How Shifting from Concern to Control Changes Everything
The Circles That Quietly Shape Our Life
5 November 2025, 10.30 p.m.
I was exhausted. My energy for the day was completely used up. Meetings, ministry, meaningful conversations with youngsters, time with my wife and children, a video call with my mum. It was a full day, and if I am honest, I just wanted to end it quickly and go to sleep so that I could survive tomorrow.
But instead of collapsing, I showed up for our book reading session on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That night’s chapter was about the Circle of Influence. It sounded simple. Three concentric circles. At the core, the circle of control. Outside that, the circle of influence. And around everything, the circle of concern.
Yet as I listened, I realised this was not a simple idea. It was a diagnosis.
Stephen Covey explains that proactive people invest their time and energy in the circle of influence. They focus on what they can actually affect. Reactive people give most of their attention to the circle of concern. They obsess over things they cannot change. Over time, something quiet happens. The circle you focus on expands. The other shrinks.
That night, it was not theory for me. It was a mirror.
I began to see how often my internal conversation sounded helpless.
“It is impossible.”
“I have no choice.”
“It is just like that.”
Each of these phrases sounded so reasonable in the moment. Yet every time I repeated them, I was shrinking my own circle of influence.
Responsibility suddenly looked different. It was no longer just about duty. It became “response-ability.” The ability to choose my response. That shift sounds small, like a tiny hyphen hiding in the middle of a long word. But it turns helplessness into leadership.
Neuroscience says that strong emotions like anger or fear have a chemical life of about 90 seconds in the body unless we keep feeding them with repeated thoughts. If we let go before that window closes, we come back to ourselves. We return to our circle of influence. If we keep replaying the story, we move further out into the circle of concern and stay there.
I realised how often I kept replaying my own stories long after those 90 seconds were over.
The book session ended. But the question stayed with me long after the Zoom call closed, long after the house became quiet.
What is influence, really?
Is it how many people listen to you?
Or is it how you respond when no one is watching?
That was the door this reflection opened for me. And it did not begin in a boardroom. It began in my marriage.
The Marriage That Answered the Question
When my wife found out she was pregnant with our 4th child, it did not begin as a joyful announcement.
She was in her late 30s. Last year, she had quietly made a plan in her heart. This year would be for herself. Travel with a close friend. More sleep. Time to slow down, to do things that made her feel alive and seen again. Her body had already carried and raised our sons. In her mind, that season was complete.
Then, in a very short span of time, everything changed. A pregnancy test. Two lines. A new life.
Her entire plan collapsed overnight.
What I saw in her was not just surprise. It was grief. She entered a kind of depression. It felt as if someone had taken a carefully drawn map from her hands and burned it in front of her eyes. In that state, every suggestion of “Look on the bright side” would have sounded cruel.
Looking back, I realise how much I failed to stand in my circle of influence as a husband. I did not know how to comfort her well. I did not know how to hold space for her grief without trying to fix it. I was still caught in my own internal story, still reacting, still asking, “Why like that?” instead of, “How can I be present?”
If I could rewind that season, I would do many things differently.
But here is the part that humbled me. She did not stay in that state for long.
Over time, I watched her do something that transformed my understanding of influence. She slowly shifted her focus away from what she could not change, and turned toward what she could.
She began to embrace the reality that this child was coming whether she felt ready or not. She started talking about the baby as a person, not a disruption. She learned to look at her own growing belly with a strange mix of humour and affection. And when we discovered that this time we would have a daughter after having sons, something in her face softened. She began to embrace a new identity as a mother of 4.
She did not read Covey before she did this. She did not underline “circle of influence” in a book. She lived it.
She accepted that the pregnancy was already a fact. She could not change that. But she could influence how she carried it. Her sleep, her food, her thinking, her faith, her words. That was where she placed her attention. She moved, step by step, from “Why this?” to “How do I walk this well?”
Psychologists have discovered that when we practise daily gratitude, the brain literally rewires itself. Dopamine and serotonin increase. The mind begins to notice possibility instead of only threat. That science explained what I watched in my own home. My wife moved from despair to a quiet kind of gratitude, and it changed the atmosphere in our family.
The truth is, she was the one expanding our circle of influence while I was still living in the circle of concern.
Around the same period, another sentence started to confront me, this time from Scripture. In Matthew 12, Jesus says, “If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.”
Those words pierced through my idea of leadership in the family.
I realised how often I had related to my wife through law and accounting.
“I have done my part as a husband.”
“I have done my part as a father.”
“So what more do you want?”
In that mindset, influence becomes a negotiation. I was still thinking in terms of sacrifice as something to be counted and measured. I did not realise that the real power of influence in a marriage is not found in sacrifice for its own sake, but in mercy. Mercy is how love expresses itself when it has every “right” to demand, but chooses to understand instead.
If I apply Covey’s language, sacrifice without mercy belongs to the circle of concern. It is obsessed with fairness, scoreboard, and who owes whom. Mercy belongs to the circle of influence. It asks a different question.
“How can I respond in a way that protects the relationship, not just my own sense of justice?”
As I sat with that, another deeper confession surfaced. For years, when I described my wife as “individualistic,” what I was really describing was myself. I had lived as a very independent person for a long time. My internal focus was “me” and my personal growth.
When I first met my mentor more than 10 years ago, my thought was, “I want to be like him. I want to be that kind of husband, that kind of father, that kind of leader.” It was still “I, I, I, I.”
This season, influence is teaching me a different pronoun. We.
Our marriage. Our growth. Our journey. Our joy.
Influence, I am beginning to see, is not first about how many people follow you. It begins with how willing you are to be changed for the sake of “we.”
From Victim to Steward in Malaysia
My journey with the circle of influence did not start with marriage. It started with my relationship to my country.
When I returned to Malaysia from Melbourne in 2013, the contrast was painful.
In Australia, I experienced a very different kind of system. When I came home, my eyes were suddenly more aware of everything that felt unfair in Malaysia. The politics. The policies that distinguish between bumiputra and non-bumiputra. The pricing differences in property and loans. The sense that some doors were simply not meant for people like me.
As a Chinese non-bumiputra, it was easy to feel like a permanent outsider in my own land.
I complained about the government. I criticised policies. I felt disgusted and helpless at the same time. Underneath my anger was a quiet belief that I could not do anything about it. In Covey’s language, I was living fully in the circle of concern and had almost no awareness that I even had a circle of influence.
It was always “their fault.” Never mine.
How do you build anything meaningful from that place?
Sometime around 2018, during a time of prayer, a simple sentence arrived in my heart.
“God is not an accidental God.”
If that was true, the implication was clear. It was not an accident that I was born in Malaysia. Not an accident that I was Chinese in a country that runs on a different majority narrative. Not an accident that I found myself drawn to education, nation-building, and the space between private and public sectors.
That revelation did not change any policy overnight. But it changed my posture.
I began to see my life here as an assignment, not a punishment.
It also made me look at the bigger picture. In Malaysia, Chinese non-bumiputra males form a relatively small percentage of the total population. Yet this minority has played a significant role in building some of the country’s largest institutions in education, healthcare, and business. Influence, clearly, is not about being the majority. It is about what you do with what you have.
That is stewardship.
I also made a decision in business that would cost us something in the short term but protect our integrity in the long term. We would not bribe. We would not cut corners with authorities. We would not take the easy way out, even if it slowed us down. I told myself, “Malaysia is as clean as we are.”
This was my way of moving back into the circle of influence. I could not single-handedly clean up a nation. But I could be responsible for the way my own company behaved. I could decide that we would be future-ready not only in syllabus and technology, but in conscience.
Interestingly, this decision did something inside me. The more I committed to that standard, the less angry I felt about what “they” were doing out there. My emotional energy shifted. Less complaining. More creating.
Leadership thinkers like John C. Maxwell describe a principle called the Law of Addition. Leaders add value by serving others. The more you focus on adding value, the more your influence grows beyond your position or title. I did not have those words in my mind at that time, but I was beginning to live it.
Influence moved from being an external measurement to an internal direction.
Not, “Do they know my name?”
But, “Are they better because I was there?”
As my identity as a Malaysian began to settle, gratitude slowly took the place of resentment. Neuroscience confirms that gratitude literally reshapes the brain. It makes it easier to see possibilities, easier to persevere, easier to hope. Spiritually, I see it as God enlarging the heart.
I also noticed something in the people around me. When someone in a family learns to respond differently, the whole family’s atmosphere slowly shifts. When a leader in a school chooses integrity, it changes the way others talk, decide, and behave. It is like a small internal movement that creates a larger wave over time.
Scientists call it the Butterfly Effect. A tiny change in initial conditions can alter an entire system. In leadership, a small internal decision often begins a generational shift.
In my case, a shift from victimhood to stewardship changed the way I thought about everything: marriage, parenting, school building, even writing reflections like this. It felt as if God was asking:
“Will you stop trying to control what you cannot, and start being faithful with what I have already placed in your hands?”
That question brought me back once again to the simple circles from Covey. Control. Influence. Concern.
And a deeper one beneath all of them.
Mercy.
Practising Response-Ability, One Small Circle at a Time
So what does influence look like in daily life, beyond late night reflections and highlighted books?
It looks like very small choices repeated consistently.
- In marriage, it looks like this. When my wife is overwhelmed, my old pattern is to defend my contributions. “I already did this, this, this. Have you done your part?”
That is law. That is sacrifice as accounting. It shrinks the circle of influence because it turns the relationship into a transaction.
What if influence, in the Matthew 12 sense, is choosing mercy instead?
To sit with her. To acknowledge her tiredness without rushing to “solve” it. To comfort instead of compare. To ask, “What do you need from me now?” rather than, “Do you see what I have already done?”
Those are not big gestures. They are often 90-second decisions in the heat of emotion. If I can pause in that window and choose a better response, I am already moving from concern to influence.
- In leadership, it looks like this. Instead of complaining about “the system” or “this generation,” I ask, “What is the next right step within my current circle?”
Maybe it is investing in 1 young leader who is still teachable. Maybe it is designing 1 better process that reduces frustration for staff and parents. Maybe it is having 1 honest conversation instead of silently judging.
Maxwell’s idea that leaders grow by adding value becomes very practical here. Every day, I can ask, “Who can I add value to today?” That question directs my attention to what I can influence instead of what I cannot.
- In parenting, it looks like this. I cannot control who my children become. I cannot control every environment they will face. But I can shape atmosphere at home. I can apologise when I am wrong. I can tell them stories about why integrity matters in Malaysia. I can show them that loving this country does not mean blind agreement, but faithful contribution.
- In my inner life, it looks like this. I pay attention to the sentences I repeat to myself. Whenever I catch phrases like “no choice,” “it is always like that,” or “nothing can change,” I treat them as alarms. They tell me that I have wandered into the circle of concern again.
I then ask 3 simple questions:
- What here is within my circle of control?
- What is outside my control but still within my circle of influence?
- What belongs purely to the circle of concern and must be surrendered?
Sometimes I write this out on paper when my mind feels cluttered. Seeing it in black and white calms me. It also forces honesty. Most of the time, there is at least 1 small step within my circle of influence that I have not taken because it feels too humble or too slow.
- In my language, it looks like this. I am learning to move from “I” to “we,” especially in marriage.
Not, “I want to be this kind of leader, this kind of husband.”
But, “How do we grow together, build together, heal together?”
This change in pronoun sounds small, but it shifts the entire target. Influence is not about proving that I can stand alone. It is about how far we can go together.
If I put all these layers together, a simple pattern emerges.
Influence begins in the smallest circle: my response. That response, when repeated, slowly shifts the next circle: my relationships. Over time, those relationships create culture. And culture is what eventually shapes communities, organisations, and maybe even nations.
The Butterfly Effect again. Quiet, almost invisible, but powerful.
Which brings me back to the original question.
What is influence?
It is not charisma. It is not position. It is not who has the microphone or the title.
Influence is what happens when we consistently choose our response in alignment with mercy, stewardship, and purpose, even when circumstances are unfair and emotions are loud.
The more we focus on that, the more the world around us begins to change, starting with the people closest to us.
The Reverse That Redefines Influence
For most of my life, I secretly believed this:
“The more I can control, the more influence I have.”
Control felt safe. It felt strong. If I could decide, direct, demand, then maybe things would finally go the way I wanted.
But the longer I live, the more I discover a different truth.
The more I try to control, the more my world shrinks.
The more I learn to respond, the more my world expands.
Influence is not found in tightening your grip. It is found in opening your hands.
In marriage, it is choosing mercy when you could keep score.
In leadership, it is choosing service when you could claim privilege.
In nationhood, it is choosing stewardship when you could stay bitter.
In faith, it is choosing trust when you do not yet see the outcome.
So if you want to grow your influence, do not start with strategies or speeches.
Start with 1 situation that is frustrating you today.
Name what you cannot control.
Then ask the harder question:
“What is 1 response I can choose, within my small circle, that reflects mercy and maturity?”
Do that repeatedly. Let time multiply it. Let God breathe on it.
You may find, as I am slowly finding, that influence is not something you chase. It is something you become.
