Control
Introduction
Your philosophy on what is controlling your experiences can have a huge impact on your life. Some believe that they have a strong sense of control where they believe they are the strongest determining factor. In contrast, some have a strong external sense of control: believing their environment is the strongest determining factor of their experiences. So what is your control philosophy and how could it affect your life at university and beyond?
Review each of the following 14 statements and click on what the typical frequency
might be for you in each case: rarely (less than 10% of the time),
occasionally (about 30% of the time), sometimes (about 50% of the time),
often (about 70% of the time) and usually (about 90% of the time).
Feedback
Read on to find out what this means and to consider whether you would like to adapt your approach.
External control philosophy
This advice is particularly important if you have a strong external control score.
There are certain advantages and disadvantages to operating with an external control philosophy:
Advantages
- You may take a more flexible, relaxed approach to external factors and pressures, which can lead to less stress and anxiety.
- You may be more opportunistic, taking advantage of late opportunities that arise.
- You may be more willing to act on advice from others and to avoid information overload by acting instinctively.
Disadvantages
- You may not feel it is important to take control of the issues you face and may end up in a less fortunate situation as a result.
- You may be less likely to identify rewards from the actions you do take and therefore feel less motivated and persevere less in difficult situations.
- You may not seek enough information about the situations you face and therefore make poorer decisions.
What can I learn from a more internal control philosophy?
- A more internal control philosophy can lead to resolution of problems and may leave you in a better final situation. If you feel you often end up in a less favourable situation than you had hoped then trying to take more control may help.
- Those with an internal control philosophy recognise that their efforts lead to results and therefore feel motivated. If you often feel demotivated in difficult circumstances and find yourself giving up, then you may want to try and adjust your views.
- An internal control philosophy leads to being better informed about a given situation. If you often feel ill equipped in terms of information in a given situation then you may wish to adjust your approach.
What can I do to make changes?
- Why not start by experimenting with a slightly different approach?
- Next time you face a significant problem, when you are about to ignore it or give up, stop and reflect. Seek help and support to persevere and spend time reflecting afterwards on the rewards from your extra efforts.
- Next time you are in a difficult situation or are facing a problem, stop and reflect on the actions you took and consider the impact they had. Allow yourself to feel good about what you have done.
- When you next face a problem, push yourself to research around it and deliberately reflect on how this has helped you resolve the problem.
- Talk to your Personal Tutor or Study Adviser (Student Services) if this is impacting on your academic performance.
- Talk to a Careers Adviser about your control philosophy in relation to career decision making if this is an issue for you.
- Talk to Counselling Services about your approach and either through their Positive Living courses or through one-to-one advice they can help you adjust your general control philosophy.
Why not start now?
Identify an upcoming issue that may need you to take more control, research more, persevere more and plan a goal.
Internal control philosophy
This advice is particularly important if you have a strong internal control score.
There are certain advantages and disadvantages to operating with an internal control philosophy:
Advantages
- You may want to take control of your decisions and are more likely to persevere in the face of adversity.
- You may realise that your efforts impact on your situation and will therefore feel more motivated by this.
- You are likely to seek out information about a situation that will impact on you.
Disadvantages
- Taking too much control may lead to early decisions so opportunities that arise later on may be lost.
- You may underestimate the influence of external factors or ignore external advice, to your detriment.
- You may get bogged down in too much information and struggle to make a decision without exploring everything. Sometimes we need to know when to take a calculated risk.
What can I learn from a more external control philosophy?
- Having a more external control philosophy can lead to a more flexible, relaxed approach to external factors and pressures. If your approach often leads to stress or anxiety then you may want to make some changes.
- Those with external control philosophies feel more able to be opportunistic. If you feel last minute opportunities often pass you by because you feel too rigid in your approach, then you may want to try and adjust.
- Those with an external control philosophy are often led by the views of others and operate more instinctively. If you feel you are often paralysed by too much information and can ignore good advice, you may want to revisit this aspect of your approach.
What can I do to make changes?
- Why not start with experimenting with a slightly different approach?
- When facing strong external forces, try to remain objective and deliberately reflect on what you can and cannot take control of to make sure you manage the external risks that exist.
- Deliberately delay decisions and see what opportunities arise.
- Try to spend more time and energy reflecting on the views of others and try to consider whether what they are saying is truly valid or not.
- Set yourself time limits for gathering information and push yourself to take a calculated risk in your decisions occasionally.
- Pay more attention to your initial instincts in a given situation.
- Talk to your Personal Tutor or Study Adviser (Student Services) if this is impacting on your academic performance.
- Talk to a Careers Adviser about your control philosophy in relation to career decision making if this is an issue for you.
- Talk to Counselling Services about your approach and either through their Positive Living courses or through one-to-one advice they can help you adjust your general control philosophy.
Why not start now?
Identify an upcoming issue that needs you to take less control, consider others' views, use instincts and plan a goal.
Your Plan
This is "Your Plan". It includes the issues that you have identified through
this part of Gro and any action points that you have decided to take to
move you forward plus any notes and thoughts you have written down
along the way. Identifying precisely what your next steps will be after
completing this exercise on control will make it more likely that
you will make progress.
You have now finished this section. You can print, download (as pdf) or email yourself a copy of your plan. To move on to another section return to the Home page.
About Gro
It is widely acknowledged that to successfully embark on developing your employability or choose a career that there are some fundamental attributes that need to be in place. If you think some of the headings below represent potential areas of development for you then continue reading about the components of Gro and consider how you can make the most of them:
- Dealing with transition and change. Moving into a career beyond university is partly about the ability to manage the process of moving between different phases of your life. This aspect of Gro is designed to help you: develop your awareness of the change process; learn from past experiences of change and to apply it to future change.
- Self-confidence. To get started on the range of activities that future recruiters seek, such as sports, committees, societies, part time work, work experience, placements and more, requires a degree of self-confidence. This section is designed to help you: reflect on your level of self-confidence and, should you need to, review suggestions and make plans as to how you may go about improving your own self-confidence.
- Dealing with uncertainty. Making decisions about the future is all about your willingness to start dealing with a degree of uncertainty. Uncertainty can be disconcerting and there is a range of ways of responding, some of which are more productive than others. This tool helps you to: understand what the different responses are, consider your own typical responses and plan your approach to a future "uncertain" situation.
- Living in the present. Many people find career decision making challenging for a whole range of reasons. This can lead to people dwelling on past regrets and worrying about the future rather than focusing on what they can do right now that is productive and will help them make progress. This tool is designed to: point out the pitfalls of living in the past and future, to help you spot your own patterns of thinking, and to consider how you can convert this into activities that are more productive.
- Your control philosophy. To start work on researching career options and considering your future direction requires a desire to take control. This section of Gro helps you to: understand whether you have an internal or external control philosophy, what the advantages and disadvantages of this are, advises those who want to make a shift in their control philosophy how to do this, and provides an opportunity to plan action.
Although the reasons for developing Gro are about helping students become more employable and more successful at making career choices, using Gro has the potential to benefit many areas of your university experience.
Consider which of these areas of development you feel you would benefit from reflecting on. This may involve looking at just one or two sections. Once you have completed a section you will have the option of printing, downloading or emailing your results, feedback and plans. Gro does not save data for you, so unless you save your work and then return to the same computer, you will not be able to access it again. This means it is important to complete an exercise in one go and to ensure you either print, email or download the feedback so you can use it again.
Remember, if you are reflecting on your own development and establishing any development plans it is a good idea to save this in iLearn which is a secure central place which you can access throughout your degree.
If your reflection results in a small number of aims and tangible activities you can take forward then Gro will have done its job in helping you on your way.
Sources of inspiration
The whole concept of Gro was borne out of reading through various definitions and models of employability, including "The key to employability: developing a practical model of graduate employability" by D'Acre Poole and Sewell, 2004 and "The Heuristic Model of Employability" by Fugate et al 2004.
- Confidence: the self-belief questionnaire was adapted to a University context from the well regarded "General Self Efficacy scale" produced by Jerusalem and Schwarzer 1995.
- Control: the locus of control questionnaire was adapted to a University context from the 'Internal Control Index' questionnaire developed by Duttweiler 1984.
- Uncertainty: much of the work here builds on the concept of 'self-regulation theory' produced by Fenton O'Creevy et al 2003 and Folkman's work on stress and coping processes (1984).
- Transition: draws on the "Theories of Transition" by Hopson produced in "Life-span development: frameworks, accounts and strategies" in Sugarman 2001. Case studies are provided by O'Regan's work in 2009 on "Learning to be a graduate: employability and identity in the first years after university."
- Past, present future: draws on the work of "The Art of Happiness" by Cutler and "The Power of Now" by Ekhart Tolle.
Credits
The Gro project was led and written by Tania Lyden with contributions from Bill Gothard and Sandhya Patel. IT programming was undertaken by Ruben Arakelyan and Chris Flanagan all from the Careers Advisory Service at the University of Reading. The project was funded by CCMS.
User guide
Gro consists of five sections. You can complete them in any order. Some sections are quicker to do than others. You don't have to do them all at the same time.
Soring results
When you have completed a section and clicked submit your results will be stored on the computer that you use to complete the test for up to a whole year (unless you delete your browsing history) and will be accessible to you on that computer provided you the same the web browser. Do be aware that if you stop part way through a section, however, your results won't be saved.
Changing results
Once you have clicked 'submit' you can't go back and alter your responses unless you delete all the results for a whole section. When you return to Gro after completing one or more sections you will see a gold bar near the top of the screen. The gold bar shows that you have results stored from a previous session. If you want to remove these results, ie to re-do a section, click on 'forget me'.
Using results
All your information and results are treated confidentially by Gro and are not shared with anyone else.
At the end of each section you will get an action plan. You can email this to yourself or download it. We'd recommend that you store a copy in your iLearn space for your Personal Development Planning.
Personal support
Some of the issues that Gro encourages you to reflect on may potentially create some personal concerns or anxiety for you. If you find you are in this position and would like extra support regarding any of the issues covered here then do seek help. You can:
- Speak to a Careers Adviser if you want to discuss an issue related to your career planning or employability.
- Meet with your Personal Tutor if you want to discuss concerns related to your academic studies or require general personal support.
- Contact Counselling Services if you want confidential, emotional advice on either a one-to-one basis or through a course run by the service.
- Go to Student Services for study advice and more.
- Talk to The Students' Union for a range of support.
Contact us
There are a number of reasons why you may wish to contact us regarding your use of Gro:
- You may want to give us positive or critical feedback on how useful you found Gro.
- You may wish to point out any links that are not working.
- You may want assistance with an aspect of the tool.
- You may have suggestions about how the tool could be improved.
If so, then please contact us at example@example.com, stating that your enquiry is about Gro and providing a full description.