Personal Agency - are you aware?
Working with some of my clients recently, we had some great discussions around the concept of personal empowerment and agency in midlife.
While some people I work with felt they had strong actualized agency and empowered to make change in their lives, still others felt that life had piled heaps of boloney at their doorsteps and were unable to feel empowered to make change or even recognize that their agency was compromised.
So what is agency?
Personal agency can include our beliefs, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, preferences, choices, values, attitude, behaviour and anything which is going on within our minds and what we do with our bodies.
It is the degree to which we are able to make decisions and carry out actions that we choose for ourselves. To claim personal agency is to claim responsibility for our choices, our actions, our words, and our reactions or responses to others and to events.
So how does this relate to midlife and how to we become aware and more powerful?
Cue 'self-efficacy' which is the belief we have in our own abilities, specifically our ability to meet the challenges ahead of us and complete a task successfully. The more we believe we have self-efficacy, the greater our performance will be in life and work. We shape, by what we take responsibility for, the outcomes of what we do. Of course, this is not guaranteed, and despite our own personal agency, things may go wrong.
Agency is also tied to mindset and we have the capability to change and grow - we can choose to be active participants in our personal development and growth and take control of our lives to make lasting change. We all have the power and ability to change the reality around us we just have to take that first step, refrain from letting others dictate how we want to live and begin to exercise our lives with purpose
This is a powerful philosophical and psychological topic and has been studied deeply so this only scratches the surface but I hope it gets you thinking about your own agency and where you are at in your life right now.
I know that I am hiding slightly behind a safe wall and my agency is not 100% actualized as I shephard my teens into adulthood and prepare for my next act - but what is cool about this is that I have identified this, am aware of it and am powerfully moving forward to embrace my agency fully.
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Hi, I’m Rani & I work with women in midlife on all things career & life - thank you for being here! I’m in Vancouver, Canada!
Would love to connect - please DM me here https://m.me/rani.macinnes/
I help women in midlife with mental fitness and positive intelligence and who are lacking clarity & purpose are overwhelmed and stuck with their life and/or career searches
I think you will love my midlife newsletter https://www.livearebellife.com/newsletter