The High Agency Mindset

Which of these best describes you:

I feel like the hero of my own story.
I feel like a supporting character in someone else’s story.

Of course, we all feel a bit of each in different circumstances and at different times. But if you squint, where you fall on this spectrum overall is a pretty good indicator of what might be the most underrated concept in all of psychology: Agency

The longer I work as a psychologist, the more I believe most emotional struggles—from anxiety and depression to procrastination and burnout—are symptomatic not of psychopathology, but low agency.

Consequently, cultivating high agency may be the most productive way for most people to improve their emotional health and resilience.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

What Is Agency?

Agency it notoriously hard to define, but here’s a pretty good working definition:

Agency is the belief in your ability to positively influence yourself and the world around you.

As a belief, agency is less inherited and fixed than a personality trait like extraversion, but more stable and domain-general than a specific mood or emotion.

I tend to think about agency as a mindset—a relatively stable but malleable way of thinking that has a strong influence over the thoughts and feelings we experience as well as how we behave.

To give this a little more color, it’s helpful to look at the extreme ends of the agency spectrum:

People with a low agency mindset tend to be passive, reactive, and fatalistic. They see life as something that happens to them over which they have little control or responsibility. They frequently feel like a victim of circumstances and tend to see themselves as a supporting character in other people’s stories.
People with a high agency mindset are active, enthusiastic, and optimistic. They view life as something they do over which they have great control and responsibility. They view themselves as the hero and author of their own story.

It’s worth mentioning that there are plenty of structural factors in our lives that increase the odds of our having a high or low agency mindset. But it’s my experience that everyone has the potential to cultivate significantly more agency in their life if that’s something they are motivated to do.

To give you a better idea of what agency looks and feels like, let’s take a look at a few short examples…

You arrive at a restaurant to celebrate a special occasion with your spouse or partner… The hostess seats you at a small table near the entrance to the kitchen. It’s noisy and crowded. Someone with a low agency mindset might complain about the seating or leave a bad review after the fact. Someone with a high agency mindset would ask their server or a manager to reseat them.
You give a presentation at work… Afterward, your CEO approaches you and gives you some difficult negative feedback about it. Someone with a low agency mindset might rationalize to themselves that the CEO is out of touch and doesn’t know what she’s talking about, vent about the experience to a coworker at lunch, or get lost in spirals of worry or self-criticism. Someone with a high agency mindset would proactively try to learn from the feedback and treat it as an opportunity to grow and improve.
For years, you’ve been thinking about writing a book… Someone with a low agency mindset might continue procrastinating because they’re “too busy” or come up with a never-ending stream of reasons why they’re not qualified to write a book. A person with a high agency mindset might decide to give up their hour of watching TV each evening and use that time to draft their book. Or hire a writing coach to help them get started and stay accountable.

If you’re still feeling a little fuzzy about what exactly agency is, don’t worry: that’s normal because it’s an inherently tricky concept.

However, once you grok the basic idea, you’ll find yourself noticing examples of agency (or a lack of agency) much more frequently—in yourself and others. As this happens, and you continue to reflect on agency, you’ll find that over time the concept crystallizes and becomes much more clear.

Okay, now that we have a good-enough sense of what agency is, let’s take a look at an under appreciated aspect of agency: How agency impacts emotional health.

The Benefits of High Agency for Emotional Health

From business and parenting to athletics and politics, having a strong belief in your ability to positively impact yourself and the world around you is a hard-to-overstate advantage.

But the current culture of mental health seems too often uninterested in (and even hostile to) the concept of agency—as if our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and even our behaviors are determined purely by the environmental or psychohistorical facts of our lives.

As to why this is, I’ll leave that to the cultural critics. Instead, I want to focus on how we can begin to cultivate more agency in our lives, and as a result, improve many aspects of emotional health—from confidence and resilience to intimacy and burnout.

But first, let’s briefly look at a few core elements of emotional health and how they’re influenced by agency.

Self-Esteem

A good working definition of self-esteem is how much you admire yourself. And it’s the result of consistently acting in a way that you’re proud of and that aligns with your values.

Of course we all struggle to align our actions with our values from time to time. But if this is a consistent struggle, a big part of the problem can also be low agency: If you don’t believe that you have much positive influence over your life you’ll have far less motivation to live a life you can admire.

Chronic Anxiety

Anxiety is unproductive fear. And while it’s normal to experience some anxiety on a regular basis, if you consistently experience high levels of anxiety, it can make your life miserable on dozens of levels.

The key to undoing chronic anxiety is realizing that while many things can predispose you to it, the only direct cause of anxiety is worry. Which means if you want to feel less anxious, you’ve got to break your habit of chronic worry. But what causes chronic worry?

One of the deep causes of chronic worry is that we use it as a defense mechanism against helplessness and perceived lack of control. Because worry feels productive, it gives us the illusion of control, which temporarily alleviates anxiety but increases it long-term.

People with a high agency mindset rarely feel completely helpless, so they are much less prone to worry and anxiety. On the other hand, those who frequently feel helpless are understandably more vulnerable to worry and anxiety.

Relationship Satisfaction

In nearly every instance of relationship breakdown I’ve seen—personal and professional—low assertiveness was one of if not the biggest contributor.

Assertiveness is the capacity to communicate with maximum honesty (authentically expressing what you really want and need) and respect (never trying to control, manipulate, or demean the other person). And for most people reading this, passive or passive-aggressive communication is likely the primary obstacle to assertiveness—that is, you have trouble expressing your own wants and needs clearly and confidently, often for fear of conflict or disapproval. But when you can’t express your true wants and needs, it eventually leads to unsustainable levels of anxiety, stress, and resentment.

A low agency mindset often leads people to feel as though they don’t have the right to express themselves honestly and authentically, and as a result, they struggle to be assertive. People with a high agency mindset, on the other hand—because they believe strongly in their own ability to influence their own lives—have an easier time communicating assertively.

Depression

While depression is a complex phenomenon, most forms of depression involve a persistent lack of motivation, energy, and enthusiasm.

The trouble is that regardless of why you don’t feel motivated, energized, or enthusiastic, the only way to restore those feelings is to consistently do things that give you energy, motivation, enthusiasm. Of course this is much harder to do when you don’t have much energy or motivation. This is depression’s version of the chicken or egg problem.

To break the cycle, you have to figure out ways to consistently do energy-giving things despite “not feeling it.” And this is where people with a high agency mindset have an advantage: When you have a strong belief in your ability to positively influence yourself, you’re less dependent on how you happen to feel or not feel in a given moment, which is a huge advantage when it comes breaking the depression cycle.

Procrastination

Probably the most underrated cause of procrastination is a lack of values clarity.

When your values are vague, overly-conceptual, or unclear, they tend not to be very motivating or useful. On the other hand, when you’re exceptionally clear on the values behind a given task or goal and why they matter to you, you tend to have a lot more motivation to follow through on the task or goal, even in the face of distractors, low energy, or difficult moods.

People with a high agency mindset tend to have more clarity about their values because instead of getting lost in indecision and overthinking, they try lots of things, experiment, figure out what they do and do not find enjoyable and meaningful, and as a result, steadily build up a clear sense of their values, which then leads to less procrastination.

Okay, now that we’ve got a good sense of what agency is and why it matters for our emotional health specifically, let’s take a look at some strategies for improving agency by cultivating a high agency mindset.

How to Build a High Agency Mindset

Keep in mind that most people have neither especially low or high agency, and instead, fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. But with sufficient practice and commitment, it’s possible to cultivate much more agency in your life and reap the benefits—emotional and otherwise.

Here are four of the best ideas and practices I’ve found for developing a high agency mindset.

1. More Creation, Less Consumption

The highest agency people I know are all builders. They spend much if not most of their time creating, building, and making.

Sometimes this building is obvious: contractors building houses, entrepreneurs building companies, artists building art. But frequently it’s more subtle: Teachers build when they design their classrooms thoughtfully; managers build when they craft clear, incisive feedback documents for their direct reports; stay-at-home moms build when they create rituals and routines to stimulate and enliven their children. In other words, being a builder is more a mindset than a set of activities. It’s orienting your life around adding rather than extracting value and striving to produce more than you consume. Because the more you build, the more you feel like a builder—like someone who is writing their own story rather than a character in someone else’s. That’s agency.

Of course, this is tough… Despite living in age where nearly all of us have incredible access to a previously unthinkable number of tools for building, it’s easier than ever to get stuck in a consumer mindset—to scroll through other people’s photos and videos on Instagram rather than record your own, to simply read about politics rather than volunteer or run for office, to buy a new shirt rather than repair an old one.

But that’s our challenge. In a world incentivized for consumption, it’s a radical act of agency to build rather than buy; to write, not just read; to sing, not just to listen; even to post rather than merely like.

None of this is to say that consumption is bad, per se. Rather, it’s about switching our default from consume-first to build-first. And our defaults only change through small consistent behaviors in a new direction.

So, one of the best ways to start building more agency is to cultivate a builder’s mindset by looking for small opportunities to create instead of consume….

Maybe that’s writing a letter to the editor about a local political issue instead of watching yet another news report about it.
Maybe it’s baking bread once a week instead of buying it.
Maybe it’s a rule that you don’t scroll Instagram until you’ve posted one photo.
Maybe it’s asking your kids an unusual question each day on the way home from school.
Maybe it’s a habit of documenting your code in an extraordinarily clear but playful way.
Maybe it’s spending one of your morning walks each week picking up trash in your neighborhood.
Maybe it’s writing in your journal for 5 minutes each morning before turning on the TV.
Maybe it’s finding one thing around the house each Saturday to fix or repair.
Maybe it’s starting a YouTube channel about your favorite sci-fi books.
Maybe it’s volunteering to coach youth football instead of watching it each weekend.
Maybe it’s turning that little southwest corner of the backyard into a little vegetable patch.

In one way or another, we’re all builders deep down. And whether you actually believe that about yourself or not, I’d encourage you to start experimenting with a little less consumption and a little more creation.

2. Practice Assertive Communication

Psychologists often distinguish between four primary styles of communication:

Passive. Passive communication means inhibiting the expression of your own wants and needs while being extremely conscientious and deferential to the wants and needs of others. The goal of passive communication is usually to avoid conflict at all costs. E.g.: saying yes even though you don’t want to. Or not speaking up for fear of what others will think.
Aggressive. Aggressive communication means communicating your wants and needs in a way that’s disrespectful of the rights of others. For example: Bullying, threatening, teasing, etc.
Passive-Aggressive. Passive-aggressive communication means communicating in a fundamentally aggressive way but disguised so as to avoid responsibility. For example: Sarcasm, gossip, backhanded compliments, excuse-making, gaslighting, etc.
Assertive. Almost always the most helpful, the assertive style communicates in a way that is maximally honest to your own wants and needs and mutually respectful of others. It is clear, direct, and kind. For example: Stating a preference despite knowing the other person wants something else; setting a boundary and saying no; giving difficult feedback honestly.

If it helps, you can visualize what these styles look like using a diagram I created called The Assertiveness Matrix which you can see about halfway down this article on assertiveness I wrote →

But what’s all this got to do with agency?

Communicating more assertively builds agency because it fosters authenticity.

Here’s how to think about it:

In the passive style, you’re afraid of other people thinking less of you, so you are dishonest about your own wants and needs. You’re conforming to someone else’s story and abandoning your own.
In the aggressive style, you’re overcompensating for deep insecurities by trying to control other people and make their stories conform to your own, which ironically distorts your own story.
In the passive-aggressive style, you’re combining the worst of the passive and aggressive styles—not expressing your authentic wants and needs and trying to control or manipulate others.

All three of these styles erode agency because they’re motivated by avoidance—running away from what you’re afraid of instead of moving toward what you authentically want.

The assertive style, on the other hand, bolsters agency because it’s motivated by approach—sharing and moving toward what you really want despite feeling afraid.

When you commit to communicating more assertively, you are demonstrating to yourself that you are enough just as you are; that you have every right to be yourself and express yourself wholeheartedly; that you respect others but don’t fear them.

And when you believe those things—really believe them because your actions consistently demonstrate that you do—you can’t help but feel like the hero in your own story.

Now, assertiveness is a big topic. And it can feel overwhelming if you’re just getting started with it. So, as usual, I recommend starting small and looking for little ways to be just a bit more assertive in your communication.

Here’s a practical exercise anyone can do to get started:

Get a piece of paper and draw a grid with 2 columns and 3 rows. Label the columns Personal and Work. Then, starting from the top, label the rows: Hard, Medium, Easy.
Make a cup of coffee or tea and spend 10-15 brainstorming as many situations or scenarios as you can think of where you would like to be more assertive.
Now, take your list and organize them into their respective cells. For example: Return incorrectly made coffee drink at Starbucks might go in the Personal-Easy cell. Schedule meeting with my direct report and give them some critical feedback about last quarter’s performance might go in the Work-Medium cell.
You’ll likely have certain cells that are very full (great!) and some that are not very full. For the not very full ones, spend more time brainstorming situations for those sparsely populated cells. You especially want to make sure you’ve got lots of examples in the Small and Medium cells.
Once you’ve got at least five situations or scenarios in each cell, this becomes your practice regimen. Once a day, commit to doing one of the Easy items. Once you’ve gone through all the Easy items, you will have built up some skill and confidence, which means it’s time to move on to the Medium items. Practice those daily until you start to feel more skilled and confident. Once you do, experiment with the Hard items.

Assertiveness is a skill. And like any skill, we only get better and more confident through practice. But when you commit to practicing assertiveness and getting better at it, you’ll find not only that your sense of agency increases, but all sorts of other benefits follow too, from improvements in your relationships to lower anxiety and less procrastination.

If you’re ready to get started practicing assertiveness, I created a free PDF guide that might be helpful: The Assertive Communication Cheat Sheet →

3. Spend More Time Around High Agency People

Jim Rohn famously quipped that You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

And while you can quibble about how precisely true this is or isn’t in specific examples, it’s pretty clearly directionally true and speaks to one of the most important but oddly under appreciated ideas in all of psychology:

Our psychological lives are profoundly influenced by our social lives.

For example:

If you want to be more compassionate with yourself, that’s going to be a lot easier to do if you’re surrounded by compassionate people. And it’s going to be a lot harder to do if you’re surrounded by jerks.
If you want to be more introspective and self-aware, that’s going to be a lot easier to do if you’re surrounded by introspective, self-aware people. And much harder if you’re surrounded by people who are psychologically naive or concrete.
If you want to be more assertive, that’s going to be a lot easier if you’re surrounded by people who model and reinforce assertiveness. And a lot harder if you’re surrounded by people who struggle to be assertive and don’t appreciate it when you are.

Similarly, if you want to cultivate more agency, it’s going to be much easier (and faster) if you can surround yourself with people who have a high agency mindset. And it’s going to be much harder (and slower) if you’re surrounded by people with a low agency mindset.

At this point, I usually get questions and pushback along the lines of:

Sure, that sounds great in theory. But I can’t just boot all the low agency mindset people in my life out and then sub in a bunch of high agency mindset people. And even if I could, I have a low agency mindset, so why would a lot of high agency mindset people even want to spend more time with me?

There’s a few separate assumptions and points in here so let me address them one-by-one:

This is about more and less, not all and nothing. You don’t have to eliminate low agency mindset people from your life or exclusively spend time with super high agency mindset people. What I’m suggesting is much more modest and incremental: What if you tried to spend 10% more time with high agency mindset people and 10% less time with low agency mindset people?
It’s a process, not a single choice. You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) overhaul your entire social network tomorrow. But maybe as you go through life, you start to use agency as more of a factor in determining friendships, jobs, socializing, etc.
But why would people with high agency mindsets want to hang out with a low agency mindset person like me? First of all, agency is far from the only factor people use to determine the quality and value of relationships. Factors like shared interests or values, humor, kindness, curiosity, warmth, creativity, and about a thousand other factors all play a role. But also, consider this: There’s nothing higher agency than someone with low agency striving to be higher agency.
Don’t equate high and low agency with good and bad. I believe high agency is largely a positive quality, but it’s not the only positive quality people have. And its absence doesn’t mean a lack of character. There are plenty of people who are, for example, profoundly kind and compassionate but have relatively low agency. And there are plenty of people with a high agency mindset who are jerks.
It will be uncomfortable and that’s good. If you don’t have especially high agency and start spending more time around people who do, you will naturally start to feel a bit anxious or inadequate about the difference. That’s a perfectly normal and healthy—if pretty uncomfortable—feeling to experience. Think about it: If you wanted to learn Portuguese and went to live in Portugal, you’d probably feel fairly inadequate about your Portuguese for a while! Meaningful growth is always uncomfortable.
But I don’t know any high agency mindset people… I bet you do, you probably just haven’t paid close enough attention. Sometimes high agency is obvious, but often it’s subtle and not especially flashy. So be patient. As you start to reflect on and internalize the idea of agency, you will start to notice it (and its absence) more and more.

The other thing I’ll say here is that surrounding yourself with high agency people doesn’t have to be an exclusively physical thing. One of the amazing things about the Internet is that you can bring many people into your life despite them not being physically present. So, if you find a particular podcaster, for example, who seems to have a lot of agency, simply listening to his or her show on a regular basis is actually a powerful way to surround yourself with people who have a high agency mindset.

To make all this actionable and less overwhelming, try this little exercise. It’ll take you less than 5 minutes:

At the top of a piece of paper, label 4 columns: Family, Friends, Colleagues, Internet People
For each column, brainstorm as many people as you can think of whom you admire generally.
Now, go through your lists and circle anyone whom you admire but also suspect has a high agency mindset. (Bonus: For each high agency mindset person you identify, write down one specific behavior of theirs that demonstrates their high level of agency).
Now ask yourself: Who’s one of these people I could spend a little more time around on a regular basis? What would that look like specifically? Maybe it’s Call up my old college buddy George once a month just to chat. Maybe it’s Get my favorite high agency podcaster’s book and spend 10 minutes reading a few pages of it each morning. Or maybe it’s Volunteer to spend some extra time at work helping out on Joanna’s team so I can learn from her.

4. Get Clarity on Your Personal Values

Agency is about positively influencing yourself and the world around you.

But that begs the question: What exactly do you want to influence? And what exactly does positive mean to you?

Does it mean you start a non-profit tutoring service for underprivileged youth in your community or a business software company?
Does it mean you run for city council or volunteer as a teacher’s aid at your child’s school?
Does it mean you exercise once a day or once a week?
Does it mean you write a book or read more books?
Does it mean you respond to emails right away or only batch respond to emails once a day?
Does it mean you run a marathon or learn to play piano?
Does it mean being a better spouse or being a better parent?
Does it mean building a shed in your backyard or paying someone else to so you can spend more time working on your non-profit?

These questions are meant to illustrate two dilemmas when it comes to cultivating more agency:

You have to decide how to exercise and invest your agency. Starting a software company and a non-profit tutoring service are both very high agency things to do. But which one you should do is not something anyone else can tell you.
There are always trade offs. By exercising your agency you are investing it into something, which means there will always be opportunity costs: That agency can’t be invested in something else. Emotionally, the acknowledgement and acceptance of tradeoffs—that you can’t have your cake and eat it too—can be profoundly unsettling and even paralyzing if you’re not careful.

Luckily, there’s a simple, cheap, and not-especially-difficult way to navigate both of these dilemmas productively so that you can cultivate more agency in your life: Clarify your values.

Values are ideals or principles that guide and motivate your choices—especially difficult choices.

For example:

If you’re trying to decide whether to start the software company or the non-profit tutoring service, being clear about your values will help. Let’s say that after some reflection and clarification, you realize that community is a strong value for you, hence your pull to start a non-profit that directly impacts your local community. But you also now realize that the community that needs you most at this point in your life is your young family which would benefit critically from your ability to work from home—something the software startup but not tutoring non-profit could afford.
Or maybe you’re trying to decide whether to take up learning the guitar or the piano. You love both instruments. But because of your recent insights about your strong value of community, you go with guitar because it’s a more “social” instrument.

Obviously, these are just examples. Starting a software company is maybe not the best way to have more quality time with your family, just like I’m sure the idea of guitar as a more social instrument than piano is pretty debatable.

The point is…

Being clear about your values not only gives clarity when choosing among competing goals, but it also provides stronger intrinsic motivation to actually follow through with your choices.

When it comes to agency, it’s a lot easier to decide how to exercise your agency when you’re clear about your values.

So whatever’s holding you back from exercising your agency—from imposter syndrome and analysis paralysis to FOMO and social anxiety—clarifying your core values is one of the best things you can do to break through.

Of course, like assertiveness, values work is a huge topic. But a good place to start is a little exercise around choosing core values.

Here’s what you do:

Download a personal values list. There are dozens of these floating around the Internet. I have one I created as part of my Values Discovery Tool Kit which you can download for free here. But it doesn’t really matter. Just find a big list of potential personal values.
Next, quickly scan through the list and circle any values that resonate or feel particularly important to you. Aim for more than 10 but fewer than 20.
Now comes the fun part: Imagine you could only have three values which guided and motivated your most important decisions in life… which three would you choose?
The discomfort of pitting values against each other and having to prioritize is one of the best ways to start thinking more intentionally and clearly about your values.

Next Steps

If you’ve made it all the way to this point, you’re likely feeling some combination of excited and overwhelmed which is totally normal. But if you are still interested in beginning to cultivate a more high agency mindset, here are a few simple steps I’d recommend right off the bat:

Get a note card, write high agency mindset on the top, then list your three biggest takeaways from this essay. Do it right now while everything’s fresh.
Have a conversation with someone you trust and enjoy about the topic of agency. Some good starter questions might be: What do you think it means to have a high agency mindset? Who’s the most high agency person you know? Are their downsides to a high agency mindset? What would be different about your life if you had twice as much agency?
Pick one of the four recommendations I mentioned earlier that especially resonates for you—1) more creation, less consumption; 2) assertive communication; 3) spend more time around high agency people; and 4) clarify your values—and ask yourself the following: What’s the 10% version of this? In other words, what’s a small way I could start experimenting with this idea? Then try it out. No pressure, just an experiment.

More Helpful Resources Related to Agency

I mentioned some of these earlier in the essay, but I’m including them all here for convenience:

Common Questions About Agency

A collection of brief answers to the most common questions I get about agency.

How is agency different than confidence, growth mindset, self-efficacy, etc?

There are a handful of concepts quite similar to agency. I’ll try to briefly differentiate them as best I can:

Confidence. Confidence is the belief in your ability to do important things despite feeling afraid. It differs from agency in that it’s more specifically about you (remember agency is also about your ability to positively influence the world around you) and your ability to perform in the face of fear specifically.
Self-Efficacy. Self-efficacy is a more narrow form of confidence in your ability to be effective in a specific domain or area. It’s your belief in your ability to perform a specific skill well.
Growth Mindset. Growth mindset is the belief that your abilities are largely improvable and primarily a function of practice and effort. It’s the opposite of the fixed mindset which views most skills and abilities as largely predetermined and unchangeable.
Locus of Control. Locus of control is the degree to which a person believes that life outcomes are primarily driven by internal vs external factors. It’s similar to agency but a bit more theoretical and less personal.
Self-Esteem. Self-esteem is your reputation with yourself or how much you admire yourself. It’s the result of consistently acting in ways that align with your values.

Where does a high agency mindset come from?

The most technically accurate answer to this question is that a high agency mindset comes from consistently acting in a high agency way.

Here’s an analogy: Being a skilled and confident violinist makes it much easier to play the violin skillfully and confidently; but the only way you become a skilled and confident violinist is by playing the violin when you’re not as skilled or confident as you want to be.

It’s often hard for people to wrap their head around this but the relationship between agency the belief and high agency behavior is a two-way street: Yes, having high agency (the belief) makes it easier to act in a high agency way; but the only way to develop high agency is to act with agency.

There’s no gene for high agency. And while some inherited factors like basic temperament and personality surely play some role in your likelihood of developing a high agency mindset or not, the better way to think about the origins of agency is to ask the following question:

What conditions incentivize a person (including myself) to develop a high agency mindset?

How can I help my kids develop a high agency mindset?

Trying to give any form of parenting advice—especially about a topic as complex as agency—is always fraught. But I’ll give it a go anyway because it’s something I think a lot about and am quite personally interested in.

I’d say the following suggestions are a combination of my own experiences (both as a child and a parent), what I’ve observed in high and low agency peers, and a more general background in psychology.

Independence. Give your kids plenty of time and space on their own to explore, make mistakes, and cultivate their curiosity and independence. It’s hard to feel like the hero of your own story when you’ve got a parent hovering over you 24/7.

Modeling.As much as possible, try yourself to cultivate and model the behaviors I list in the How to Cultivate More Agency section plus any others you discover. As usual, kids seem to learn much more based on what they observe us doing (or not doing) rather than what we tell them to do (or not do).

Projects. Do projects with your kids. This could be as simple as baking cookies or as complex as building a barn or coding an app together. The goal is to acculturate them into a mindset of production > consumption, to give them a felt sense of the magic of making stuff and co-creating the world around you.

Socratic Dialogue. At the risk of sounding somewhat pretentious and old-fashioned, learn a little bit about Socratic dialogue and use it in conversations with your kids. You want your kids to be drawn to and excited about questions, not answers. And socratic based discussions area great way to help them get there.

Enthusiasm. Be excited about things. Spend time doing things that are genuinely stimulating and interesting to you around your kids, even if it means spending a little less time doing things directly with or for your kids. And if you feel like you don’t have anything you’re extremely excited or passionate about, I’d say you owe it to yourself and your kids to spend some time cultivating your own curiosity and interests.

You’re still here?

What questions do you have about agency and building a high agency mindset?

Shoot me an email and I’ll do my best to answer: hello@nickwignall.com