Stop Trying to Control the How: Be Open to Exploring Another Way

What if the best way forward is the one you never planned?

I can still picture the marshmallows scattered across my classroom floor.

Twenty-something little faces staring at them, followed by an eruption of laughter.

It was supposed to be an ordinary writing lesson with my Year 1 and 2 students, and I had everything prepared.

The writing topic was ready, the daily vocabulary words were organised and I had planned the lesson using the familiar I do, we do, you do approach. I would demonstrate the writing, we would practise together and then the children would write independently.

I knew exactly how the lesson was going to unfold.

Just before we began, I reached for a bag of marshmallows. I sometimes surprised the children with a little reward for completing their writing. Other days there was no reward, or perhaps a chocolate or a piece of fruit.

That morning, it was marshmallows.

The moment I pulled out the bag, every pair of eyes followed it.

Then, somehow, the bag fell.

Marshmallows scattered across the classroom floor.

For a moment, I stood there in shock. The children erupted into laughter, and before long, I was laughing too.

I looked at the marshmallows, then at the children, and suddenly had an idea.

I left the bag and a few marshmallows where they had fallen.

“Off you go,” I said. “Write your daily paragraph about that.”

They did.

Some wrote about what had happened, describing their teacher, the marshmallows and the laughter. Others took the story somewhere entirely different, imagining a marshmallow escaping from the classroom and setting off on an adventure.

Some children wrote an entire page, and every single child finished their writing that day.

It was one of the most successful writing lessons I remember.

Almost none of it happened the way I had planned.

I had gone into that classroom knowing exactly how I wanted to teach the lesson, yet the thing that mattered most was never the topic, the vocabulary list or even the carefully prepared sequence.

I wanted those children to write.

When something unexpected happened, I had a choice. I could bring everyone back to my original plan, or I could recognise the opportunity right in front of me.

That morning reminded me of something I have returned to many times since.

Sometimes, when we stop trying to control how something should happen, we discover a better way of achieving what we wanted all along.

Of course, a bag of marshmallows falling onto a classroom floor is hardly a life-changing event.

Yet I wonder how often we find ourselves in situations where things aren't happening the way we expected, and instead of considering another possibility, we become increasingly determined to make our original plan work.

Perhaps you have decided that your career needs to follow a particular path, that someone you love needs to make a certain decision or that your future depends on circumstances changing exactly as you imagined.

You know what you want, but life isn't cooperating.

We can spend so much energy trying to make things happen the way we believe they should that we stop noticing opportunities right in front of us. Sometimes we even begin trying to control other people's choices because their decisions don't fit the future we have planned.

What is interesting is that we don't necessarily recognise this as control.

We might call it being organised, responsible, prepared or committed. We might believe we are helping someone avoid a mistake or ensuring that an important outcome is achieved.

Those intentions can be valuable. The difficulty begins when our preferred approach becomes the only acceptable approach.

What if creating the future we want has less to do with controlling exactly how everything unfolds and more to do with the person we are becoming along the way?

Three questions have helped me explore this distinction.

WHAT do I want? WHO am I becoming? HOW else could it happen?

Know What You Want to Create

When we decide we want something, we naturally begin thinking about how to achieve it. We consider the opportunities available, the people involved and the steps we believe will help us get there.

Planning gives us direction and allows us to prepare for what matters. The difficulty begins when we become so attached to a particular plan that we start treating it as the only way to achieve the outcome we want.

Imagine someone who wants greater freedom in their working life.

They decide that starting a business is the answer, so they begin researching opportunities, developing ideas and organising their future around leaving employment.

That may be a wonderful choice.

Yet what if the freedom they want could also come from working differently, changing roles or developing skills that create opportunities they haven't considered?

Starting a business is one possible pathway; greater freedom is the experience they genuinely want.

I have explored this distinction through the work of my mentor Chris Duncan, author of You're Not Broken.

Chris teaches the importance of shifting our attention away from the problems we are trying to resolve and towards what we would genuinely love to create. His approach encourages us to focus on the future we want to experience rather than allowing our present difficulties to determine the possibilities we consider.

I explored a similar idea in Choosing What Comes Next: Start with the Life You Want to Create, where I considered how knowing what we want gives our choices direction.

What interests me now is how easily we can become attached to one particular way of achieving it.

Someone might want greater cooperation and shared responsibility at home, yet become frustrated when their partner approaches a task differently. The desired experience is cooperation, but insisting that everything must happen a particular way can begin working against it.

Sometimes the expectations we place around an outcome work against the very experience we are trying to create.

Recently, I was coaching a young adult who has made remarkable progress over the past year. She has developed greater confidence, independence and the ability to make decisions about her life.

During a conversation about her future, she explained an arrangement she believed she needed to maintain for another two years to support someone important to her.

Her intention was generous, although I became curious about how firmly she had connected that intention to one particular plan.

I encouraged her to think about what she wanted for their future together and whether there might be other ways to create it.

Could they explore different employment opportunities? Could they consider living somewhere else? Might there be an arrangement that supported both of their ambitions?

She didn't need to abandon her original idea or make another decision immediately. The opportunity was simply to recognise that other possibilities might exist.

She became thoughtful and thanked me for giving her something to consider.

We hadn't found the answer, but we had opened the conversation.

The question wasn't whether her plan was right or wrong. It was whether she was treating one possible arrangement as something that had to happen, without considering what else might support the future she wanted.

When we separate what we genuinely want from how we expect to achieve it, we give ourselves more freedom to explore what could be possible.

Become the Person Who Can Create It

Once we know what we want, our attention often moves towards everything that needs to happen around us.

We think about the opportunities we need, the circumstances that must change and the decisions other people might have to make.

Yet there is something equally important worth considering.

Who are we becoming in the process?

We may want greater confidence, independence or responsibility, but continue waiting for our circumstances to make those experiences possible.

Someone might believe they will become confident once they have the right job, independent once they earn enough money or capable once another person gives them greater responsibility.

The difficulty is that many of these qualities develop through experience.

We learn to make decisions by making them, to communicate by speaking up and to manage responsibility by having opportunities to practise it.

I see this particularly often when working with parents who want their teenagers to become more responsible.

They want them to organise their time, complete responsibilities and make good decisions. Yet when something needs to be done, it can be tempting to explain exactly what needs to happen, how it should be done and when it must be completed.

The intention is usually to help. Parents want their children to succeed, avoid unnecessary difficulties and develop good habits, but when every part of the process is managed for them, young people may have fewer opportunities to develop their own judgment.

One of the strategies I encourage parents to try is to release control over just one part of the process.

Keep the expectation clear, but give the teenager a genuine choice about how or when they will meet it.

They may approach the task differently, underestimate the time required or discover an easier way of completing it. Each experience gives them information they can use next time, while appropriate boundaries and support remain in place.

If we want young people to become capable of making decisions, we need to give them opportunities to practise making them.

There is another consequence of control that I think we often overlook.

When someone is constantly told how things must be done, they may gradually stop offering ideas, making decisions or taking initiative. They learn to wait for instructions because their own judgement has so little room to develop.

Meanwhile, the person making every decision can become increasingly frustrated that nobody else takes responsibility.

One person feels frustrated because they aren't trusted to make decisions. The other feels frustrated because everyone keeps coming back to them for answers.

Both may want greater independence, confidence and capability, yet the pattern between them can make those qualities harder to develop.

This is why WHO matters so much.

We need to consider not only what our behaviour achieves today, but what it is helping us and the people around us become.

This connects with the work of Herminia Ibarra, author of Working Identity.

Ibarra has explored how people develop new professional identities through experimentation and action. Rather than working out exactly who they need to become before making changes, people can try new roles and behaviours, then learn from those experiences.

I find this particularly relevant to my coaching.

Over the past year, the young adult I mentioned earlier has worked through anxiety, overwhelm, procrastination and difficult conversations. She has learned to speak up, make decisions and begin living independently.

Each experience has given her more than a strategy for managing a particular difficulty.

It has helped her discover what she is capable of doing.

Twelve months ago, she was working towards greater independence. Today, she has begun experiencing it.

Her choices about the future can now reflect the capabilities she has developed and the person she wants to continue becoming.

I think this is worth considering in our own lives.

We may be working towards something important, yet still making decisions from familiar expectations about what we can manage, what other people need from us or how circumstances must unfold.

Who am I becoming while trying to make this happen?

Am I becoming more confident in my ability to navigate uncertainty, or increasingly dependent on things going according to plan?

Am I learning to trust my judegment, or am I waiting for someone else to make every decision?

Am I giving the people around me opportunities to develop their judgment, or am I deciding so much for them that they have little room to practise?

These questions matter because the person we become is influenced by the choices we make repeatedly.

We may need to speak up when we would normally remain silent, take responsibility for something we have been avoiding or trust ourselves to try an unfamiliar approach.

The circumstances may not change immediately, but each experience gives us an opportunity to develop the qualities and capabilities we want.

The future we want is influenced not only by the circumstances we create, but by the person we become through the choices we make.

Release Control and Explore Another Way

There is something reassuring about having a plan.

We know what to expect, understand the steps involved and feel better prepared for what might happen next. Plans help us coordinate responsibilities, use resources wisely and work towards meaningful goals.

Yet every plan is developed using the information available at a particular moment.

Other people make decisions. New opportunities emerge. Circumstances develop in ways we couldn't have anticipated.

When that happens, we may feel tempted to work harder at making our original approach succeed, even when another possibility deserves consideration.

I see this in professional environments, particularly when someone has considerable experience in their role.

A manager may know an effective way to complete a project because they have used it successfully many times. When an employee suggests something different, the manager may instinctively explain why the familiar approach would be better.

Their experience may be valuable, and some standards cannot be compromised. Yet if the outcome could be achieved in more than one appropriate way, insisting on a particular method may limit what the team has an opportunity to contribute.

The employee loses an opportunity to develop judgment and confidence, while the manager may overlook an idea that could improve the result.

I don't think being organised, having standards or knowing what works makes someone controlling.

The question is whether those expectations leave room for another appropriate way.

When we become unwilling to consider a different approach simply because it isn't ours, we may have moved from providing direction to exercising unnecessary control.

Sometimes we are the person insisting on a particular way. Other times, we are the person being told there is no other way.

In either situation, it is worth considering where choice exists, what can reasonably be negotiated and which expectations genuinely need to remain in place.

Where control involves intimidation, threats or restrictions on someone's safety and independence, simply suggesting another approach may not be appropriate or safe. That is different from the everyday expectations and routines we can reasonably question.

Psychologist Ellen Langer, author of Mindfulness, has explored how familiar ways of thinking influence what we notice and the assumptions we make.

Her work encourages us to recognise different perspectives, remain attentive to new information and question conclusions we might otherwise accept automatically.

I find this particularly useful when considering the Control pattern.

Once we become convinced that something needs to happen in a particular way, we may become very good at identifying why other approaches won't work.

We recognise unfamiliar ideas as problems to solve rather than possibilities worth exploring. Over time, our confidence in one method can begin restricting the alternatives we are willing to consider.

This is where three questions I use in coaching become valuable.

What am I expecting?

We begin by identifying the particular outcome, decision or arrangement we believe should happen. Being specific helps us recognise whether that expectation is essential or simply something we have become accustomed to believing.

What other ways could it be?

We can then consider alternatives. Perhaps there is another opportunity, a different arrangement or a perspective we haven't yet explored.

The aim isn't to abandon the original plan immediately, but to recognise that it may not be the only possibility.

How else?

This question encourages us to keep looking.

We often identify one alternative and begin deciding whether it will work before considering anything further. Remaining curious a little longer may reveal an option that wasn't immediately obvious.

Not every possibility will be practical or appropriate. Safety, financial responsibilities, professional standards and other important commitments may require a particular approach.

Flexibility doesn't mean ignoring those conditions. It means recognising where we have more freedom to choose than we first imagined.

I think back to those marshmallows on my classroom floor.

I could have collected them, settled the children and returned everyone to the lesson I had prepared. There would have been nothing unreasonable about that decision.

The plan was sound. The learning objective was clear.

Yet something unexpected had captured the children's attention, and I could see an opportunity to use it.

I didn't need to change what I wanted them to achieve.

I needed to be willing to change how we got there.

That willingness becomes easier as we develop confidence in our ability to respond, learn and make decisions. We become less dependent on everything unfolding according to our expectations.

We can remain committed to an outcome while reconsidering the pathway. We can value our own experience while recognising that someone else may have a useful perspective.

An unexpected change may still be inconvenient or disappointing, but it doesn't always have to prevent us from moving towards what matters.

Being open to another way doesn't mean abandoning what matters. It means allowing ourselves more than one possibility for creating it.

Start Choosing Here

Think about something you want to create in your life.

Perhaps it is greater freedom, a meaningful career, stronger relationships, more independence or an experience you have been looking forward to.

You may already have a plan for how you believe it should happen.

Take a moment to consider whether that plan has become an expectation you are reluctant to question.

WHAT do you genuinely want?

Look beyond the arrangement you have imagined and consider the experience or outcome that matters most.

WHO are you becoming?

Consider how your current expectations and behaviours are shaping you. Are they developing the confidence, flexibility and capability you want? What could you begin practising now?

HOW else could it happen?

Consider the expectations you have placed around the outcome. Explore another possibility, then another, without needing to decide immediately which one is right.

You can remain committed to what matters while allowing yourself to discover different ways of achieving it.

You don't need to control every step of the journey. You need to become someone who can navigate it.