Things I can control worksheet: Free PDF template

Key takeaways

A things I can control worksheet sorts one stressor into three rings: what the client controls, what they influence, and what they cannot change.

The three-ring version is a later adaptation of Stephen Covey’s model, which named only a circle of concern and a circle of influence.

Two questions decide every item, and the middle ring is where most sessions go wrong.

Clients who file influence items under control build action plans they cannot finish, then read that as proof they are helpless.

The free PDF holds three labeled sections and one instruction line, so it works on paper or on a tablet.

Pabau’s digital forms store the completed sheet in the client record, so you can compare this month’s sorting with last month’s.

A things I can control worksheet asks a client to take one worry and break it into pieces. They sort each piece into what they control, what they influence, and what they cannot touch. The exercise lives or dies on that middle ring.

What follows is the session walkthrough, the sorting mistakes to watch for, and how the finished sheet earns its place in the client record.

What a things I can control worksheet does in a session

It hands the client one page with three labeled boxes. Their job is to take a single stressor apart and put each piece in exactly one box.

The sorting is the intervention. Anxiety runs on a blurred picture, where a job interview arrives as one solid threat. Separate the answers a client can rehearse from the hiring decision they will never make, and the threat stops behaving like one object.

Therapists, school counselors, occupational therapists, and coaches all run some version of it. There is no scoring key and no training requirement, which is why the sheet travels so far outside formal therapy.

Sorting what you control, influence, and cannot change

Two questions decide where an item goes. Can the client change it on their own, today? If not, can their effort shift the odds?

A yes to the first question puts the item in the control ring. A no followed by a yes puts it in influence. A no to both puts it in concern, where the work is acceptance rather than action.

Inside your control

These are the choices a client makes without needing anyone else to agree:

• Their thoughts, interpretations, and self-talk
• Their coping strategies and emotional responses
• Their effort, preparation, and practice
• How they spend their time and attention
• How they speak, and how they listen
• Their sleep, movement, and self-care habits

Inside your influence

These move when the client puts effort in, but the result belongs to someone else:

• Another person’s outlook or mood
• A decision they contribute to but do not make
• A shared family routine or household rule
• How a team or a class responds to their work
• The impression they leave in an interview

Outside both

These hold still whatever the client does:

• Other people’s opinions and judgments
• Events that already happened
• The economy, the job market, and the weather
• Another adult’s choices
• Aging and most bodily sensations, though the response to them is a choice

Where the circle of influence fits

Covey never wrote about a circle of control. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People sets out two circles. One holds whatever occupies you, and the smaller one inside it holds what your effort can reach.

The three-ring version came later. Popular adaptations split the innermost items out and called them a circle of control, which is the shape most printable worksheets now use.

The distinction matters when a client asks where the model comes from, and it matters more when the middle ring gets skipped.

Take a client worried about a strained relationship. The partner’s mood belongs in concern. How that partner sees the week ahead sits in influence, because an honest conversation moves it. Whether the client rehearses that conversation beforehand is squarely control.

Some clients respond better to a drawn diagram than to three boxes. The circle of control worksheet lays the same three rings out as nested circles.

Running the exercise in a 20-minute session

Budget 20 minutes for a first pass. Five of those go on the stressor alone, because a vague stressor produces a vague sheet.

1. Name one stressor. Ask for a single situation, specific and current. “My interview on Thursday” works. “Career uncertainty” does not.
2. Empty the situation onto paper. Have the client list every part of it, internal and external, without judging where each piece belongs. Two or three minutes of loose listing beats a tidy list of four items.
3. Run each item past the two questions. Read the item aloud, ask both questions, then write it in the matching section. Do the first three together, so the client hears how you reason.
4. Pick one action from the control ring. One, not five. Name what it is, when it happens, and what the client will notice afterwards.
5. Write an acceptance line for the concern ring. Keep it short enough to say under stress. “I cannot decide this, and I can decide what I do next” is enough.

The order matters. Clients who pick actions before they finish sorting almost always act on an influence item, which brings us to the mistakes worth watching for.

Four sorting mistakes that stall the exercise

The sheet fails in predictable ways. These four cover most of what goes wrong in a first session:

• Influence items filed under control. A client writes “my manager’s decision” in the control box, builds a plan around it, and reads the outcome as personal failure. This is what turns a calming exercise into evidence of helplessness.
• A stressor too big to sort. “My health” cannot be broken into pieces. “My appointment on the 14th” can.
• A concern ring used as a complaint list. If the outer box fills with grievances and the client stops there, the sheet has rehearsed the worry rather than settled it. Pair every concern item with the acceptance line.
• A sheet completed once and never seen again. The value sits in comparing this week’s sorting against last month’s. Without that comparison, it is a one-off activity rather than a thread through treatment.

Adapting the sheet for kids, teens, and adults

The three rings hold at every age. What changes is the language, the examples, and how much of the sorting you do together.

• Children, roughly 6 to 12. Swap “control” for “my choices” and keep the examples inside their week: homework, a fallout with a friend, bedtime. Drawing and color coding work better than writing. Parents who fill in their own sheet alongside the child give the exercise far more weight. Other therapy worksheets for kids use the same trick of turning an adult concept into a drawing task.
• Teenagers, 13 to 18. Introduce all three rings by name, since teens can hold the difference between shaping something and owning it. Draw the examples from friendships, grades, social media, and family rules. Many find the concern ring a relief, because it gives them permission to stop managing how they are seen.
• Adults. Work stress, money, health, and relationships fill the sheet quickly. Adults often notice they have spent years working the concern ring. Perfectionism and people-pleasing surface here more than any other pattern, and both show up as an overloaded control box.

Why sorting settles an anxious client

Anxiety needs a threat plus a sense that the client’s own effort will not change it. The worksheet takes the second ingredient apart in three ways.

• It replaces rumination with a decision. Once an item has a box, the mind has somewhere to put it. Cognitive behavioral therapy makes the same move when it separates a thought from the situation that triggered it.
• It makes acceptance concrete. Naming what cannot change gives a client permission to stop fighting it. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls this dropping the struggle, and it eases the distress that piles on top of the original worry.
• It converts worry into a task. “Manage my interview nerves” is not something anyone can do on a Tuesday. “Rehearse answers to five likely questions” is. Clients who need a wider menu of actions can work from a coping skills worksheet alongside this one.

A quick checklist before you hand the sheet over

Run through these six points while the client is still in the room.

• The stressor is one situation, with a date or a name attached.
• The client has said both sorting questions back to you in their own words.
• The control box holds at least one item they can act on this week.
• The influence box is not empty, because an empty middle ring usually means it was skipped.
• Every concern item has an acceptance line beside it.
• The completed sheet is stored where you will find it at the next session.

That last point is the one practices lose. A sheet completed on paper in a Tuesday session is rarely in the room a month later. The comparison that makes it useful never happens.

Most software for therapy practices can store the completed form against the client’s chart, which turns a handout into a record you can reread.

How Pabau keeps the worksheet in the client record

Most practices hand the sheet out, watch it go home in a bag, and leave a one-line note behind. The next time the worry comes up, the therapist is working from memory.

Practice management software like Pabau closes that loop. You build the three rings once as a digital form, then assign it to a client before or after the session. The completed version files itself against their record.

Clients fill it in on a phone, so the sorting happens while the worry is live rather than the night before the next appointment. You open their chart, see last month’s sheet next to this month’s, and the session opens with a comparison instead of a recap.

Forms, client records, and scheduling come with every Pabau subscription, so none of it waits on an upgrade.

Assign and track therapy worksheets in one place

Send the worksheet as a digital form, store the completed copy in the client’s record, and pull it up again at the next session. Every Pabau subscription includes it.

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Conclusion

The worksheet is only as good as the sorting. Get the middle ring right and a client leaves with one action and one worry they have agreed to stop carrying. Get it wrong and you have handed them a list of tasks that were never theirs.

Print the sheet, run it once against a live stressor, then read what the client put in the influence box. That box tells you more about how they are coping than a score ever would.

The version that keeps working is the one you can find again in six weeks. Book a demo to see how Pabau files completed worksheets in the client record and brings them back into the next session.

Continue your research

Wondering whether the problem is belief rather than circumstance? Locus of control worksheet separates what a client believes about control from where control sits.

Need a way to work the concern ring? Cognitive defusion covers the ACT techniques that help clients unhook from thoughts they cannot argue away.

Working with a client in acute distress? Crisis intervention strategies for clinicians sets out what to do when a sorting exercise is the wrong tool for the moment.

Handing out more homework than you can track? Therapist burnout prevention looks at the boundaries that keep a caseload workable.

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