Chapter 11
In agency, there is power
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 11.
If I were to ask you to what extent do you take responsibility for yourself, what would you say?
When I was younger, and I mean a lot younger, I used to think that responsibility was a cage. As though it was a shackle on my personal freedom, and brought with it a world of “shoulds” and expectations. I could not have been more wrong.
If anything, responsibility is the price of freedom.
There are plenty of people out there who will quickly turn to blaming their external circumstances for the situations that they find themselves in or the state of their lives. Granted, we don’t have any control over these circumstances, and, granted, sometimes the Universe can hurl a handful of gorilla shit at us that we weren’t prepared for.
However, our perspective, our story, shapes how we handle it.
We have two modes of approaching these circumstances. We can allow ourselves to become a victim of them (yes, I said “allow” and I meant it), or we can own how we respond to them.
When we adopt a victim mindset, we’re redacting our own power. Not power to control the circumstance - ultimately, there’s very little control that we can enact upon the world. What I mean here is that we’re not recognising the power that we do have, and that’s the ability to control ourselves.
When we take responsibility for ourselves, we’re creating agency in our lives. We might not be able to control what happens to us, but by owning our response and our choices, then we can influence what the outcome will be.
Let’s say that, heaven forbid, you were to unexpectedly lose your job. If you were to respond to that as a victim, then you’d be saying things to yourself like:
This is so unfair, why did this happen to me? What have I done to deserve it? I don’t know what I’m going to do. Fuck [insert name of ex-employer here].
By responding to this scenario with agency, however, we are empowered to take a different approach. We’ve lost our job, and that’s something that we cannot change or alter. What we can do is act with a level of pragmatism, focusing on what our end goal should be rather than succumbing to the whims of the Universe.
When we have agency, we could get ourselves up in the morning as though we were still going to that old job, and make our “work” for the day searching for another (if that’s what we needed to do). Again, we can’t control what we’ll eventually get hired for, and we can’t dictate how long this process will take. We can, however, update the CV, get in contact with recruiters or talent officers at places that we’d like to work, and put ourselves out in front of people.
That’s us controlling what we can control - ourselves and our responses to the circumstances that we’re thrown into.
Why is it, then, that some people have a very clear agency, and some don’t? What is it about these people that gives them that drive and motivation to take the helm and steer their own lives?
It’s my belief that there are a few factors that contribute to our sense of agency. The first is the acknowledgement of our own impermanence. We all have a finite amount of time in existence, and all of us know this. What we don’t all do is acknowledge it in our day to day. Some of us never really think about it, especially when we’re younger.
When we’re young, it’s easy to bound through life feeling like we’re immortal. There are years ahead of us, we’ve got plenty of time to do what we want to do, and every opportunity to “make it”. Time, however, has a different idea. Caught in its stream, we’re carried forwards, and before we realise it, we’re in our forties, and all of those grand ideas and ambitions that we’d imagined in our early twenties become ghosts that haunt us.
We’re left wondering “what happened?”
The ego doesn’t like to think that it’s going to come to an end. It wants to persist, to continue experiencing ad infinitum. Our tragic reality is that it can’t, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to avoid the inevitable death of our ego.
To borrow again from Stoicism, I’m going to talk about the idea of memento mori. It’s a Latin phrase meaning “Remember that you will die”.
Sounds a bit morbid, but its sentiment comes from a place of positivity and motivation. Reflecting on our own impermanence and mortality is only depressing if we approach it from the point of view of our ego. When we approach it from an angle of focusing our priorities and creating meaning, then it can become a tool of personal empowerment.
How often do we spend doing things that have no real meaning for us, for example? Activities that aren’t in line with our priorities and the purpose that we hold for ourselves? By being mindful of our impermanence, it helps us to direct our energy towards the things that matter and gives our time a tangible value.
If we’re viewing our time with value, then we’re more likely to push ourselves towards actioning the tasks that will satisfy our values and bring us to a place of personal fulfilment. If we don’t see the value of each day, then it becomes easy to put things off until tomorrow.
It’s all about how we frame our lives. Seneca, one of the great Stoics philosophers, said in his book “Moral Letters”
Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day...The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.
I really like the last part of that - each day is never short of time. So much of our lives can be a balancing act between satisfying our “shoulds” and meeting our “wants”. When we hold court to our own impermanence, it can help us to question those "shoulds" and consider whether or not they are actually working in line with our own sense of values and our own sense of meaning.
By focusing our energies on activities that are purposeful, it actually gives us time, because we aren’t spending it on stuff that doesn’t necessarily matter in the long run.
Understanding our values and purpose is of fundamental importance to exercising agency in our lives. If we look at people that we deem to be successful, we’ll notice a similar trait amongst all of them, and that’s focus and determination. They seem to know exactly where to direct their energy and how to spend their time to maximum effect.
That comes directly from knowing our values. Without a set of values, what’s driving us? How can we know what activities are going to align with our sense of personal meaning if we don’t know what our meaning is?
This is where self-awareness creeps in once again, and this is why I always say that it is the foundation for growth and personal development. You’ve got to understand what your definition of fulfilment is, and how your actions align to your sense of character. Without that understanding, those actions that we take won’t necessarily move us in a direction that we want to.
Not being aware of our values can also create a vacuum of purpose. A space that can be filled by the expectations and wants of others - not in a malicious sense, but because we have nothing that we can use to hold up against or challenge external demands on our time, we’ve got no way of
recognising whether an action that we’re taking is working for our fulfilment, or for somebody else’s.
If you’re reading this and you’re thinking “I don’t really know what my values are”, then I’m inviting you now to change that. There’s a straightforward, but not necessarily easy, set of exercises that I’m going to work through with you now.
The first thing we’re going to do is turn that powerful lens of consciousness in towards ourselves. In the same way that we’d audit a set of accounts to see what’s going well, and what’s not, we’re going to be looking at what’s going on inside ourselves. We’re going to explore what’s working well for you, and what’s not.
On a piece of paper (yes, paper), draw a line down the middle so you’ve got two columns. The left column is going to be the “good” aspects of your character, and the right the “bad”. I’m using those ironic air quotes around good and bad here, because we need to recognise that these aren’t concrete labels for our feelings. Ultimately, there are no good and bad feelings, there are just those that are acting in our
interests and those that are detrimental to our agency.
Feelings are just feelings, in the same way that when we look up at the sky, the clouds are just clouds. They’re fleeting, impermanent, and subject to change at any moment.
Find yourself a quiet space where you aren’t going to be distracted, and start by thinking about the beneficial aspects of your character. The parts that are helping you to move forwards in life. We’re using our Observing eye here, which is going to be the tricky part. Let go of those perceptions and judgements that you hold over yourself, and see if you can step back to view yourself objectively.
There’s no pressure. I don’t want you to be setting goals for achieving a certain amount, and then chastising yourself for not reaching it. You may even find that you can’t think of any to start with, but I promise you that they are there. They don’t have to be grandiose or aspirational. It is the small things that make us who we are.
I’m going to give you a couple of ideas to support you, in case you’re struggling. Think about what you hold to be “good”. It could be that you’re kind to your friends and family. It could be that you do what you say you’re going to do, or that you’re creative, or that you place value on your time.
Try to avoid those work-centrist or academic ideas, such as “I always meet my quarterly objectives”, “I regularly hit my sales targets”, or “I get excellent grades in my assignments”. They’re what your employer or academic institution deems to be good, they don’t come from you. This exercise is about your values.
Now, we’re going to do the same for those “bad” aspects of your character. Avoid self-flagellation and put any sense of judgement to one side. Again, focus on you with the Observing eye, and not any external idea of what constitutes bad. We’re not interested in your boss saying that you were late for work or your Tutor pulling you up because you didn’t get that assignment in on time.
Remember that when we’re saying bad aspects, it’s a relative term. We want to explore the aspects of you that you feel work against you. Do you start projects and then leave them unfinished, only to give yourself a hard time for it later on? Are you locked in a perpetual state of procrastination? Do you feel like you’re floating through life with no real sense of direction or purpose?
You may be thinking at this point "What did that exercise tell me about my values? All I’ve done is write down what I think is good and bad about myself."
In order for us to have agency that works towards our own fulfilment, we need to have a set of values that our agency can align with. First, though, we have to gain a better understanding of ourselves. We have to ensure that the definition of our character comes from us, and not from some external locus of control or third-party influences.
Those aspects that we determine to be “good”, they’re shining a light on what it is that we need to be working towards. The elements that we think are “bad” are holding us back and stifling our growth.
Our values can evolve from this understanding. By focusing on nurturing the good and improving on or resolving the bad, we can create a set of values that will act as a guide to challenge our path in life and ensure that we are going in a direction of our choosing.
I call this guide a personal manifesto. It’s a handbook outlining our intentions, our values, and our motivations. It is both a statement of our principles and our own call to action and, when writing it, we must be as honest with ourselves as we possibly can.
This is no time for bullshit or plastering over the cracks. We’ve got to get down in the dirt and be intimate with who we are.
As with the previous exercise, this is not something to be rushed. Take time to process what you’re thinking and what you’re discovering. Make notes on those illuminations and play with those ideas. Be creative, and don’t tell me that you’re not creative, because I just said there’s no time for bullshit.
Part of creating our manifesto is questioning and challenging ourselves. Hopefully, you’ll have got a bit of practice at that in our previous exercise where we audited our character. Now we’re going to take it a step further and use that audit as the basis for a definition of who we are and who we want to become.
Start by asking yourself the following:
What defines me?
What motivates me?
What fulfils me?
What is my purpose?
These are the big, esoteric questions, and it can certainly be a daunting prospect to try and address them. Yet we can break these down into more bite-sized chunks by going back to our audit we created earlier.
Those “good” aspects of your character, would you say that they define you? If you said things like “I do my best to help others” or “I make sure I take time for my friends and family”, can we take these and use them as the foundation for defining who we are?
You could find yourself coming up with something like:
"I am compassionate, thoughtful, and creative. I do my best to ensure that I am spending quality time with the people that matter in my life, whilst maintaining proper boundaries for myself to satisfy my own needs for self-care. I recognise that taking time for myself is not selfish - it gives me the contentment and energy I need so that I can provide time and support to those I care about."
Notice the little reminder I put in there about taking time for myself not being selfish. In this case, I’ve added it to reinforce the idea that it is completely ok to do this, and to help unlearn the idea that we should be prioritising the needs of others above our own.
Now let’s look at those negative aspects. We’re going to want to be challenging these as it is very likely that they come from one of two places - attachment, or aversion.
If we find ourselves frustrated with another person, it’s because we’re attaching ourselves to the person that we want them to be, instead of seeing them as an independent, free-thinking human being.
I found, when setting myself a deadline to complete this book, I had to complete a set number of words a day. I became attached to that goal, and if I didn’t reach it, then I became frustrated with myself for not achieving it. Even when there was other “stuff” going on during the day that I needed to address, I was still annoyed. What’s important is recognising it. What’s important is the self-awareness to be able to say “ok, I’m feeling this, and I can see that this is why. How do I remedy that?”.
Attachment is us projecting our wants and expectations onto other people and external events, and being dissatisfied when what transpires does not meet those expectations. It should come as no surprise, at this stage of the book, to realise this. How quick we can be to expect from the world, instead of expecting from ourselves.
Aversion is the counterpoint to that - it’s our overestimation of the extent to which something is going to cause us suffering. We might avoid going to the dentists when we need to, for example, because we’re afraid of the pain of the treatment. Or we might put off getting a vaccine
because we’re frightened of someone sticking a needle into our arm. Or we could skip taking that exam or test because we’re terrified that we’ll fail and it will prove that we aren’t good enough. Better to live in the vague limbo between knowing.
In reality, the suffering caused by these events is never as bad as we imagine it might be. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus refers to this when he says “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality”. When our tendency to forecast and prophesise gets the better of us.
We’ve already acknowledged that the only thing we have any control over is ourselves and our responses to people and events, so how can we possibly foretell the future? What do all of these simulations do other than generate a tornado of anxiety and expectation within us?
So, look at those bad traits, and think about whether they’re caused by attachment or aversion. In each case, what’s the driving force behind the trait? I guarantee you there’ll be something below deck that’s fuelling the furnace.
Take time to reflect upon what this could be. Write down your ideas, talk with your friends and family and people that you trust. Use them as a mirror for your own self-discovery.
Here’s an example of how we might incorporate those bad aspects of our character into the definition of who are:
I have a tendency to procrastinate on activities that might bring me success. I can see that I do this from a place of fear, because I am afraid of what success might bring and of being seen by others. I also spend too much time on my work, and not enough time on my own needs. This comes from my not valuing and prioritising myself, because I am seeking the approval and praise of my boss. I feel that I will only gain this
approval by doing well in my job.
This is actually one of my comments from my first manifesto (first? you mean you do this more than once?). That’s what we’re looking for, and that’s why this exercise requires time and patience.
We can see how that need for approval and praise, in this example, not only acts as a definition for our current character, but also serves as a motivation for us. Not a positive motivation, but it’s important that we recognise it if we want to work towards changing it.
This gets incorporated into our manifesto as well. We could reframe the above by adding something like:
Going forwards, I will ensure that I am prioritising my own wellbeing needs, and not placing the expectations of my work above them. I will dedicate one hour each morning to meditating and exercising before starting my day.
I will also work on valuing myself and my time, instead of seeking the approval of others. The evenings and weekends are mine, and I will not spend them working or answering emails or calls from my employer. I recognise that these expectations from work are not reasonable, and it is not my responsibility to meet them.
It is my responsibility to look after my own wellbeing.
That way, it serves as a reminder to us of what action we are going to take in order to remedy our “bad” traits and free us from the traps that they create. Notice again the little reminders in the example above - these expectations are not reasonable…it is not my responsibility to meet them.
We put those in to help us unlearn these unhelpful behaviours. It’s easy, when our attention is no longer focused on exploring our values, and we’re back in business-as-usual mode, for our minds to go back to their default setting. These snippets help to anchor us to our intentions.
Essentially, when creating our manifesto, we’re trying to imagine our future self and our future life. Not from a point of prescience, but through recognising that the only changes we can affect are changes within ourselves.
Who do you want to become, and how are you going to become them? That is the question our manifesto must answer.
The book is available to buy from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book, if you want to add it to your book shelf.