In The Room #26 – The year hadn’t changed. The story had.

One of the sales representatives in a workshop this week said this year had felt different.

Harder. Like something had shifted in the market. Customers were more difficult. Momentum felt slower. The whole thing just felt different in a way that previous years hadn't.

Then we looked at the numbers.

Same inquiry volume as the previous year. Similar conversion rate. Tracking consistently with prior periods. Nothing in the data suggested the year was meaningfully different from any other.

The year hadn't changed. The story about the year had.

And once that story had formed, it had the potential to shape everything. How they talked about prospects, how they approached difficult calls, how much energy they brought to the work. The narrative had become the operating reality.

That's not a frontline sales problem. I see senior leaders do exactly the same thing with team culture, market conditions, and organisational performance. A difficult quarter produces a story about a difficult organisation. One high-profile departure becomes a story about retention. A few hard conversations become a story about a team that's struggling.

Sometimes those stories are accurate. Often they're a feeling that has been mistaken for evidence.

The workshop was built around a deceptively simple idea: Locus of Control.

The concept, developed by psychologist Julian Rotter in the 1950s, distinguishes between what sits inside your sphere of control and what sits outside it. It sounds straightforward. In practice, most people give a surprising amount of attention to things they have no actual ability to change – and correspondingly less attention to the things they can.

The question that shifted the conversation was this: what can you actually control here? Not influence. Not wish was different. Actually control.

It's a harder question than it sounds. Because the honest answer is usually narrower than people expect. You can't control the market. You can't control what a customer decides. You can't control a decision made two layers above you, or another person's behaviour, or whether this year feels easier than last year.

But you can control your preparation. Your response. The clarity you provide. The conversation you choose to have. Where you direct your attention next.

And the distinction between what is outside your control and what sits squarely within it changes the quality of the choices available to you.

Alongside Locus of Control, we worked with a related idea: Attention, Control and Choice.

The premise is simple. Attention is a finite resource. Whatever you give it to grows in significance. Whatever you consistently attend to shapes your experience of a situation more than the situation itself does.

When attention goes to what can't be changed, it generates frustration, rumination, and a sense of helplessness that compounds over time. When attention goes to what can be acted on, it generates momentum – small or large, but real.

This isn't about manufactured positivity. It's not about pretending a problem is good or telling people to look on the bright side. Reframing isn't denial. It's asking a more useful question about a situation you can't make disappear.

Instead of "why is this happening to me?", what part of this is actually mine to act on?

Instead of "how do I stop this from happening?", given that it's happening, what can I choose next?

Instead of giving attention to what is outside your control… where would that attention be more useful right now?

Those questions don't change the problem. They change the relationship you have with it. And that changes what you do next.

The leadership application is direct.

A manager can't control whether someone arrives motivated every morning. But they can control the clarity they provide, the quality of their one-on-ones, and whether people understand what good performance looks like.

They can't control every decision made above them. But they can control how they communicate those decisions to their team – whether they add context, own the message, and hold the line.

They can't control whether a difficult conversation will be uncomfortable. But they can control whether they have it.

And they can't control the story their team tells about a difficult period. But they can control the evidence they put in front of them. The actual numbers, the real progress, the genuine wins that a negative narrative tends to render invisible.

That last one matters more than it might seem. Because teams take their interpretive cues from leaders. If a leader's attention is locked on what can't be changed, the team's attention often follows. If a leader models a different relationship with difficulty – not denial, but deliberate redirection – that too is contagious.

The problem may still be there. The market may still be difficult. The decision may still have been wrong. The difficult person may still be in the room.

But the problem doesn't have to decide what you do next.

That's the choice that's always available, even when almost everything else isn't.

The honest question: what are you currently giving attention to that you have no actual control over – and what might become possible if that attention went somewhere else?

Dan Kuss is the founder of Strengths Academy, an Adelaide-based leadership development consultancy specialising in strengths-based leadership development and team performance. The "In The Room" series shares observations from inside real rooms and leadership conversations.

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