Keep your clipboard focused on your own inventory

Trying to control other people is unwise for numerous reasons.

It’s a distraction from our own work, counterproductive to our happiness, addictive in unhealthy ways, detrimental to our relationships, driven by fear, highly stressful, and in certain cases, abusive, sadistic or illegal.

But one facet of this interpersonal habit we often overlook is, controlling people is labor intensive. It’s simply exhausting.

The question is not, wow, where do they get the balls, but rather, wow, where do they find the time?

Seriously. In a culture where our number one competitive sport has become complaining about how little time we have, it’s amazing to me that people still have energy left over to try and control others.

Isn’t controlling our own behavior a big enough job? Trying to do that for anyone else seems like  a tremendous burden to carry.  

Sober recovery programs often teach addicts how to avoid this behavior. Their term for it is called, taking other people’s inventory. They say each of us already have enough to deal with on our own journey, without trying to fix and control someone else’s collection of faults, shortcomings and offenses.

The image of taking inventory is metaphorical, of course.

But then again, what if it wasn’t? What if each individual literally had a warehouse full of boxes stacked on palettes stored in aisles? Might that make us think twice about trying to control others?

My family ran a wholesaling company for over forty years, and they had a warehouse that my brother and I always visited. There were literally millions of items in hundreds of thousands of square feet to explore. The place was hot, dirty, difficult to navigate, and had spider webs everywhere.

Imagine doing the annual inventory of that place. Then imagine doing it over and over for every other company in the industry.

That’s what trying to control other people is like. Terrible time management. A futile game with no winners.

Pixar should consider doing an entire animated movie about this. How each human being has their own unique inventory sitting in their own special building, the bulk of which that person probably doesn’t even realize is in stock. Maybe the boxes themselves come alive when the humans aren’t around and go on adventures?

This film would offer a priceless lesson about not meddling. Staying out of other people’s warehouses and focusing on roaming our own aisles instead.

Just imagine how much more productive people could become if they stayed focused on their own inventories, rather than trying to project manage everyone else’s.

Oscar awards, here we come.

Rohr, the spiritual teacher and friar, writes about this tendency to control in his amazing book of daily meditations. He says our natural instinct is to try to fix, control, or even, foolishly, to try to understand everything. The ego insists on understanding. But faith is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until we’re moved by grace to a much deeper level and a much larger frame.

It’s one hell of a time management technique.

Keep your head down and your clipboard focused on your own inventory?

That would save the average person twenty hours a week at minimum.

What happened to the last person you tried to control?