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
basking in the grace of others
startingfromnix.com
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?
sundus • agency: it's only human
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
“The capacity for growth depends on one’s ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be "solved," then no change will occur.”
― James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife
Pessimists see problems. They worry about what could go wrong in the future. Optimists see possibilities. They focus on what could go right in the future. Proactive people turn problems into possibilities. They give us reasons to be optimistic about the future.
Adam Granttwitter.com"Proactive people turn problems into possibilities. They give us reasons to be optimistic about the future."
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
Giving kids the agency to follow their own curiosity seems right for a lot of obvious reasons: it will make them happier, intrinsic motivation will fuel them to learn more, it keeps the youthful flame burning instead of extinguishing it with routine...But it’s also important for a less obvious reason, one that will be even more important as things... See more
Packy McCormick • How Do I Teach These Kids?!
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... See more