By Anthony Meindl | Posted May 28, 2014, 10 a.m.

Im a good kisser. Lets just start with that.

Yet I recently made out with this guy who told me that I wasnt kissing correctly. Or maybe he didnt say it quite like that, but by stopping me in the middle of a kiss and instructing me as to where and how I should proceed, it sure felt like I wasnt doing it correctly.

Oh no he didnt! You say? Well, actually, yeah he did.

Once I got through the shame and embarrassment of thinking I was doing something wrong (which took me all the way back to my first kissing experience as a 16-year-old and actually not knowing what I was doing), I ascertained in the moment that this remark by my future husband (not) had more to do with his controlling tendencies than it did my missing his bottom lip.

But it also showed me where Iand all of uscan get stuck.

When life (through people, experiences, rejections, and challenges) delivers us a response not to our liking, we often retaliate by meeting such resistance with our own pushbacknamely, control.

It can show up in a lot of ways: Shutting down. disconnecting, disengaging, closing oneself off, getting angry, or just becoming a total ass to someone. This also shows up in acting, where scenes can trigger emotions that we usually try our hardest to shut down and control in our day to day life.

Its normal. It happens. But combatting control with control never works. It shuts out all possibility for solution. It shuts out all possibility of truthfully living in the moment in our work. It shuts out generating the kind of awareness that were looking for in life.

That is, awareness of how to remain open when what you really want to do is control! If we could but realize how powerful we truly are when we let go of control, we might just never try to control things again.

Read more:
What a Kiss Can Teach You About Acting, the Moment, and Life