Ben Crowe in his book, Where the Light Gets In: Simple, playful and profound perspective shifts to change your life, identifies the Three A’s as the source of living with confidence and happiness. He describes agency, acceptance and appreciation as the “Triple-A mindset muscles” that are foundational to “being human with freedom, clarity and enjoyment”. In this post, I will discuss agency and highlight it’s relationship to dealing with expectations and pressure.
Agency – power and control
Agency is the capacity to exercise control, choice or decision-making in a particular context. In a previous discussion, I highlighted the role of action learning in facilitating agency in the workplace both for employees and managers. While agency has a key role in our professional lives, it also impacts our personal life, whether we are talking about our relationships and/or sporting/recreational activities. It can also be very relevant to our longevity as we age.
Agency enables us to shape our lives and our environment and facilitates the release of creativity. We become “masters of our own destiny” in the sense that we take control of the controllables in our life, including how we respond to difficult circumstances such as chronic illness. We can control how we respond to our circumstances or adopt a victim mentality. Controlling our response leads to freedom, victimhood leads to a sense of powerlessness and inertia (“there is nothing I can do about my situation!”). When we see ourselves as a “victim” we “abdicate our responsibility for living”.
Ben draws inspiration about agency from the example of Viktor Frankl who survived Auschwitz and became a globally acknowledged author and psychiatrist when he wrote his landmark book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Ben specifically quotes a significant statement by Viktor Frankl where he maintains that, in the face of being stripped of everything (dignity, choice, decision-making, control), the last human freedom still remains – “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. Ben points out that both Nelson Mandala and Viktor Frankl exercised internal freedom despite the loss of their external freedom through imprisonment.
Matt Mauser, who lost his wife Christina in the same helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, epitomises agency in “choosing one’s attitude”. In subsequently singing on AGT, he stated that he wanted to perform to teach his three young children that “grief is not going to define who we are as a family” and that “you have to find joy in life and just continue”.
Projection – reducing agency
Ben Crowe points out that “choosing our own path” entails risk and opens us up to the prospect of “failure”, criticism, and even ridicule. We can recall, for example, the personal cost for singers and artists who chose in their early years to defy their parents’ wishes for their career and instead pursued, at considerable emotional cost, what they considered to be their own “life purpose”.
Ben maintains that parents often project onto their children their desire to satisfy their own unfulfilled dreams. This projection can conflict with the child’s own career goals and aspirations. Ben cites the example of Andre Agassi whose father insisted that he play tennis against Andre’s own desires at the time.
Projection reduces agency. Encouraging independence in children builds their capacity to make choices in line with their natural talents – it builds the child’s decision-making muscle. This freedom to choose and pursue their own path gives them “personal agency”.
Intuition and agency
Intuition is wisdom born of experience, reflection and subconscious processing, and insights gained through writing. Agency, then, is the willingness and capacity to act on “intuitive judgments”. Sometimes, agency can also involve the decision to not act on our intuition when it’s the result of bias, fear, or inadequate information about the context or the people involved. However, when we can truly rely on our intuition and bring it into alignment with agency, we can move forward and “trust our gut”.
The reflective capacity of introverts, and their ability to slow down and be still, builds their insights, intuition and agency. David Lynch (famous filmmaker, artist, Director, photographer and musician) maintained that creative ideas come from within and are stimulated by stillness and silence and the act of reflection which enables access to the “infinite dynamism” within us.
Susan Cain, in her book, Quiet, lauds the intuition of introverts who strive to exercise agency in a world dominated by extroverts. She points out that social constraints and external validation of extroverts negatively impacts the freedom of introverts to share their insights, thus limiting their agency in a world that desperately needs their incisive thinking and decision-making. She argues for empowering introverts, helping them to exercise agency “in a world that can’t stop talking”.
Reflection
I’m older than the great majority of pickleball players and opponents express surprise when I retrieve balls or play shots that much younger players are not able to do (especially spins). Ageism is rife and sometimes I feel the need to prove that age does not define competence. As a result I occasionally up the ante to prove my competence as I did recently playing a person who had played more than 1,000 pickleball games ( I have only played 250 games). I noticed that the right-handed player had a weak backhand (they would stand in the very corner of the backhand court so that they could take the ball on their forehand). So I served very deep into the backhand corner of their court so that they were forced to play a backhand (actually they used their left hand to retrieve the ball and play an ineffectual shot).
When I reflect on my competitive response, I wonder whether I am being trapped by my own projection of the other player’s expectations of me. Am I giving up my freedom, my agency to play more socially than competitively, driven by the felt pressure to rectify an assumed expectation? I have nothing to prove but do I need to show that I can play better, when we are actually playing recreational (non-competitive), intermediate-level pickleball? It seems that our own expectations of personal competence, as well as our assumptions re other’s expectations, can limit our decision-making and choices, thus reducing our agency in the situation.
As we grow in mindfulness through the stillness and silence of reflection, we can enhance our self-awareness and unearth our assumptions and projections. In the process, we can develop our intuition and facilitate our agency in our personal and professional lives.
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Image by Ahmet Yüksek from Pixabay
By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)
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