Agency
 The Superpower Of High Hope People
The word agency is shorthand for our perceived ability to shape our lives day to day. As "agents" we know we can make things happen or stop them from happening. We know we can take responsibility for determining our goals and then seeing them happen. Over time, we can develop our ability to motivate ourselves by building our capacity for persistence and long-term effort. Agency makes us the authors of our own lives.Â
Michelangelo, perhaps history’s greatest sculptor, understood the concept of agency. Two of his more famous quotes speak directly to this idea:
"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it."
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free"
For Michelangelo, his agency was already there, inside the hunk of stone, whether by divine providence or by his own imagination. His eyes and hands were merely the vessels by which that idea—the art—was brought forth into the physical world as he or God (or both) originally intended.
What is Agency?
"Agency is the capacity to make decisions and to act"
Consider the challenges of your job, your career or even you life. What do they have in common, psychologically? In each case, success requires high-functioning human agency.
In the psychological sense, agency entails a category of beliefs. A mindframe. More profoundly, genuine agency includes the strategies and actions that accomplish what we want and it gives us the initiative to bring us what we need.
Feeling that you have agency is nice. But feeling agentic falls far short of exercising agency. Agency involves thinking and behaving competently and making real progress toward your desired future.
To exercise agency is to acquire significant control over your life’s various arenas, including school, work, sports, physical health and mental wellbeing.Â
Find Your Agency Mind Map
Understand the 6 areas of your Agency
Adaptability & Resilience
Your ability to shift your behaviour and outlook in response change
Mind-Body Connection
The regulation of the balance between your mind and body
Core Cognition
Your ability to perform basic cognitive functions, make sense of complex sets of events and situations
Drive & Motivation
Your ability to work towards achieving your desired goals and to initiate & persevere
Social Self
How you interact with, relate to and see yourself with respect to others and to your community.
Mood & OutlookÂ
Your ability to manage and regulate your emotions effectively and to have a constructive outlook.
Your mind health is directly related to your agency
Your Mind Health can maximize your hope to think, learn, and create, all while taking care of your mental health. Beyond the elevated self-awareness and consciousness you’ll experience by applying metacognitive strategies, scientists have investigated some of the many benefits of expanding your agency.
- Learn better. Research show that high agency learners identify challenges much faster and change their tools and strategies to better achieve their learning goals. Knowing your agency can even compensate for IQ and lack of prior knowledge when it comes to solving new problems.
- Make decisions faster. Monitoring and controlling your ongoing cognitive activity can make you aware of your cognitive bias and help avoid mistakes or at least not reproduce the same mistakes twice. In addition, because of heightened awareness, metacognition leads to a reduction in response time, which reduces the time to solve a problem or complete a task.
- Be more creative. All narrative works of art can be defined as metacognitive artifacts which are designed by the creator to anticipate and regulate the cognitive processes of the recipient. Intrinsically speaking, creativity is thinking about how you are thinking.
- Improve your mental health. Knowing your own Mind Health gives you the ability to understand how to strengthen your hope and to adapt your strategies that help you govern contradictions in your life. As such, researchers defined metacognition as the process that “reinforces one’s subjective sense of being a self and allows for becoming aware that some of our thoughts and feelings are symptoms of an illness.”
As you can see, understanding how agency works is really the mind’s Swiss Army knife. That one ability can help you learn better, make decisions faster, be more creative and improve your mind health. Â
Create A Life Time Of Hope
