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For some reason I always remembered the psychological training I received at Glasgow Dental School and I can even remember the building I was in when I received it.

It’s worth considering, when you’re in discussion with someone and trying to change their behaviour for whatever reason that might be.

Remember that we’re all selling all the time to everyone in one way or another. 

The external locus of control understands or believes that external factors affect destiny. They realise that no matter how much they train or how good they eat, they still might die on cancer or a heart attack.

The ultimate and extreme external locus of control does whatever they want all the time because, in their mind, ‘I could just get hit by a bus’.

When you get to that end of the spectrum it’s difficult to manage because you cannot change the behaviour in a direction towards anything positive. As far as they’re concerned their destiny is already stamped.

The internal locus of control (wrongly) believes that they control everything. As long as they can eat properly, exercise properly, decrease their stress, stay away from people who don’t look after them, and control their environment entirely then the likelihood is that they’ll live forever.

It’s easy to work with internal locus of control people if you have something they want because they see that as valuable, but the difficulty is that they cannot accept the bumps in the road.

Understanding these two definitive psychological traits is really interesting because it impacts on how you resolve conflict or how you deal with difficult situations. Also worthwhile perhaps is plotting yourself on the spectrum of external to internal locus of control.

Blog Post Number: 1909