Welcome. This week we're going to talk about agency, or at least we're going to start the conversation talking about something called agency. If you know what that term is hanging with me because we're going to unveil what that is. I think you're going to like what it represents. Agency refers to the human capability to influence one's functioning and course of events of one's actions. Think about sailing a ship, and that steering wheel is called the helm. Agency is this idea that I'm going to be the captain of my ship. I'm going to grab the helm and I'm going to steer the ship instead of what? Hands-off and just saying, You know what, I'm just going to let the boat do whatever it wants. It's going to just drift with the wind and the currents and the weather and that sort of thing. Agency is this idea of kind of, you can think of taking control of your life. Again, I want to be very careful how we use control. We'll touch more on what that means later. But the idea is I'm going to grab the helm and I'm going to steer the ship. What's important to this concept is this metaphor is, as I steer the ship, here's the thing. Again, we'll talk more about this later, but I want to bring it out there right now is when I'm steering my ship, I can't control the currents, I can't control the wind, I can't control perhaps adverse weather, those are out of my control, but I can continue to steer the ship through all of that. Again, that gives us a bit of, a sense of control as we navigate our way through life. According to social cognitive theory, there are four components to agency. We're going to talk about each one of these in detail as we move forward. But here they are; intentionality, forethought, self reactiveness, or self-regulation and then lastly, self reflectiveness or self-efficacy. I tend to like self-regulation and self-efficacy a little bit better than the original terms. We'll dig into each one of those. But I really want you to think about this as the takeaway from this is a functional self-awareness. You're going to see this term as we move forward. But functional self-awareness, you know, I'm a big fan, big proponent of self-awareness. That's what a lot of these courses are about. Now we're going to call this functional self-awareness. This is vital to a life of really better well-being. That's the best way I would put it. As noted, we are going to look at each one of these individually. I just want to make sure that we're all on the same page. You might see intentionality. You go, okay, I get it. I understand what that is, but let's make sure we're on the same page. It's an awareness and a will to act in a particular way based on an idea or a mental state. It's just this idea that we're going to live our lives with intent. That may seem obvious. You might be saying, doesn't everybody live their life with intent? I would say from my experience, a lot of people do not. So much of what I do in this course and other courses that I do is to try to get you to get some clarity of purpose. This idea of why am I doing the things I'm doing so that you can get some intentionality around how you live your life, how you show up. That's going to be one of the four main components of agency, is to live your life with intent. The next one we're going to talk about is forethought. I'm really big on this idea of not only a reflection and introspection, I think those are hallmarks of goods self-awareness. Again, this is functional self awareness that we're talking about here. Before thought is this idea of, we've talked in previous lessons about identifying with your future self. You can think of forethought is I'm going to project into the future because I'm a human being. I have that wonderful power of imagination and I can do that, whereas my dog probably can't figure that out. So as human beings we have this great capacity to project into the future. Use that to your advantage so that you can say, depending on what I do now, how's that going to impact my future self? Again, behind that is going to be a lot of reflection and introspection to look forward into the future and say, okay, what is it, how is this going to play out? Or at least my best guess. Next is self-regulation. Self-regulation is this idea that I can monitor, regulate, and control cognition, motivation, and behavior. I personally would remove the word control. I know it's used a lot in the research in the literature, but I'm not sold on the idea that we can control these very powerful force, especially in motion. Regulating, I think, is a good goal to have. Do the best you can with it, but control sounds a lot like perfectionism to me. I see a lot of people let their emotions get the best of them and they feel horrible about themselves. I would say, let's do the best we can. But also know that sometimes we are emotional beings and they are motions are going to get away from us. That's the way it goes. Practice a little self grace and just say, Hey, it's okay, I'm going to do better tomorrow. But again, I like the word regulation better than I like control. But again, this is that idea that we can self-regulate ourselves. The next one we're going to talk about is self-efficacy. I'm going to spend more time in the next lesson going deeper in self-efficacy. But I'm going to show it to you now. Again, we see that the term functional self-awareness. It's a belief in your capabilities really at the end of the day that you can produce given levels of attainment. We'll talk about what's the difference between self-efficacy and confidence. Maybe I'll leave that question there. I'll pose that question to you now and we'll talk about that in the next lesson. But self efficacy is incredibly powerful force where we can build that idea. Again, it's this idea that I can take on hard challenges. When you have high self-efficacy, you can do things that you never thought were possible, and so I would encourage you to develop your self-efficacy, which is why I focus a lot on the next lesson. Now we get to the good stuff. Here's eight ways to improve your sense of agency. As I started this lesson, be the captain of your own ship, grabbed the helm, steer that ship, even when you have inclement weather, unfavorable winds and currents. Grab the helm. It's going to be important to developing your sense of agency. The next one I would say is something that comes from stoic philosophy. It's called amor fati. Maybe you're familiar with that. But if you're not, the loose translation is a love of fate. The stoic philosophers, again, roughly 2,000 years ago, would say that if we can learn to love whatever fate delivers to our doorstep, we're going to be a much better place to have a good, strong sense of agency. That doesn't mean we always are going to say, okay, that's great. But again, when things come to us, the way we interpret that fate is incredibly important for our mindset, so practice amor fati. Also, think about practicing in a growth mindset. You see this show up a lot and we've already talked about growth mindset in some other lessons. It shows up a lot for good reason. Growth mindset, that idea that can-do attitude, that idea that I can figure this out. I can learn it. People who have a growth mindset really look at challenges and say, just give me enough time I'll figure this out. That is at the heart of what a growth mindset is and it really is going to help you improve your agency. Next one, let go of perfectionism. If you've followed me at all in any of my courses, I'm not a fan of the word perfectionism. There are in the psychology literature are some things that say, healthy perfectionism. I don't buy into that. Perfectionism is one thing to me. It's not almost there. Some people will say perfectionism is mostly free of flaws. I would say perfectionism, anything that's perfect is free of all flaws. I say that is unrealistic, in my humble opinion, is not something that we can attain. Let go of that, and so this leads to the next one. Do it badly, and what I mean by that is take on things that made you look foolish. You might be embarrassed. You're going to fall down and just really feel like this is horrible. When we're little kids, we're small children we're running around. You've ever watched a small child trying to learn how to walk if you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But anytime you've been around small child, what do they do when they're learning to walk? They usually fall down a lot. What do they do when they fall down? They usually just giggle, most of the time, not always. Sometimes they get that determined look on their face. Again, I'm going to do this. But either way, they don't worry about how bad they look, how foolish they look. They don't care if anybody else is laughing at them, in fact, they'll laugh with you if you're laughing at them. Maybe we need to go back to being a small child and say, I'm going to take on hard challenges and I really don't care if you laugh at me. Let's laugh together because I'm going to do this badly and here's the deal. You do badly and you're going to get better. You practice and you're going to get better. This is going to develop your agency. Cultivate beginner's mind, sometimes called child's mind, very related to the last one. In Zen Buddhism, it's called [inaudible]. It's this idea that you always have something to learn, if you ever start to feel like I know it all or I don't have anything else to learn you've lost beginner's mind. The older we get and the more wisdom we acquire in life, the harder it is to have beginner's mind. Remember again, like a small child, we just drank it in and we suck it up like a sponge. Let's continue to do that all the way through our life. Clarity of purpose, I feel like I've hit on this already. Why are we doing this? Understand your vision, your mission, your values, your ethos, all of those things that are going to help you develop that clarity of purpose, which is going to be very instrumental to a sense of agency. Lastly, this idea that life happens for you instead of to you. When we start to look at life as happening to us, it's easy to slip into a victim mindset. Why try? Because life's unfair and it's not anything I can control and I start to feel helpless. That's exact opposite of a sense of agency. Again, not to feel like we're entitled where everything is going our way. But when we start to shift the mindset, life's happening for me. Even the bad things that happen are happening for a reason. When we can get into that mindset, and we're steering our ship, we're in good shape. I hope you practice some of these things to improve your sense of agency. In the next video, we'll talk about self-efficacy and how it fits into all of this. See you there.
