Instead, surround yourself with friends, family, and communities who encourage you to reach your full potential, nurture your talents, affirm your values and difficult decisions, and give you a reality check when you’ve behaved badly or are stuck in negative thinking. Surround yourself with friends, family, and communities who encourage you to reach your full potential, nurture your talents, affirm your values. That means you should set boundaries with difficult people, disentangle yourself from negative online interactions, and be more conscious of how you might be vulnerable to “groupthink”-pressures to behave or think in ways that are contrary to your values. It’s impossible not to be affected by those around us-it’s easy to “catch” their emotions, for example, and our brains tend to synch up when we associate with other people. That may mean spending time in nature, turning off your phone notifications while at work, or avoiding eating in loud cafeterias. To help you increase your agency, practice going to quiet and screen-free spaces to escape overstimulation. On the other hand, taking a walk ( especially outdoors) is a good way to restore depleted attention in your brain so you can concentrate better later. If you are lacking agency, it’s likely your attention is being hijacked and you need to figure out how to restore it.įor example, research has shown that having a phone present while you work distracts you and interferes with your capacity to think. Control stimuliĪgency begins with what you let into your mind-meaning what comes in from your environment. In our new book, The Power of Agency, we outline seven steps to creating more personal agency, so that you can put yourself on a more powerful path-whether at work, in your relationships, or in life in general. With agency, we can feel more in command of our lives. What we need is more agency: the ability to cut through all of what pulls at us, find emotional and physical balance, think more clearly, and advocate for ourselves so we can take a course of action that makes sense. We exist in a buzz of worry that we’re not doing what we’re meant to do, and the anxiety we feel, in turn, makes it difficult to get things done, creating a spiral of inaction. They often feel stuck, adrift, or thwarted.įor many of us, the pace of life has accelerated to a level where we can’t fully adapt. They struggle to make choices and decisions. We hear the same thing over and over from the people who come to see us: They feel overwhelmed by life. Though unhappy, they didn’t know what to do or how to make a change.Īs an experienced child and family psychologist (Anthony) and a management psychologist who works with business leaders (Paul), we were struck by how common these concerns are. Constant interruptions from electronic devices made them feel on call to their workplaces and disengaged from each other. After working long hours, they arrived home to a laundry list of other duties. Getting their kids out the door to school was an ordeal, involving much haranguing and eating on the run. Their daily routine included a dizzying array of activities and responsibilities that kept them constantly stressed. But it soon became apparent that they had a different problem altogether-one common to working parents. Leslie and Josh came to therapy to talk about their son’s problems in school.
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