One of my five pillars of living an Ajles life is authenticity. In being authentic, we also must strive to understand and implement agency.
Recently I met with my good friend and Ph.D. psychologist, Dr. Juliana Hauser to discuss what, exactly, agency means and how to better implement it in our lives. Dr. Hauser is an expert in family therapy, relationships and sexuality and her work is fascinating!
Due to COVID, this was the first time we’d met in person and I was thrilled to chat with her face-to-face. Dr. Hauser was attending one of my exclusive Doyenne dinners, where a group of smart savvy women get together for amazing food and even better conversation. Before the dinner she and I had a little one-on-one time; we discussed the importance of a sense of agency when living an ageless life.
One of my pillars of Ajles is being authentic, and indefinable and that’s one of the cornerstones of Dr. Hauser’s work. In her work, she talks a lot about agency and choice. She lays down the foundation of what agency is, and how we come to the choices in our lives when we don’t think we actually have a choice.
What is agency and how does it keep me ageless?
The National Library of Medicine explains sense of agency “refers to the feeling of control over actions and their consequences.”
According to Dr. Hauser, agency is a noun, a verb, a concept, and a skill. She defines the five steps to agency as:
- Knowing there is a decision to be made.
- Feeling good that you make good decisions.
How you make meaning of how things go in your decision makes a big difference on how good you feel about the decisions that you make.
- Making the decision.
Be purposeful and intentional. There’ll be many times when you realize you didn’t even make the decision or perhaps you deferred to other people to make those decisions. We need to actively make the decision.
- Learning to deal with intended and unintended consequences of decisions.
Have a tolerance for ambiguity. Be okay with the grey area and learn you’re going to be okay because we can’t control everything. Sometimes the best things are the unexpected.
- Making meaning of it.
These steps to finding agency are things that we don’t typically learn. Women in particular are living through hundreds of years of societal standards that sometimes teach us that we don’t have agency. It takes a lot of strength and courage to go through these steps.
We all know and love Betty White. Betty White was a perfect example of supreme agency, especially in her generation. She died at 99 years old, and she divorced a man in her forties because he would not allow her to be authentic and make the choices she wanted.
There are different paths to achieving agency.
Dr. Hauser explains that some people find their way to agency in different ways.
- Directly: This can be due to trauma and this is their survival – though they don’t always know what they’re doing as agency. Some individuals who are transgender, and are in the process of discovering this, are also experiencing an active agency.
- Indirectly: Others learn agency by hearing about it, or seeing it by meeting somebody comfortable in their own skin.
Regardless of the path we take to find agency, it’s important that we are constantly activating our agency. No one has perfect agency – it’s a skill that we can always keep working on.
I believe that living authentically and finding agency is easier at a certain age.
I’m about to turn 55, so I didn’t always have agency. I believe that people who trust in themselves have an easier time gaining agency and being authentic. Dr. Hauser, who is also 50 explains that at a certain point we just get so tired of living life on other people’s terms. Something I hear a lot from those living an authentic and ageless life is “I’m just done, I’m gonna make my own choices.” – that freeing feeling is agency.
The fourth step to finding agency may be the most challenging. Personally, I can take a no, I can take a yes, but the grey is so hard for me as I’m sure it is for a lot of women for whom lists and plans make them feel safe. When we are living an ageless life, agency is a skill we should incorporate daily for authenticity. According to Dr. Hauser, it’s never too late to learn agency, and it’s not a one-stop shop.
One important aspect of living with agency and authenticity is by finding a like-minded community.
Our Ajles community is the perfect place to have those vital conversations and connections. Our online community, combined with our in-person Doyenne dinners makes Ajles the quintessential community to join.
The high that we get from just being in the presence of other smart, savvy women can carry us for a long time.
If you’d like to listen to the entire interview, along with several others from Ajles.life Ambassadors and have free access to our Best of Life Four-Day Summit Series Recordings, please consider joining our exclusive Ajles community here. It’s a powerful step to living active, authentic, ageless, healthy, indefinable, joyful, and vital!