble, means you're not outsourcing your worth, your value to likes or metrics or a paycheck or trophies in the cabinet.

You don't need the room or anyone or your boss or your father or your sibling or your principal or your first grade teacher to validate you and tell you that you matter. And you don't have to wait for the apology or the thing that you are waiting for somebody to say that somehow is going to magically make you feel whole.

Now that sounds really simple. You're like, sure, stop outsourcing my worth to metrics. I know, easier said than done. And it's not a one and done. You don't tick a box and go, great, regulated, even if I wobble. This is work. This is a commitment. This is a mindset and a lifestyle where just like you choose a healthy lifestyle, you choose a lifestyle that involves you becoming anchored internally.

There's a really personal example I want to share of something that happened in my life that validated the importance of this internal anchor that changed everything. My sister's recently been out in Australia from the US, and I'd spent many, many years thinking that if we could just have a conversation, if if she just said something that I'd wanted her to say my whole life, I'd finally feel whole, I'd be seen. I waited decades wanting to be seen by my siblings, who I thought and I knew never saw me for who I was.

But knowing that for whatever reason, that was probably never going to come my way, I had the opportunity to do that work on myself. What if I say those things to me that I want them to say? What if I finally see myself for who I am? If I do then that shedding work on my own, then the irony became when the things that I'd wanted to hear for 40-something years were said, I didn't actually need it. Now let's be clear, there were tears shed influenced by the bottle, okay, many bottles of wine in that moment. And it was beautiful.

But those tears at the time of hearing those things were really for the old me who'd waited so long to hear something. And in that dual moment of two things happening at once, and I still get emotional thinking about it now. There was the old me, it's like, oh my God, I've waited to hear this my whole life. And then there was the me of today going, I don't need it.

And that was so freeing because I didn't need it. I it was evidence that I had built an internal anchor. I'd built my sense of self, my sense of self-worth, my trust in me. And I didn't need someone to plug a gap. Because how dangerous is that? Building your self-worth, your self-trust on something that you don't control. So of course, you're gonna spend so much time trying to control it. Now you're probably thinking, all right, Jo, sounds great. How do I have some of this?

Well, you have to stop waiting for the good girl, or the gold star, or the medal, or the boss, or the approval, or the words, because they may never come. And I've had clients who still feel like they have a hole or a wound that will not heal because they want somebody who is no longer on this earth to say something to them. And therefore, they're in a position now where they can never heal. I don't want that for you.

So the alternative is you have to become the source. You have to praise yourself and know it's not going to make you get a big head. You have to consciously choose who you are, decide your identity instead of taking the one that has been given to you, the one that was conditioned into you from childhood. You get to shed the version of you that thrived on gold stars and well dones.

You have to destabilize this identity where you are as a concoction of what others think of you. You decide who you want to be. Let go of the parts that you don't want to be anymore. Give back things that aren't yours, that were your parents or societies or your cultures, and actually give yourself everything you've ever wanted, that you've got hiding somewhere that you're waiting for someone to give you. This is your permission to give this to yourself.

Because then when it comes, as my moment did, you will have this glorious realization that oh my God, I was already whole. And so, in this world that is speeding up, your urge to control is going to spike and it's going to get worse. Your hustle muscle is going to activate and go crazy on steroids, and all your old coping strategies are going to come back online. I can guarantee it.

So the question I want you to ask yourself is not how do I control this better? But the question is, can I stay steady inside it? Because the more you anchor internally, the less you need to grip externally. And ironically, that's when you become infinitely more powerful.