500 Words a Week - Agency

There’s a word that I’ve recently been hearing and reading a lot of in various podcasts and books. That word is agency. So, what does this word mean? There are a few definitions I came across.

If we look to social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfil their potential.

One’s agency is one’s independent capability or ability to act on one’s will.

Agency is the capability of individuals to make choices and to act on those choices in ways that make a difference in their lives.

The simplest and my favourite definition is from Bandura; agency is “the power to originate action”.

We can see the importance of agency when we look towards the negative times or times when we’ve been feeling low in our life’s. In some form or another, I’d say they all centre around a lack of agency, I know for me this was how I felt. A lack of feeling like we have power or control over our life’s and what we would like to do. They are times when we might just find ourselves ambling through life. Passively letting the day-to-day rhythms of life pass us by, being innocent bystanders instead of active participants.

It’s in these times we might need a reminder that we have far more control over our lives than what we once believed. This comes through understanding what we have control over and focusing the majority of our time and resources on that. Rather than endlessly worrying about what we can’t control or influence.

In “Master of Change” by Brad Stulberg, there’s a chapter on how we should look to respond rather than react. In responding, we are in control, assessing the options and arriving at a well thought out conclusion. In reacting, we are firing from the hip, allowing our limbic system to take over, saying or doing something we might later regret. In looking to place more attention on responding:

“They separated what they could control from what they could not, and then they focused on the former, asserting their agency by responding instead of reacting. Do this repeatedly and you begin to develop what psychologists refer to as self-efficacy, a secure confidence borne out of the evidence-based belief that you are capable of showing up and taking deliberate actions during difficulties.”

Agency comes down to having a sense of control of our life, having the capacity to influence our own thoughts and behaviours, and having faith in our ability to handle a wide range of situations.

We develop agency, similar to the above quote from Brad, by accumulating evidence that we are capable of showing up and taking deliberate actions during difficult times.

Sure, sometimes the action we take may be the wrong one. However, that’s part of life, learning from our mistakes.