It’s not unusual for small business owners to sometimes feel like things are spinning out of control. Once you start to feel yourself losing control, you have two choices. You can allow the sense feeling out of control to allow you to give up or continue to spiral, or you can decide to put a stop to the problems you are experiencing and take proactive steps to put yourself back in the driver’s seat.

4 Tips to Take Back Control

Here are some four habits you can develop that will allow you to to sieze control of your personal and professional life.

1. Be Proactive – When you spend all of your time reacting to situations, it’s natural to feel out of control. Instead of focusing on reacting, take charge of what’s going on around you and become focused on taking proactive steps to influence the environment in which you live and work. Think about what will have to happen for you to regain a sense of control, and then start taking steps toward making that happen.

2. Increase Awareness – Don’t let changes in your personal or professional life sneak up on you. Usually, when you are taken by surprise by a change in your business or personal life, it’s because you weren’t paying attention to the signs that something might be changing. Don’t go through life without picking up context cues and signals from the environment around you. That’s where you’ll get the information necessary to become proactive rather than reactive.

3. Assertive Communication – People who are able to maintain a sense of being in charge of their own destinies are individuals who practice assertive communication on a daily basis. You have to start out by knowing your mind and being willing to stand up for what you need, want, and believe in. If you let other people “walk all over you” it’s time to stop being a doormat and stand up for yourself. You don’t have to be aggressive in order to be seen as assertive. Learn to speak your mind while maintaining respect for others.

4. Pick Your Battles – If you spend all of your time fighting battles that just don’t matter – or that you have no chance of influencing – you’ll spend all of your time worrying about and working on things that you can’t control. An important key to taking back control in your life is to learn when to walk away from a no-win situation to focus your energies on other things, where you do have a chance of success.