There might not be many topics related to leadership more important than personal agency.
I think of personal agency as especially, but not exclusively tied to the more difficult existential decisions we learn to make, particularly the ones that stand outside our usual decision-making patterns, choices that cause us to step back, examine and intentionally challenge our habitual ways of doing things, that demand conscious and sometimes extensive deliberation. Personal agency is about freedom, yes, but it’s not about some shallow, individualistic and self-interested liberty that doesn’t give a hoot about what anybody else thinks. Such choices are deeper down, involve what is most meaningful to us, including the kind and quality of relationships we want in our lives, how we communicate, how we fulfill our needs, and how we see and perceive our own value and values. I think of personal agency as that which enables us to both shape and follow a path our lives are “meant” to take.
But how can there be something we both “shape” and “follow” at the same time? How do we manage this apparent oxymoron?
A client worries a lot about failure, worries simultaneously about being too assertive and not assertive enough. “How should I be?” “What if I don’t fit?” “What if I learn I don’t belong or even deserve my role?”
In this real world case I found myself suggesting the client cultivate a different mindset, one in which even if there is “failure” in worldly terms, including extremes such as getting fired or resigning under pressure, the experience — while undoubtedly painful — would most likely be temporary. A person can pick themselves up and at some point they will live and work again. They will find a new job and possibly even a new purpose. They will have probably learned something very important from their experiences. They will go on to make important choices: a different employer, a different kind of work perhaps, or maybe they will do something entirely different with their life than push 60+ hours a week. People reinvent themselves. They will choose and in choosing do exactly what they are meant to do. It’s all hard work no matter what happens and, in this sense, I tell the client, you cannot fail.
To adopt this anti-failure mindset, the client would have to free themself from surface judgments and learn to make choices directly in the face of risk and insecurity. They can’t have it all and also be completely protected from things breaking. There is no perfectly certain, safe way forward. There is no guaranteed success — and this recognition is a kind of necessary reckoning that requires the inner work of surrender and acceptance in the midst of insecurity. Indeed there is a pit, but falling into it isn’t a crime; it’s a setback.
Personal agency is what we discover at the perenial fork in the road, at the many forks we face along the way. If we get stuck at the fork for whatever reason, it’s our chosen lack of agency that we are holding onto dearly –aka our “reasons,” our desire to placate existential anxiety or shame, to settle, to stay in the rut of old conditioning that has reared its ugly head, including anxiety about what it also might mean to manage success. Stuckness — as the opposite of personal agency — is choosing to sit down at the fork and wait.
It is giving away inner power we could own for ourselves. Sometimes the wait is worth it — and we learn something from it but all too often it is not. What’s clear is that in taking the risk to choose, we learn to become, to intentionally shape our lives, an experience, paradoxically, that often feels as if we’re simply doing what is the meaningful and right and the hard thing, maybe even a courageous thing. It can feel as if we’ve finally held up the lantern given to us and are following its light into a darkness that surrounds us completely, one step at a time.
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