Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
unoptimal and
Agency
Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.
Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk
It has become hard to be intentional about the future — to imagine and shape the worlds we want to live in — because the modern state rarely assumes any role in doing that or in encouraging us to do it either.
Substack • Imagining a World Beyond Consumerism
Agency and self-efficacy are deeply intertwined, like the will to act (agency) and the belief that you can succeed (self-efficacy). They reinforce each other in a feedback loop, but they aren’t the same thing.
How They Influence Each Other
How They Influence Each Other
- Self-Efficacy Fuels Agency
- If you believe you can accomplish something, you're more likely to take action .
- Exa
ChatGPT
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more
Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Not Viktor Frankl
Michael Ashcroft • How to Make Unfixated Choices
“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all
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