I came across this word on X, which I’ve recently started using a lot: agency.

Not the business kind, not a marketing agency or a travel agency. This is a different meaning entirely. Someone posted about “having agency over your career,” and I realized I didn’t fully understand what that meant. So I went down a rabbit hole.

Turns out, when psychologists and philosophers talk about “agency,” they’re referring to something deeper than just “doing stuff.” Agency is about being the author of your own actions. It’s a concept developed primarily by psychologist Albert Bandura in his social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2006).

It’s a word I didn’t have before, but once I learned it, I realized it describes something I’ve been thinking about for years.

What Is Agency?

Agency is the capacity to act intentionally in the world (Bandura, 1989). The difference between things happening to you and you making things happen.

Bandura describes humans with agency as being:

• Self-organizing: you structure your own life
• Proactive: you initiate actions, not just react
• Self-regulating: you control your behavior and emotions
• Self-reflecting: you think about your own thoughts and actions

This flips the script on seeing humans as passive beings shaped by environment or pushed around by unconscious impulses. As Bandura puts it, people are “producers of their life circumstances, not just products of them.”

The Four Properties of Human Agency

According to Bandura (2006), there are four core properties that make up human agency:

1. Intentionality

You make conscious decisions to act. You’re not just going through the motions. You have goals and purposes behind your actions.

2. Forethought

You can think ahead. You plan, set goals, and anticipate the likely outcomes of your actions. This temporal dimension is huge: it means you can work toward a future you imagine.

3. Self-reactiveness

You don’t just make plans. You actually construct appropriate courses of action and regulate their execution. You monitor yourself and adjust.

4. Self-reflectiveness

You can step back and reflect on your own capabilities, the quality of your thinking, and the meaning of what you’re doing. This meta-awareness is uniquely human.

The Feeling vs. The Reality

The sense of agency is the subjective feeling that you’re in control of your actions and their consequences (Moore, 2016). That feeling of being a conscious, rational, free agent.

But there’s also actual agency: your real capacity to influence outcomes.

Ideally, these align. But sometimes people feel they have more or less control than they actually do.

Why Agency Matters

I think agency might be one of the most important concepts for understanding human well-being and personal development.

Psychological Health

People with a strong sense of personal agency tend to have (Bandura, 2006; Moore, 2016):

• Higher levels of well-being
• Greater life satisfaction
• More psychological resilience
• Better ability to persist through challenges
• Stronger internal locus of control (believing outcomes depend on your actions)

When you feel like you have no control over your life, that’s when helplessness and depression set in. The opposite of agency is learned helplessness, the belief that nothing you do matters (Seligman, 1972).

Personal Growth

Agency is what allows you to set goals and actually pursue them. Without it, you’re just drifting. With it, you can deliberately shape your skills, your relationships, your career, your health. Basically everything that matters.

Psychology Today describes agency as “the highest level of personal competence” (Relationship Doctor, 2022). It’s not just about feeling capable. It’s about having the strategies and actually taking the actions that accomplish what you want.

It’s Learnable

Agency is not fixed. You can develop it.

A growth mindset helps here. Every time you set a goal, take action, and see results, you reinforce your sense of agency.

Examples

Having Agency

• Career decisions: Choosing to leave a job that isn’t fulfilling, negotiating your salary, deciding to learn new skills. You’re not just accepting whatever comes. You’re actively shaping your professional path.

• Health choices: Deciding to exercise, choosing what to eat, seeking medical advice and making informed decisions about treatment. Your health outcomes are partly within your control.

• Learning: Deciding what to study, how to spend your time, pursuing curiosity. I think this one is huge. The decision to learn something is pure agency.

• Setting boundaries: Saying no to things that don’t serve you, choosing who you spend time with. This is agency in relationships.

Lacking Agency

• Micromanagement at work: When someone tells you exactly how to do every single task, you have no autonomy over methods or approaches. You’re executing someone else’s will, not your own.

• Systemic barriers: People facing discrimination or poverty often have their choices severely constrained. You can’t exercise agency if the options aren’t available to you.

• Abusive relationships: Control tactics by abusers are specifically designed to strip away the victim’s sense of agency. They take control over finances, social connections, even daily routines.

• Learned helplessness: After repeated failures or trauma, some people stop believing their actions matter. This is the psychological destruction of agency.

Connections

Agency connects to many ideas in psychology:

• Self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci): autonomy is one of three basic psychological needs
• Locus of control (Rotter): internal vs. external attribution of outcomes
• Self-efficacy (Bandura): belief in your ability to succeed
• Learned helplessness (Seligman): what happens when agency is destroyed

Understanding agency changes how you approach growth. The four components (intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness) are all trainable skills.

My Takeaway

Agency is not just a nice-to-have. It’s fundamental to human flourishing.

Without it, we are leaves blown by the wind. With it, we are authors of our own stories.

So: cultivate your agency deliberately. Set goals. Make plans. Take action. Reflect on what works. Adjust. Repeat.

And recognize that agency is not purely individual. Systemic factors, relationships, and social structures all affect our capacity to act. Working to expand agency (our own and others’) is one of the most valuable things we can do.

References

• Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist, 44(9), 1175-1184.

• Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(2), 164-180. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00011.x

• Moore, J. W. (2016). What is the sense of agency and why does it matter? Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1272. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01272

• Relationship Doctor. (2022). Agency is the highest level of personal competence. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/getting-proactive/202203/agency-is-the-highest-level-personal-competence

• Seligman, M. E. P. (1972). Learned helplessness. Annual Review of Medicine, 23(1), 407-412.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2015). Agency. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/