agency: it's only human

I was realizing how many personal and interpersonal issues ultimately traced back to feeling like one has little to no agency. Everything from confidence to motivation can be traced back to agency, at least to some extent.

A victim mentality is, in my opinion, one of the biggest threats to cultivating a sense of agency. Perpetual victimhood cannot coexist with agency.

Reminder that a sense of agency means feeling like you have control over your actions and their consequences . I think people tend to forget that second part; owning your mistakes and their consequences is extremely difficult, which might be a motivating factor for some people to adopt victim complexes. (A victim complex is learned!)

Agency can be formally defined as the subjective feeling of having control over one’s actions and their consequences…Put differently, you don’t feel as though life is just happening to you, with your only choice being to sit back and accept it all. Instead, you feel as though you are an active participant in your life; you are making things happen.

in order to develop agency, one needs to be psychologically ready to embrace it (i.e., change their worldview) once they spontaneously discover it. For instance, abandoning a victim mentality and being open to taking risks.

You might have independence, and you might be an ambitious person—but if you can’t even begin to fathom creating and playing by your own rules, do you really have agency?