The power of agency
Over the past few years, I have slowly come to grips with a difficult aspect of myself. As I confronted it, I began to recognize it in others, sometimes in a friend, a family member, a co-worker, or a client. You, dear reader, may be familiar with it, too. It’s a feeling of frustration and powerlessness as if nothing you do matters and nothing will ever change. You’ll know you’re in it when your sentences start with, “Why can’t they…You/she/he/they did…I didn’t choose…Why is it always happening to me…” Put another way, it’s an abdication of responsibility and an overwhelming feeling of victimhood. Sometimes it could also feel like indifference - not that you’re okay, but more like there is so much isolation and disappointment it is easier not to care.
Powerlessness doesn’t just happen in personal life; it happens at work, too. For example, you are asked to take over a project that has been screwed up badly. You are assigned a task that you know will be too tedious/uninspiring. You are tasked to work with people you don’t get along with. Or perhaps, your team is taken away due to reprioritization. The project you have worked on for months gets canceled and shelved indefinitely. (To be completely transparent, all of the above examples have happened to me at some point in my career). In each one of these moments, you could easily blame someone else. After all, their decision is affecting you.
In The Art of Not Giving a F***, Mark Manson specifically discussed the difference between fault and responsibility. “Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things. You always get to choose which metric with which to measure your experiences with.” Sounds a little harsh? I agree. Being confronted with our own part can be uncomfortable because, from this point on, we are responsible for what happens next.
That leads me to my next point. Suppose that you do want to take responsibility and turn the situation around. How do you do that when you can’t control the world around you? A long time ago, in a therapy session, I rehashed one of those topics that had dragged on for months. The difference was that this time, rather than continuing the same old story and rant, I excitedly reported how I finally did something about it. Surprisingly, I felt relieved and motivated, even though the situation wasn’t fully resolved yet. My therapist listened patiently, nodded, and said, “Ah, so you regained your agency.”
What an interesting word, agency. The root of agency is ag-, meaning to drive, draw out or forth, and move. It forms all or part of words like act, agenda, navigate, and strategy. When we can go and take action, something changes. First and foremost, that feeling of powerlessness dissipates. Our attention is focused on action and literally propelling ourselves forward. Secondly, as we get more information, some old assumptions (and scary thoughts) start falling apart. And if we keep following the momentum, more connections begin to form, which tells us that we are, in fact, not alone at all. At this point, it doesn’t matter what the result is anymore - heck, even the process starts to feel different!
The thing with agency is that it’s hard to will our way into it. On the contrary, it often requires us to loosen our grip on the story we are heavily invested in so that we can try on a different perspective. Some questions to consider: What is your part in this situation? What hidden wisdom is not quite clear to you yet? Knowing that you have the ability to control how you experience it and how you deal with it, what do you choose? It may also be helpful to remember previous moments when you have overcome similar challenges. What did you do then? What got you here today?
It’s worth pointing out that there is a difference between empowering ourselves and trying to change things that are outside of our control, like a toxic environment or other people. To fully realize the power of agency is to remember that we always have a choice. It may be a difficult one, but it is nonetheless a decision that we, and no one else, own. As you, dear reader, return to the real world and take that sense of powerlessness head-on, I want to share with you one of my favorite prayers, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
