Dichotomy and Trichotomy of control
Have you ever worked exceptionally hard to achieve something and felt utterly crestfallen when you were unable to get it? Yet when you do, it leaves an ultimately hollow feeling? You parents may have once told you to enjoy the journey rather than seeking a goal, and there is truth in that statement.
Dichotomy of control
There is a branch of philosophy named stoicism (It’s a philosophy designed to make us more resilient, happier and more virtuous). Typically the Stoics would advocate the use of the analytical brain to maintain tranquillity over our emotions. One of the emotions was that of worry: how can we worry about the right things? One of the themes of stoicism is dichotomy and trichotomy of control. This may sound very conjectured, but it’s pretty simple.
The Stoics stated that to choose whether to worry or not, simply categorize your issue into these two buckets:
- Things over which we have complete control (such as goals we set for ourselves)
- Things over which we don’t have complete control (such as weather)
If your issue falls into the first category — that is, matters that you have control over — then you should worry about it, because you can affect the outcome. However, if your issue falls into the second category, then there is no point of worrying because you cannot control the outcome. Although easier said than done, the Stoics argued that frequent application of this analytical reasoning to problems would strengthen one’s resolve and make him or her more able to maintain their tranquillity.
Trichotomy Of control
But the one problem with the dichotomy of the control is that always life doesn’t present a binary choice between things we can control. The Trichotomy of Control adds some important nuance to this idea that we should only concern ourselves with things that are within our control.
It tells us that a large number of things in our daily lives lie in the realm of “things over which we have some but not complete control”. The examples of getting an A* in Maths or getting a first-class degree fall nicely into this category. You can probably think of many other examples. On the one hand, clearly we have some control over these outcomes, but on the other, they’re not entirely within our control because there are plenty of external factors that can influence them — eg: the difficulty of the exam paper, the examiner’s feelings on a given day etc.
The trichotomy of the control states that when a Stoic concern himself with things over which he has some but not complete control, such as winning a match, he will be very careful about the goals he sets for himself. In particular, he will be careful to set internal rather than external goals. Thus, his goal while playing will not be to win the match but to play to the best of his ability in the match(something internal, over which he has complete control).
It’s important because our internal goals will affect our external performance, but it’s also important to realize that the goals we consciously set for ourselves can have a dramatic impact on our subsequent emotional state. In particular, if we consciously set winning a match as our goal, we arguably don’t increase our chances of winning that match. In fact, we might even hurt our chances: If it starts looking, early on, as though we are going to lose the match, we might become flustered, and this might negatively affect our playing in the remainder of the game.
