What's your sea right now?

In the Navy, we had a saying about the sea. We called her a cruel mistress.

She was always in charge. If she decided to throw a tidal wave at us, she was going to throw a tidal wave. There wasn't a single thing any of us could do about that.

So we stopped trying to control her. We put our energy into two other things instead: how we navigated (what we could influence), and how we showed up on board, disciplined, steady, doing our jobs properly (what we could control).

I still use that split now, years later, off the ship and in ordinary life. Concern. Influence. Control. And I've started asking the people I work with to try it on their own lives, not just their teams.

So what's your sea?

For a lot of people I talk to, it's the cost of living. A diagnosis. A relationship that's ended, or one that's struggling. A job that's draining them but isn't the sort of thing you can just walk away from tomorrow.

All of it is real. All of it is heavy. All of it is sitting well outside anything you can really control.

It's not wrong to feel the weight of that. Noticing what's hard is not the problem. The problem is when we get stuck there, when all our energy goes into the sea, and none of it goes into the ship.

The sea is going to do what the sea does. The question is whether you're spending all your energy worrying about it, or putting some of it into what you can actually influence and control.

The bit that surprised me

I run a version of this exercise fairly often, usually with rooms full of stressed, exhausted leaders. Everyone writes down what's worrying them. Then we go through it, one by one: is there really nothing you can do about this?

Almost every time, the “nothing I can do” pile empties out. That’s not because the problems weren't real, it’s because nobody had sat with them long enough, or they’d never had someone else alongside them, to spot what was still theirs to move.

It's rare that there's nothing there for us to do. It's that we're too close to see it on our own.

What this isn't

This isn't “just think positive”, and it isn't “your life is what you make it”. If you're in a hard place right now, redundancy, grief, illness, a situation you didn't choose and can't simply think your way out of, none of this is about blaming yourself for not trying hard enough.

It's the opposite, really. It's permission to stop pouring everything you have into the sea, because the sea was never going to hear you anyway, and to put even a small amount of that energy into the one thing that's always, always still yours: how you show up today.

So, what is still yours?

What's sitting outside your circle of concern right now, taking up space in your head, that isn't yours to fix?

And underneath that, what's still within your influence or control? Not the whole problem. Just the next honest, doable thing.

That question, “What do I really need to shift this, right now?”, is the same question at the heart of the S.T.R.E.S.S.™ Framework. It’s not tip or a list of things you should be doing. It’s a proper, personal look at what's going on, and what's realistically yours to change.

If you want to explore this properly, the S.T.R.E.S.S.™ Framework workshop is built around exactly this. Book yourself in, or if you'd rather talk it through first, my inbox is open.