Are there controlling people in your life who want to control you? It could be your boss, partner, son or daughter. Maybe a friend, sibling or parent. Whoever you are, you are probably, from time to time, angry at other people telling you what to do.

However, it is also likely that telling others what to do is not always annoying. If at dinner you hear, “Would you pass the salt, please, honey?” You could probably extend your arm and move the salt in the desired direction without a second thought.

Why are some situations annoying in this controlling way and others not? What is the disturbing aspect of being dominated by others?

Imagine how wonderful life would be if you could quickly prevent or eliminate this inconvenience when it did occur.

Before any problem can be solved, it is important to understand what the problem of controlling people is. Well, what’s the problem with people telling you what to do? And most importantly, what does it mean to say that one person controls another person?

If we deal with the second question first, it may be easier to answer the first question. We might agree that being in control is a situation that occurs when you do things according to someone else’s instruction or request that you would not have done in the absence of the other person’s call. This definition, however, immediately raises a problem.

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By this definition, you’re just as in control when you thoughtlessly pass salt as you are when your boss “makes” you late to finish a report.

The problem is that one situation feels like it’s in control, but the other doesn’t. However, in either case, you were acting a certain way only because someone else told you to.

So, why do the two cases look so different?

Discrimination is crucial and gets to the heart of the problem of controlling people. With a “pass the salt” attitude, you want to pass the salt, because you want to be nice and helpful to your partner, you want a sense of closeness in your relationship, and so on.

However, with the “working late” scenario, you don’t want to come back late. You want to be home for a family dinner or just enjoying a glass of wine or watching your favorite TV show.

So how does it happen that you get to a place where you don’t want to be? The simplest explanation, unless you’re chained to your desk, is that as much as you don’t want to be at work, you also want to be at work.

You’re late for work because your boss asked you to, but that’s only half the story. The other half of the story is that you will stay up late because you want that job. You need to keep this job to pay the bills and put the food on the table. You also think that you may have a chance for promotion in the next two months, so you want your boss to think well of you.

If you have as much money as you need and you don’t care what your boss thinks, you are less likely to go along with your boss’ demands.

Suppose the next time you walk into the corner store to buy some milk on the way home, the man behind the counter says, “Pick up that broom and sweep the shop before I sell you milk.” Can you see yourself sweeping the store? Maybe not.

why? Well, you probably don’t care what the person behind the counter thinks of you, and there are plenty of other places to buy milk.

Three situations, then, can arise when someone else tells you what to do:

1. You don’t want to do it, you don’t (sweeps the store).
2. You want to do it, and you do it (pass the salt).
3. You both don’t want to do this and want to do it at the same time (staying out late at work).

It is the third most problematic case. The problem with the third situation is that it puts you in conflict with yourself.

Sure, there was a directive from someone else, but your goal is to maintain some sort of relationship with whoever is executing the directive, along with your goal to do something different, and that involved you in your own war.

So controlling people (which we can all be, by the way) is only problematic when we conflict about both wanting and not wanting to do what we’ve been asked to do.

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The good news is that since the problem is our inner conflict, we have a chance to do something about it.

We may never be able to stop others from telling us what to do, but we do have the ability to think about goals that are important to us at any time.

Therefore, staying late at work can be seen as an exercise to improve one’s chance of being promoted. Instead of feeling like your goal of “going easy with a glass of wine” gets derailed, you can see yourself pursuing your promotional goal instead.

It takes some flexible thinking, as well as practice, to be able to step back and find the most important goal, but it’s a surefire way to reduce the influence of those controlling (others).