Do you know how to make someone give you 20 cents? It’s a cinch. First, go into a store and find something that costs $9.80. Then, go to the cashier and hand over a $10.00 bill. The cashier will give you back 20 cents. Simple. You’ve just controlled the cashier. You made the cashier give you 20 cents.
This little exchange might not seem controlling but that’s part of the beauty of control – most of the time we don’t even notice that it’s going on. Often, it’s only when a disturbance occurs that the ever-present control is exposed.
On Wednesday I stopped at one of my favourite cafes and ordered a double-shot ristretto. The young man taking my order said “$3.50 please”. I absent-mindedly handed over $3.50 and continued to study the poster that had caught my attention. The young chap said, a little more insistently, “It’s three dollars fifty”. I dragged my attention away from the poster and looked down at his outstretched palm where there was a 1 dollar coin, a 2 dollar coin, and a 20 cent coin presenting themselves to me. I immediately said “Oh! Sorry!”, fished a 50 cent coin from my wallet, and exchanged it for the 20 cent piece in his hand. In a few minutes I had my coffee.
In the dim lighting of the café I had mistakenly plucked the wrong coin from my wallet. Even an innocent bungle like that can reveal the control that is constantly at play. In this scenario I was controlling the cashier by making him give me a double-shot ristretto and he was controlling me by making me give him $3.50.
We can tell that there was control going on because when the cashier didn’t get what he wanted he acted to make things right. The coins he got were different from the coins he wanted so he did what he could to correct the difference. This is the hallmark of control.
The café cashier likes to live in a world where people give him the money that he asks for and I like to live in a world where café cashiers give me the coffee I ask for. That little morning exchange was a great example of pure, unadulterated control.
Control was uncomplicated in that situation because we both let each other get what they wanted. Control gets much trickier when we want other people to do things that they don’t want to do.
If the cashier had said “$12.50 please” I would have objected and probably found another café. If I had said to the cashier “Just take the darn $3.20 and be happy with it” I doubt that I would have got my coffee.
So controlling others is straightforward if we can figure out ways to control them without hindering their control. Making a cashier give you cash or coffee is easy if you do it in such a way that enables them to control what they want as well. You could also try making them give you money by pointing a gun at them and you might even get what you want initially but your ability to control is likely to become severely limited quite quickly.
If your little baby wants to be fed but you think she needs to be cuddled, as lovely as your cuddling actions are, they won’t help your youngster reduce the difference between what she wants and what she’s getting. She’ll keep on doing whatever she can do until she’s as fed as she wants to be. And as she keeps on doing all that she can do, it’s highly likely that this doing will interfere with things you’d like to be doing. How can you get back to what you want to be doing? By helping the babe reduce the difference between how fed she is and the feeding she wants.
And that’s the serious fine print in the control contract we signed up to when we took our first breath: Thwarting other people’s control is bad for us – ultimately, it limits our own control.
Control is all about what people want. Well, it’s all about what people want and what they’re currently getting. On the outside, we certainly have some influence over what other people are getting in the world we share with them but there’s very little we can do about the wants that are tucked away in the recesses of their mind. If what we want other people to do is at odds with how they want their world to be, they’ll find ways of removing our influence. We all will. That’s how we’re designed.
So should we stop trying to control others? Absolutely not! Controlling others is a part of life. Should we control others in ways that don’t interfere with their own controlling? Definitely! Why? Because that’s good for them and it’s good for us. Helping others control helps us control better too.
The Holy Grail of humanity is about findings ways to control what we want without stopping other people from doing the same thing.
These ideas are explained in lots more detail in my book Controlling People: The paradoxical nature of being human that I’ve written with my good friend and colleague Rick Marken. You can find it on amazon.com (http://tinyurl.com/plcc7h7).
