Personal agency relates profoundly to the well-being, happiness, and success of any personality type. In basic terms, agency is a person’s capacity to deliberately and effectively change events or their environment. That sounds simple, but agency is a deep-reaching concept that affects your life more than you may realize. In this article, we’ll explore agency broadly, setting the stage for later examinations of how it relates to specific personality types.
Agency doesn’t depend on intelligence, imagination, morality, love, courage, values, inspiration, or culture, yet it’s the gateway to bringing such grand potentials to reality. The ability to act effectively when you choose is an essential form of power relevant to your self-expression, self-actualization, or any circumstance where you desire something. Consequently, understanding your agency is one of the most important forms of personal growth.
Your agency is your ability to personally accomplish what you want in life.
Agency can be viewed as having multiple components: opportunity, awareness, skill, resources, and intention. Let’s better understand what these components mean using the example of a firefighter’s job role:
- Opportunity: This represents whether circumstances allow for a person to act, i.e., whether they have the chance to do something. A firefighter must have access to a fire in order to be able to fight it. In context, their agency is limited by physical proximity.
- Awareness: This is one’s conscious recognition of the opportunity to act, i.e., knowing that there’s something to be done. Without some mechanism to perceive the need for their help, firefighters have little agency. They can’t fight fires that they’re not aware of.
- Skill: This represents one’s relevant physical and mental abilities, i.e., what they can do. A firefighter is trained and well practiced in how to handle various emergency situations. Without that skill, their effectiveness would be minimal, and thus, they would have little agency.
- Resources: This represents the materials, tools, or information needed to act, i.e., the stuff that one needs to do what can be done. Without the proper equipment, a firefighter can do little to address an emergency, and thus, they would have virtually no agency.
- Intention: This represents the decision to act and the comprehension of the effect, i.e., that one means to do something to create a specific result. If a firefighter does not choose their actions or recognize cause and effect, they can only achieve random accidents. Conscious purpose is an intrinsic part of personal agency.
Take away any of those five things, and you essentially eliminate agency – for firefighters or pretty much anyone, regardless of personality type. But enough about others – what about you?
The Need for Agency
Agency is important to your life because it’s the power to create the outcomes that you want, versus depending on external forces. Any goal that you haven’t yet accomplished is probably missing at least one component of agency. Maybe you don’t have the resources or just haven’t had the right opportunity. (Some personality types are better than others at boldly seizing opportunities.) But the role of agency in achieving your goals is just the mechanical half of its importance – it also has deep emotional and psychological ramifications.
Personal agency boosts your self-esteem, confidence, and optimism – qualities that many personalities struggle with. Your capacity for effective action helps you feel happier and more secure and helps you develop your potential to access what life has to offer. Personal agency makes you feel like you can direct your own life, and that makes it easier to bravely face challenges, push your boundaries with less stress, and even handle failure with resilience.
When you have little personal agency, you’re more likely to feel helpless, frustrated, or scared. If you don’t think that your actions can produce the desired results, you may not have much reason to act. Turbulent personality types are likely to experience self-doubt, for example. But things are rarely clear-cut, and your personal agency likely depends on the situation. You may usually have good agency and occasionally flounder, or you may rarely have agency and only sometimes feel empowered. (Or anywhere in between.) Your degree of personal agency affects your life significantly, and that makes understanding it a critical part of personal growth.
Ultimately, strong personal agency helps you be successful and happy in life.
But it gets more complicated, because your sense of agency and your actual degree of functional agency are different things. One is conceptual, and the other is provable. And since we rarely see ourselves or our situations accurately, we sometimes falsely believe that we have great agency (hyperagency) or little agency (hypoagency). All it takes to develop a skewed view of our own agency is the misperception of any one of its components: opportunity, awareness, skill, resources, or intention.
An inaccurate sense of personal agency is a common problem for all personality types – with potentially serious consequences. For example, someone might experience a devastating failure due to hyperagency in the form of overestimating their ability (think: Dunning-Kruger effect). Hypoagency can be just as bad, as underestimating their ability may prevent someone from attempting to reach goals. That can lead to feelings of powerlessness and a state of inaction (think: learned helplessness). Those are extreme potentials, but flawed awareness of agency can create subtle problems in everyday life.
We all have goals at any given moment – for example, finishing a certain amount of work before going home, getting special food ingredients on the way, and cooking a new recipe once we get there. But our true agency isn’t always certain or apparent: maybe there’s more work than you realized, so you left work late, and the specialty store is closed, so you can’t buy that certain spice blend. Now you’re skipping the fancy recipe and you’re kind of bummed.
Let’s look at what happened in terms of the components of agency (opportunity, awareness, skill, resources, intention). What could have been different? The root problem could be seen as inaccurate awareness, because you thought you could act on your goals of finishing work and leaving on time, but reality said otherwise. Now, there’s no blame in this scenario – maybe something was dumped on you last minute. This is just an exercise in examining how circumstances and events can increase, diminish, or obscure your agency.
Once late, there was little that you could do about the store being closed – the opportunity was no longer available. Your decision to skip the recipe – which is a lack of intention – could be seen as stemming from not having the resources (special spices) or not having the skill to experiment with substitutes. Or perhaps you did have enough skill to successfully improvise but didn’t believe in yourself, which counts as lack of awareness.
Agency can be complicated, but it’s a useful way of viewing the interactions between circumstances, goals, your personality, and the outcomes that you experience. Your knowledge and choices can increase or decrease your agency, as can external influences beyond your control. But the funny thing about agency is that you almost always have more than you think – it’s just that exercising it might come with risks that you’re unwilling to take or costs that you’re unwilling to pay. Let’s consider this relative to the above scenario about your dinner plan agency.
You might have left work on time with some tasks unfinished (risk: angering your boss) or driven to another store far away (cost: time and fuel). You could have attempted the recipe with alternative ingredients (risk: stress, failure). It’s natural to avoid a risky or costly choice, but that’s different from having no choice. Self-awareness calls you to understand your agency even when you choose not to exercise it. “I will or I won’t act” is a far more powerful mindset than “I can’t act” or “What’s happening?”
The many possible permutations of choices and results underscore how agency – and your sense of it – affects your life. You deserve options. Accurate awareness of your agency is a critical step in the planning and attainment of goals, no matter how small. But that’s not a bad thing, because agency can be extremely empowering to every personality type.
Assessing Your Agency
A healthy approach to agency requires more than just correctly understanding how much of it you have, but that’s a great start. Recognizing what you truly can and can’t do requires assessing every component of your agency in any given situation. It also requires working to set aside internal biases like arrogance and self-doubt, so that you can see yourself more clearly. (That’s a major personal-growth practice in itself for any personality type.) Objectively assessing your own agency takes practice, but it’s almost always worth doing.
For one thing, critically assessing your agency can help you reach a goal faster by identifying what’s stopping you. You can go down the list of agency’s components and ask yourself, “What’s missing in this case?” You might often think that it’s resources, because hey, if you had enough money, you could do anything, right? Sort of. You could pay someone else to create results for you, but that’s not the same as being able to achieve them yourself, and therefore, it’s not really personal agency.
One of the scariest yet most enlightening conclusions that you might come to when assessing your agency in regard to a particular goal is that the main thing missing is intention. Meaning, you haven’t chosen to act, possibly because you’ve convinced yourself that you won’t succeed (certain personality types especially struggle with this, as we have discussed in many articles). The idea that you can improve your life by exercising personal agency may also bring an uncomfortable sense of responsibility. You may subconsciously downplay or deny your own agency for the sake of relieving yourself of obligation, but that might not be worth the cost of giving up your power.
No amount of skill – or any other component of agency – can overcome a lack of willing intention.
Of course, there’s a flip side to agency and responsibility. Assessing your agency may reveal that some things that you feel you should do are truly beyond your capability at that moment. It doesn’t make sense to feel responsible for things that you have no agency over – although it might inspire you to grow. For example, it’s pointless to feel guilty about being a bystander who’s unable to reasonably fight a fire, but it might make you want to become a firefighter. Seeking an accurate sense of your own agency should lead to growth and freedom, not avoidance or guilt.
Common Agency Pitfalls
Let’s consider a few scenarios where any personality type’s relationship to personal agency could be considered unhealthy. It’s useful to understand these patterns, because when you see them in yourself, you can work on them. When you see them in other people…well, that’s its own issue. We’ve already touched on some basic downsides of hyperagency (arrogance, foolhardiness) and hypoagency (frustration, helplessness), but let’s look at some other manifestations of unhealthy agency.
A common form of hyperagency is the belief that you have the power to change other people’s behavior when you don’t. This often comes from the sense that you are responsible for other people’s problems. While it’s certainly possible to encourage and support people’s own efforts to heal, grow, or change, it’s very unlikely that you can control their thoughts and feelings or the actions that result from them. It’s tempting to believe so when you want to help someone, but the false belief that you can change someone’s behavior may sustain an unhealthy relationship with them.
That usually involves being emotionally and mentally drained, or worse. If someone is continually miserable, self-destructive, or abusive, your attempts to change their behavior might become a harmful cycle. The belief that you’re having some positive effect – even if that effect is temporary or imagined – may convince you to keep trying. Ultimately, chasing a false sense of agency over other people’s mental and emotional states yields little but exhaustion and pain. (That isn’t to say that you can never exert a positive influence, but if so, then that’s not false agency.)
But hyperagency doesn’t just pose a risk to the individual experiencing it – it can also be harmfully projected outward. The belief that you can change other people’s thoughts and feelings can lead to controlling behavior. For example, people with high social status may develop hyperagency because they’re insulated from negative responses. Without anything to contradict their misperception, they may believe that they know how others should best think, feel, and act, and that they have the power to make it happen.
Real-world examples could include anything from a micromanaging boss to an overbearing parent. They may assert good intentions while ignoring the will and preferences of those they seek to help, as well as dismissing other influential forces in the situation. They may believe that their involvement creates the intended results, but that’s often minimally true, though they rarely allow themselves to realize that fact. Unfortunately, harmful, delusional, or controlling behavior isn’t merely the domain of hyperagency.
An unhealthy form of hypoagency can occur when someone uses their helplessness as emotional pressure to manipulate others. If being or claiming to be incapable becomes advantageous to someone, it can become a motivated, habitual behavior. That‘s dangerous, because manipulating others is a form of power that can functionally substitute for personal agency. When someone can make others do things for them, they have little reason to do things for themselves. That dynamic may be workable when a child is being cared for by adults, but it tends to be extremely problematic when it exists between reasonably capable adults.
Claiming incapability to avoid responsibility is a potentially addictive abdication of personal agency.
When any relationship is too lopsided, it can create a sense of unfairness and resentment that breeds deeper problems between any personalities. Many relationships, be they romantic or professional, become troubled when those involved have an inaccurate understanding of their own or each other’s agency. Blame, guilt, outrage, criticism, and hurt spring up all too easily between people who disagree on who can do what, because such beliefs are usually paired with assumed obligation. Frustration over what others “should” do hinges on the belief that they reasonably can do it – but that can be a false belief.
For example, skill sets can vary widely between coworkers of equal rank. A person who is very skilled at a specific task may assume that others can and should complete the same task equally well, and indeed, a coworker who lacks adequate skill (and, therefore, lacks agency) may believe that they can do so. But if the less skilled person performs poorly compared to expectations, conflict is a likely result. When people depend on each other’s successes, even one person’s misperception of agency can be mutually disappointing – and harmful. The above are just some examples of unhealthy agency, but there are many positive possibilities as well.
Healthy Approaches to Agency
The most obvious benefit of agency comes from actively learning and practicing a broad range of internal, external, mental, emotional, and physical abilities. Acquiring the skill to accomplish a specific goal is a classic example: you might want to fix up your home, so you learn some basic carpentry and finishing techniques. Or maybe you want to sell your art, so you learn some marketing skills. It could even be something like getting CPR and first-aid certified just in case there’s an emergency situation. But while increasing and using your agency externally can be wonderful, nothing’s more important than how it can help you progress internally.
Regardless of your situation, developing a healthy sense of agency can help you lead a happier and more successful life. Learning to assess your agency is as important as how you use your agency, because it helps you recognize what you can and can’t do, including where you need to grow to become the person you want to be. Life is full of opportunities to fail and succeed, and how you engage with them can make a big difference in your progress. Let’s look at a few examples of healthy approaches to agency.
Exploring your own agency can rapidly move all your goals forward – including emotional goals like sustained happiness, confidence, and security.
Sometimes there’s a valuable lesson to be learned from continuing to act despite ongoing failure. When you believe that you have agency, but your actions are ineffective (apparent hyperagency), contemplation alone might not always reveal the problem. Repeating the process of failing can grant you new insight – if you can handle the stress and stay objective. You could think of it as growth-minded hyperagency. It takes some grit to intentionally fail, but experience can teach you much more than thought alone. But you don’t have to do it alone.
For example, if you’re into sports but do poorly in competitions, your peers and trainers could lend their expertise to find the issue, even if you yourself can’t figure it out. Sometimes the input of a radically different personality type with different values might be useful. Being willing to confront your areas of overconfidence or misperception (hyperagency) leads to a more balanced understanding of your own agency. Then, you can work on whatever you need to until the effectiveness of your actions matches your desire and sense of agency.
You can also learn (and do) much by being willing to act despite underconfidence (apparent hypoagency). Trying to accomplish something when you don’t seem to have agency is a great way to overcome doubt and break new ground. This can be considered growth-minded hypoagency and also requires some willingness to fail. There’s a first time for every success, and it’s rarely possible to predict it, so you often just have to try and see how it goes. You may have more agency than you realize, but you won’t know unless you use it. If you fail, it doesn’t mean that you were wrong to try or that you cannot succeed – it just serves as a learning experience.
Other personality types are a valuable resource for developing healthy agency, because they can give you a different perspective and perhaps some positive reinforcement. Someone else’s belief in you might mute your own doubts just long enough for you to recognize your own agency and act. Likewise, they may offer corrective feedback that can help you refine your approach to increase your agency. Having the support of wise, caring people can help you see your own agency more affirmatively, which can be a major step in your personal growth and success.
Growth can also be shared when it comes to developing healthy agency. For example, when a leader works to understand the unique abilities of each person they manage, they’re really assessing agency. That assessment helps them match people’s traits with work assignments in ways that increase efficiency and success for the whole team. There’s no reason why peers cannot become partners in exploring and developing each other’s agency as well – especially friends.
One advantage to such mutual assessments is that they can make it easier to be objective. One person might help another see their agency (or lack thereof) more clearly, without self-critical filters or ego. Further, the concept of agency gives different personalities a framework to discuss and understand all kinds of situations with each other. It’s a rational, function-oriented format for the classic act of talking things through supportively, as friends often do. A shared, step-by-step examination of every component of agency, whether it’s regarding something past or planned, is a powerful way for people to comfort, support, and inspire each other.
Beyond Agency
The role that personal agency plays in attaining happiness and success is undeniable – but it’s not everything. As the saying goes, no one is an island, and complete self-sufficiency is a fantasy that can be taken too far. As valuable as your own capability is, there are moments when it’s important to look beyond personal agency at other needed elements of life that lie outside yourself. There’s nothing wrong with valuing independence, but if insistence on self-reliance becomes a barrier to achievement and joy, that’s a limit worth reconsidering – especially for the most independent-minded personality types.
Often, the people who most value personal agency are also the ones least likely to seek help, even when it’s needed. Personal agency can bring a great sense of pride and empowerment, and admitting the need for help might feel like it diminishes those things. But a wall is a wall. Part of having healthy agency is knowing when you’ve reached your limits and need outside assistance to make progress or overcome a challenge. But shared support isn’t the only essential thing that lies beyond agency.
Learning is also an effective option when you’ve reached the limits of your personal agency. It’s an especially good kind of external help because it can become agency in the form of skills and resources. Reaching beyond your own agency to make progress on something doesn’t preclude developing enough ability that you eventually won’t have to. One of the most useful aspects of working to understand your agency is that it will help you find opportunities for personal growth – not just through personal practice and mastery but also by welcoming outside knowledge, ideas, and beneficial influences.
Conclusion: Building Your Agency
The role of personal agency in your life can be quite magical. When it’s understood and used correctly, it can help heal harmful negativity bias, low confidence, and self-criticism. For most people, that process starts internally. Your ability to take effective action in life rests on your thoughts and emotions, because that’s where healthy agency comes from. Developing a strong sense of agency requires practice, and exercising personal agency helps move you toward inner happiness and self-fulfillment. Your sense of agency and actual degree of agency (which are distinct, as previously discussed) can feed each other.
The merest shred of belief in your own efficacy can lead you to take action, and when that creates even a minor positive result, it proves your agency. That, in turn, justifies your sense of agency, leading to more action, better results, and so on. A healthy cycle of affirming your agency starts with an internal belief, and because of that, it can also be restarted when failure interrupts your confidence. Even when you don’t succeed, believing in the value of trying is one of the best ways to affirm your own power to make progress.