Leadership Reframe: When You Can’t Control What You Can’t Control

“You cannot always change the game, but you can always control how you play it.”

Atip Muangsuwan
CEO Coach and Coach Supervisor

As a leader, you’re accustomed to driving results and influencing outcomes. But what happens when you feel your contributions are overlooked, or you perceive an uneven playing field? The frustration is palpable, and it can be a significant drain on your energy and ambition.

I recently coached an executive—let’s call her Jane—who faced this exact challenge. As a high-performer, she had been instrumental in building her company’s IT infrastructure. Yet, she felt her CEO failed to give her some recognition, and she saw a colleague in another department receiving preferential access to new opportunities.

Her session goal was straightforward: “I want to learn how to manage my career more effectively.” Her underlying motivation, however, was rooted in a very human need for fairness and growth. Her story is one I see often in the C-suite: a talented professional stuck focusing on what they can’t control.

Our work together revealed a powerful pivot that every leader can make: shift your focus from what you cannot change to what you can control.

The Fundamental Leadership Framework: Within Control vs. Outside Control

The first step was to help Jane delineate her sphere of control. We used a simple but profound framework:

• Outside My Control: My CEO’s opinions, her recognition of my work, her decisions, her fairness, other departments’ opportunities.
• Within My Control: My performance, my thoughts about the situation, my emotional response, my actions and behaviors, my team’s morale, my decision to stay or go.

For leaders like Jane, acknowledging that we cannot control others’ perceptions is not an admission of defeat. It is a strategic decision to redirect energy to the domains where we are truly sovereign.

The Internal Engine of Career Management: Think → Feel → Act

Jane’s frustration was real, but it was being fueled by a cycle of thoughts that left her feeling powerless. We explored the Think-Feel-Act cycle:

Thought: “My CEO doesn’t value me, and my career is stalled here.”
Feeling: Frustration, resentment, demotivation.
Action: Withdrawal, decreased engagement, quiet quitting.

The breakthrough came when Jane realized she could reframe her thoughts to change this trajectory.

Reframed Thought: “I have built a critical system for this company and have a stable platform from which to operate. I control my performance and my visibility.”
New Feeling: Empowered, proactive, calm.
New Action: Seeking out new projects, documenting achievements, coaching her team.

By changing her thoughts, she changed her emotional state, which in turn empowered her to take more constructive actions that would ultimately advance her career—with or without her CEO’s immediate validation.

Two Strategic Questions for Every Setback

When faced with a career challenge, I challenged Jane to ask herself two strategic questions:

1. “What can I learn from this?”
2. “How can I turn this into an advantage?”

From these, her key insights were remarkably transformative. She realized this circumstance was an opportunity to build greater resilience. She committed to becoming a more visible, proactive leader. Most importantly, she decided, “I will never treat my people the way I feel treated now,” turning a personal frustration into a cornerstone of her future leadership philosophy.

The Executive Action Plan: Focus on Your Agency

Jane’s homework was a clear, actionable plan for reclaiming her career narrative:

1. Master Your Focus: Consciously dedicate mental energy only to areas within your control—your work, your team, your growth.
2. Catch and Reframe Negative Thoughts: Practice noticing disempowering thoughts and actively reframing them into statements of agency and opportunity.
3. Invest in Your Well-being: “Go find the activities that I love to do,” she said. This isn’t an escape; it’s a strategic reinvestment in your primary asset: yourself.

The Final Word for Leaders

Jane concluded our session with a word that might surprise some: “Happiness.” She realized that happiness is a decision built on a foundation of reframing her perspective.

My keyword summary for the session was “Reframe.”

The highest level of career management is not about forcing others to see your worth. It is about knowing your worth so clearly that you operate from a place of empowered choice. You cannot always change the game, but you can always control how you play it.

Focus on the areas you have control over. The rest will follow. 

About Atip Muangsuwan: Coach Atip is an executive leadership coach who specializes in helping high-achieving leaders overcome internal barriers to unlock their full potential and drive organizational success. Through a blend of strategic frameworks and profound personal insight, he empowers leaders in transforming their mindsets, emotional states, and behaviors for lasting impact.