“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley
Last week, I was at a conference in Charleston to ring in the new year. Several friends asked how my AGENCY book is coming along, and I promised to share an excerpt.
Hope you find this thought-provoking, and motivates you to craft and adopt your own definition of AGENCY – so it can contribute to you leading an even more meaningful life.
Actor Harvey Fierstein said, ““Accept no one’s definition of your life. Define yourself.”
Doing a deep dive into your AGENCY history is a great way to come up with your own definition of AGENCY so it’s personally relevant and meaningful for you.
You can do that by taking this 10-question quiz to fully appreciate the pivotal role AGENCY has played in determining your “corner of the universe.”
I hope you’ll print this quiz and answer the questions with friends and family members. People tell me it has led to one of the most insightful conversations they’ve ever had.
I hope that reflecting on who has supported your AGENCY, when and where you’ve owned your AGENCY, what advice you would give about AGENCY, helps you become so convinced of its value, you keep it top-of-mind and top-of-heart every day for the rest of your life.
I know that sounds grandiose, however as you’re about to discover, AGENCY is the lead domino of self-respect, the primary determinant of whether we end up with regrets or results.
Reflect on the Role AGENCY Plays in Your Life with This 10-Question Quiz
“How you spend your days is, of course, how you spend your life.” – Annie Dillard
- How would you define AGENCY? What does it mean to you?
- Who facilitated AGENCY in you when you were growing up? How so? Describe a time they encouraged you to figure things out on your own and take responsibility.
- Who didn’t support your AGENCY in your childhood? How did they discourage or undermine your autonomy? How did their behavior impact you then – and now?
- When is a time you acted with AGENCY? How did you “take charge?” What did you say to yourself to get resourceful and take responsibility to fix or influence what was happening?
- When was a time you did not demonstrate AGENCY – a time you did not handle things proactively? If you could have a do-over, what would you do differently?
- Who is a current example of AGENCY – someone you respect who takes initiative to improve the world around them? Share an example of a time they did this.
- Who is someone you work or live with or around who does NOT take AGENCY over their life? Why do you think this is? How does their behavior affect you?
- What are the benefits of AGENCY? How does it impact our quality of life?
- If AGENCY is so important, why don’t we do it sometimes? What blocks it?
- What do you wish someone had taught you earlier about AGENCY? What is one piece of advice you’d like to give about how to exercise AGENCY on a daily basis?
I’d love to hear your insights. Feel free to comment or email me to share your stories.
With your permission, I’ll pass along your aha’s to create a rising-tide conversation on this topic so others can benefit from what you’ve learned.
What’s YOUR Definition of AGENCY?
“The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.” – Joan Didion
One of the most rewarding aspects of developing and distributing this quiz has been hearing people’s vastly different responses, experiences, and perceptions of what AGENCY is.
I’ll share the traditional definition, my own, some of the eye-opening definitions that have been contributed, and then it’s time, as Harvey Fierstein advised, to define it for yourself.
Webster’s Dictionary defines the word agency as “the capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior; having faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations.”
Hmm. That’s accurate, but it’s a mouthful and a bit obtuse.
And something I know from my thirty years as a communication strategist is, “If we can’t repeat it, we won’t remember it, and we probably won’t do it.”
So, here’s a shorter, hopefully more meaningful, memorable definition.
AGENCY is “the power to improve what happens to us, by us, around us.”
Notice the verb is improve, not control.
We can’t control what happens to us, by us, or around us.
We can improve it
And therein lies our AGENCY. Therein lies our destiny.
Who Taught Me AGENCY?
“Teachers affect eternity. Who know where their influence will end?” – Henry Fosdick Emerson
I’ll always be grateful to my parents for fostering AGENCY in my brother, sister, and me.
We grew up in a small mountain valley in Southern California, more horses than people. We lived on a ranch, and when you live on a ranch, things go wrong.
You run into a rattlesnake in your driveway. You get a call at 3 am reporting your cattle are out roaming the country road. Lambs get stuck in the cattle guard. The windmill breaks and you have to truck in water from town. Your 300 pound pig roots in your freshly planted garden.
Yes, all of that actually happened.
And when things went wrong, our mom and dad expected us to get busy fixing it.
Kill the rattlesnake by chopping off its head with a shovel. Herd the cattle back in their pasture and fix the fence. Gently remove the lamb from the cattleguard. Do what needs to be done, truck in the water without complaining about it. Instead of whining when Ma Chow wallowed in my garden, focus on what I was going to do to prevent it from happening again.
In other words, whining, wallowing, waiting to be rescued were not options.
No matter how unfair, unfortunate, or unpleasant the task/chore was, their response was always the same, “Quit belly-aching. The question is, ‘What are you going to do about it?”
In fact, those eight words might make a better working definition of AGENCY.
When something goes wrong AND when you want something – AGENCY is asking yourself, “What am I going to do about it?”
A podcast host recently asked, “Where did you get your confidence?”
I smiled, “On the back of my horse.”
He did a Scooby Doo. “What?!”
I told him, “Even when my sister and I were eight and nine years old, we would be gone all day on our horses. And this was before cell phones. Yet they didn’t worry. They didn’t warn us. They trusted that if something did go wrong, we’d get resourceful and handle it.
Get bucked off? Figure it out. Bridle break? Figure it out.
They facilitated our AGENCY which is the root of confidence.
Instead of being afraid something might go wrong, we understand things probably would go wrong. And when they did, we’d figure them out.”
In fact, our father, who was an FFA (Future Farmers of America) advisor, gave us one of his favorite quotes from Bob Moawad and it became our motto.
“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own.
No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame.
The gift is yours.
It is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.“
AGENCY is Taking Responsibility for Your Life
“The greatest day in your life is when you take responsibility for your attitude. That’s the day you truly grow up.” – John C. Maxwell
That philosophy of taking responsibility for our quality of our life is the essence of AGENCY.
How about you? Who taught you the importance of taking responsibility?
Have you thanked them?
Imagine how it would feel for them to receive a call, email, or handwritten note from you “out of the blue” expressing how grateful you are for them instilling AGENCY in you.
This philosophy of AGENCY was nobly embodied by Viktor Frankl.
You’re probably familiar with who Frankl was and his profoundly impactful legacy.
Frankl was a prisoner in several Nazi concentration camps in World War I. He certainly couldn’t control the horrors he witnessed and experienced. Yet he was able to survive and chose to write about his epiphanies in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning.
He said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
What a stirring definition of AGENCY. It is Viktor Frankl’ing your life.
On a daily basis, you will encounter AGENCY Crossroads. Stuff will happen. And you have a choice. You can go down the rabbit hole of hate, outrage, despair, victimhood, helplessness.
Or you can pull yourself up by the emotional bootstraps and respond in ways that help rather than hurt. You can choose to extract the lesson, focus on what’s good, right and worth living for, and continue to show up and be the quality of person you want to be – no matter what.
What’s it going to be?
AGENCY is Embracing “If It’s To Be, It’s Up to Me”
“We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from a passive voice, ‘It got lost,’ to an active voice, ‘I lost it.'” – Sydney Harris
So, what is YOUR definition of AGENCY?
Take the time to write it out. Play with it and tweak it until you wouldn’t change a word.
I’m forever grateful to my college philosophy professor who, on the first day of class, gave us an assignment to create a 100 word-or-less mission statement.
He said, “Yes, we’re going to study Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, but first you’re going to come up with your own philosophy.”
Thanks to him, I drafted, then crafted, this, “My purpose is to make a positive difference for as many people as possible while maintaining a happy, healthy lifestyle with family and friends.”
That 24 word mission statement as served as my Moral North Star ever since.
If you invest the time now to clarify your own meaningful definition of AGENCY, it can serve as your Moral North Star moving forward.
Want one more sample definition to kick-start your musing?
“Helplessness is thinking, ‘There’s nothing I can do about this.
AGENCY is realizing there’s always something I can do about this.”
This philosophy was embodied by renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote eloquently about the theory of relativity in his international bestseller A Brief History of Time.
At age 21, at the beginning of his brilliant career, he was diagnosed with ALS (often called Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and was told he had less than 3 years to live.
Instead of falling into depression, Hawking refused to be defined or defeated by his diagnosis.
He used assistive technologies – a blink switch attached to his glasses and a thumb-switch to operate his wheelchair and a voice synthesizer to communicate via computer – to compensate for his loss of muscle and subsequent mobility issues.
He became a professor at Cambridge University, continued to conduct pioneering research in his field, spoke at conferences, and wrote three children’s books with his daughter.
He died at age 76, after opting to act with AGENCY despite living with ALS for fifty years.
As Stephen Hawking said, “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
How about you? How will you follow Viktor Frankl and Stephen Hawking’s inspiring examples?
How will you define – and adopt – an attitude of AGENCY to lead a meaningful, additive life?
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Can you tell I love this topic? If you’d like to share AGENCY with your team, let’s connect!. I look forward to connecting and exploring how we can customize a program for your group.