个人代理：每个人个性的基础

个人能动性与任何性格类型的幸福、快乐和成功息息相关。从根本上讲，能动性是指一个人有意识地、有效地改变事件或环境的能力。这听起来很简单，但能动性是一个影响深远的概念，它对您生活的影响比您想象的要大。在本文中，我们将广泛探讨能动性，为后面研究它与特定性格类型的关系奠定基础。

主动性并不依赖于智慧、想象力、道德、爱、勇气、价值观、灵感或文化，但它却是将如此巨大的潜力变成现实的大门。选择时有效行动的能力是一种基本的力量，与您的自我表达、自我实现或任何您想要得到某种东西的情况有关。因此，了解您的主动性是个人成长最重要的形式之一。

行动可以被视为具有多个组成部分：机会、意识、技能、资源和意图。让我们以消防员的工作角色为例，更好地理解这些组成部分的含义：

• 机会：这表示环境是否允许一个人采取行动，即他们是否有机会做某事。消防员必须能够接近火灾才能扑灭火灾。在这种背景下，他们的行动受到物理距离的限制。
• 
  意识：这是一个人对行动机会的有意识的认识，即知道有事情要做。如果没有某种机制来感知是否需要他们的帮助，消防员几乎没有代理权。他们无法扑灭他们不知道的火灾。
• 
  技能：这代表了一个人的相关身体和心理能力，即他们可以做什么。消防员接受过如何处理各种紧急情况的培训和良好实践。如果没有这种技能，他们的效率就会很低，因此他们几乎没有代理权。
• 
  资源：它代表行动所需的材料、工具或信息，即一个人完成可以完成的事情所需的东西。如果没有适当的设备，消防员就无法解决紧急情况，因此他们几乎没有代理权。
• 
  意图：这代表了行动的决定和对效果的理解，即一个人意味着做某事以创造特定的结果。如果消防员不选择自己的行动或认识到因果关系，他们只能造成随机事故。有意识的目的是个人能动性的内在组成部分。

去掉这五件事中的任何一个，您基本上就消除了代理——对于消防员或几乎任何人来说，无论性格类型如何。但其他人就够了——那您呢？

 代理的需要

能动性对您的生活很重要，因为它是创造您想要的结果的力量，而不是依赖外部力量。任何您尚未实现的目标都可能至少缺少代理的一个组成部分。也许您没有资源，或者只是没有合适的机会。 （某些性格类型比其他性格类型更善于大胆抓住机会。）但是，代理在实现目标方面的作用只是其重要性的机械作用，它还具有深刻的情感和心理影响。

个人能动性可以增强您的自尊、自信和乐观——许多人都在努力克服这些品质。您采取有效行动的能力可以帮助您感到更快乐、更安全，并帮助您发挥潜力，获得生活所提供的一切。个人代理让您觉得您可以指导自己的生活，这让您更容易勇敢地面对挑战，以更少的压力突破自己的界限，甚至以韧性应对失败。

当您几乎没有个人能动性时，您更有可能感到无助、沮丧或害怕。如果您认为您的行动不能产生预期的结果，您可能就没有太多的理由去行动。例如，性格暴躁的人可能会经历自我怀疑。但事情很少是明确的，您的个人代理可能取决于具体情况。您通常可能有良好的代理权，但偶尔会陷入困境，或者您可能很少有代理权，只是有时感到被赋予权力。 （或介于两者之间。）您的个人代理程度会极大地影响您的生活，这使得理解它成为个人成长的关键部分。

但这会变得更加复杂，因为您的代理感和您的实际职能代理程度是不同的。一个是概念性的，另一个是可证明的。由于我们很少准确地看待自己或我们的处境，我们有时会错误地认为我们有很大的能动性（超能动性）或很少的能动性（低能动性）。对我们自己的机构产生一种歪曲的看法所需要的只是对其任何一个组成部分的误解：机会、意识、技能、资源或意图。

An inaccurate sense of personal agency is a common problem for all personality types – with potentially serious consequences. For example, someone might experience a devastating failure due to hyperagency in the form of overestimating their ability (think: Dunning-Kruger effect). Hypoagency can be just as bad, as underestimating their ability may prevent someone from attempting to reach goals. That can lead to feelings of powerlessness and a state of inaction (think: learned helplessness). Those are extreme potentials, but flawed awareness of agency can create subtle problems in everyday life.

We all have goals at any given moment – for example, finishing a certain amount of work before going home, getting special food ingredients on the way, and cooking a new recipe once we get there. But our true agency isn’t always certain or apparent: maybe there’s more work than you realized, so you left work late, and the specialty store is closed, so you can’t buy that certain spice blend. Now you’re skipping the fancy recipe and you’re kind of bummed.

Let’s look at what happened in terms of the components of agency (opportunity, awareness, skill, resources, intention). What could have been different? The root problem could be seen as inaccurate awareness, because you thought you could act on your goals of finishing work and leaving on time, but reality said otherwise. Now, there’s no blame in this scenario – maybe something was dumped on you last minute. This is just an exercise in examining how circumstances and events can increase, diminish, or obscure your agency.

Once late, there was little that you could do about the store being closed – the opportunity was no longer available. Your decision to skip the recipe – which is a lack of intention – could be seen as stemming from not having the resources (special spices) or not having the skill to experiment with substitutes. Or perhaps you did have enough skill to successfully improvise but didn’t believe in yourself, which counts as lack of awareness.

Agency can be complicated, but it’s a useful way of viewing the interactions between circumstances, goals, your personality, and the outcomes that you experience. Your knowledge and choices can increase or decrease your agency, as can external influences beyond your control. But the funny thing about agency is that you almost always have more than you think – it’s just that exercising it might come with risks that you’re unwilling to take or costs that you’re unwilling to pay. Let’s consider this relative to the above scenario about your dinner plan agency.

You might have left work on time with some tasks unfinished (risk: angering your boss) or driven to another store far away (cost: time and fuel). You could have attempted the recipe with alternative ingredients (risk: stress, failure). It’s natural to avoid a risky or costly choice, but that’s different from having no choice. Self-awareness calls you to understand your agency even when you choose not to exercise it. “I will or I won’t act” is a far more powerful mindset than “I can’t act” or “What’s happening?”

The many possible permutations of choices and results underscore how agency – and your sense of it – affects your life. You deserve options. Accurate awareness of your agency is a critical step in the planning and attainment of goals, no matter how small. But that’s not a bad thing, because agency can be extremely empowering to every personality type.

Assessing Your Agency

A healthy approach to agency requires more than just correctly understanding how much of it you have, but that’s a great start. Recognizing what you truly can and can’t do requires assessing every component of your agency in any given situation. It also requires working to set aside internal biases like arrogance and self-doubt, so that you can see yourself more clearly. (That’s a major personal-growth practice in itself for any personality type.) Objectively assessing your own agency takes practice, but it’s almost always worth doing.

For one thing, critically assessing your agency can help you reach a goal faster by identifying what’s stopping you. You can go down the list of agency’s components and ask yourself, “What’s missing in this case?” You might often think that it’s resources, because hey, if you had enough money, you could do anything, right? Sort of. You could pay someone else to create results for you, but that’s not the same as being able to achieve them yourself, and therefore, it’s not really personal agency.

One of the scariest yet most enlightening conclusions that you might come to when assessing your agency in regard to a particular goal is that the main thing missing is intention. Meaning, you haven’t chosen to act, possibly because you’ve convinced yourself that you won’t succeed (certain personality types especially struggle with this, as we have discussed in many articles). The idea that you can improve your life by exercising personal agency may also bring an uncomfortable sense of responsibility. You may subconsciously downplay or deny your own agency for the sake of relieving yourself of obligation, but that might not be worth the cost of giving up your power.

Of course, there’s a flip side to agency and responsibility. Assessing your agency may reveal that some things that you feel you should do are truly beyond your capability at that moment. It doesn’t make sense to feel responsible for things that you have no agency over – although it might inspire you to grow. For example, it’s pointless to feel guilty about being a bystander who’s unable to reasonably fight a fire, but it might make you want to become a firefighter. Seeking an accurate sense of your own agency should lead to growth and freedom, not avoidance or guilt.

Common Agency Pitfalls

Let’s consider a few scenarios where any personality type’s relationship to personal agency could be considered unhealthy. It’s useful to understand these patterns, because when you see them in yourself, you can work on them. When you see them in other people…well, that’s its own issue. We’ve already touched on some basic downsides of hyperagency (arrogance, foolhardiness) and hypoagency (frustration, helplessness), but let’s look at some other manifestations of unhealthy agency.

A common form of hyperagency is the belief that you have the power to change other people’s behavior when you don’t. This often comes from the sense that you are responsible for other people’s problems. While it’s certainly possible to encourage and support people’s own efforts to heal, grow, or change, it’s very unlikely that you can control their thoughts and feelings or the actions that result from them. It’s tempting to believe so when you want to help someone, but the false belief that you can change someone’s behavior may sustain an unhealthy relationship with them.

That usually involves being emotionally and mentally drained, or worse. If someone is continually miserable, self-destructive, or abusive, your attempts to change their behavior might become a harmful cycle. The belief that you’re having some positive effect – even if that effect is temporary or imagined – may convince you to keep trying. Ultimately, chasing a false sense of agency over other people’s mental and emotional states yields little but exhaustion and pain. (That isn’t to say that you can never exert a positive influence, but if so, then that’s not false agency.)

But hyperagency doesn’t just pose a risk to the individual experiencing it – it can also be harmfully projected outward. The belief that you can change other people’s thoughts and feelings can lead to controlling behavior. For example, people with high social status may develop hyperagency because they’re insulated from negative responses. Without anything to contradict their misperception, they may believe that they know how others should best think, feel, and act, and that they have the power to make it happen.

Real-world examples could include anything from a micromanaging boss to an overbearing parent. They may assert good intentions while ignoring the will and preferences of those they seek to help, as well as dismissing other influential forces in the situation. They may believe that their involvement creates the intended results, but that’s often minimally true, though they rarely allow themselves to realize that fact. Unfortunately, harmful, delusional, or controlling behavior isn’t merely the domain of hyperagency.

An unhealthy form of hypoagency can occur when someone uses their helplessness as emotional pressure to manipulate others. If being or claiming to be incapable becomes advantageous to someone, it can become a motivated, habitual behavior. That‘s dangerous, because manipulating others is a form of power that can functionally substitute for personal agency. When someone can make others do things for them, they have little reason to do things for themselves. That dynamic may be workable when a child is being cared for by adults, but it tends to be extremely problematic when it exists between reasonably capable adults.

When any relationship is too lopsided, it can create a sense of unfairness and resentment that breeds deeper problems between any personalities. Many relationships, be they romantic or professional, become troubled when those involved have an inaccurate understanding of their own or each other’s agency. Blame, guilt, outrage, criticism, and hurt spring up all too easily between people who disagree on who can do what, because such beliefs are usually paired with assumed obligation. Frustration over what others “should” do hinges on the belief that they reasonably can do it – but that can be a false belief.

For example, skill sets can vary widely between coworkers of equal rank. A person who is very skilled at a specific task may assume that others can and should complete the same task equally well, and indeed, a coworker who lacks adequate skill (and, therefore, lacks agency) may believe that they can do so. But if the less skilled person performs poorly compared to expectations, conflict is a likely result. When people depend on each other’s successes, even one person’s misperception of agency can be mutually disappointing – and harmful. The above are just some examples of unhealthy agency, but there are many positive possibilities as well.

Healthy Approaches to Agency

The most obvious benefit of agency comes from actively learning and practicing a broad range of internal, external, mental, emotional, and physical abilities. Acquiring the skill to accomplish a specific goal is a classic example: you might want to fix up your home, so you learn some basic carpentry and finishing techniques. Or maybe you want to sell your art, so you learn some marketing skills. It could even be something like getting CPR and first-aid certified just in case there’s an emergency situation. But while increasing and using your agency externally can be wonderful, nothing’s more important than how it can help you progress internally.

Regardless of your situation, developing a healthy sense of agency can help you lead a happier and more successful life. Learning to assess your agency is as important as how you use your agency, because it helps you recognize what you can and can’t do, including where you need to grow to become the person you want to be. Life is full of opportunities to fail and succeed, and how you engage with them can make a big difference in your progress. Let’s look at a few examples of healthy approaches to agency.

Sometimes there’s a valuable lesson to be learned from continuing to act despite ongoing failure. When you believe that you have agency, but your actions are ineffective (apparent hyperagency), contemplation alone might not always reveal the problem. Repeating the process of failing can grant you new insight – if you can handle the stress and stay objective. You could think of it as growth-minded hyperagency. It takes some grit to intentionally fail, but experience can teach you much more than thought alone. But you don’t have to do it alone.

For example, if you’re into sports but do poorly in competitions, your peers and trainers could lend their expertise to find the issue, even if you yourself can’t figure it out. Sometimes the input of a radically different personality type with different values might be useful. Being willing to confront your areas of overconfidence or misperception (hyperagency) leads to a more balanced understanding of your own agency. Then, you can work on whatever you need to until the effectiveness of your actions matches your desire and sense of agency.

You can also learn (and do) much by being willing to act despite underconfidence (apparent hypoagency). Trying to accomplish something when you don’t seem to have agency is a great way to overcome doubt and break new ground. This can be considered growth-minded hypoagency and also requires some willingness to fail. There’s a first time for every success, and it’s rarely possible to predict it, so you often just have to try and see how it goes. You may have more agency than you realize, but you won’t know unless you use it. If you fail, it doesn’t mean that you were wrong to try or that you cannot succeed – it just serves as a learning experience.

Other personality types are a valuable resource for developing healthy agency, because they can give you a different perspective and perhaps some positive reinforcement. Someone else’s belief in you might mute your own doubts just long enough for you to recognize your own agency and act. Likewise, they may offer corrective feedback that can help you refine your approach to increase your agency. Having the support of wise, caring people can help you see your own agency more affirmatively, which can be a major step in your personal growth and success.

Growth can also be shared when it comes to developing healthy agency. For example, when a leader works to understand the unique abilities of each person they manage, they’re really assessing agency. That assessment helps them match people’s traits with work assignments in ways that increase efficiency and success for the whole team. There’s no reason why peers cannot become partners in exploring and developing each other’s agency as well – especially friends.

One advantage to such mutual assessments is that they can make it easier to be objective. One person might help another see their agency (or lack thereof) more clearly, without self-critical filters or ego. Further, the concept of agency gives different personalities a framework to discuss and understand all kinds of situations with each other. It’s a rational, function-oriented format for the classic act of talking things through supportively, as friends often do. A shared, step-by-step examination of every component of agency, whether it’s regarding something past or planned, is a powerful way for people to comfort, support, and inspire each other.

Beyond Agency

The role that personal agency plays in attaining happiness and success is undeniable – but it’s not everything. As the saying goes, no one is an island, and complete self-sufficiency is a fantasy that can be taken too far. As valuable as your own capability is, there are moments when it’s important to look beyond personal agency at other needed elements of life that lie outside yourself. There’s nothing wrong with valuing independence, but if insistence on self-reliance becomes a barrier to achievement and joy, that’s a limit worth reconsidering – especially for the most independent-minded personality types.

Often, the people who most value personal agency are also the ones least likely to seek help, even when it’s needed. Personal agency can bring a great sense of pride and empowerment, and admitting the need for help might feel like it diminishes those things. But a wall is a wall. Part of having healthy agency is knowing when you’ve reached your limits and need outside assistance to make progress or overcome a challenge. But shared support isn’t the only essential thing that lies beyond agency.

当您的个人能力已经达到极限时，学习也是一个有效的选择。它是一种特别好的外部帮助，因为它可以以技能和资源的形式成为您的能力。超越自己的能力在某件事上取得进展并不妨碍您发展足够的能力，以至于您最终不需要这样做。努力了解您的能力最有用的方面之一是，它将帮助您找到个人成长的机会——不仅仅是通过个人的实践和掌握，还包括欢迎外部知识、想法和有益的影响。

结论：建立您的代理机构

个人能动性在生活中的作用非常神奇。如果理解并正确使用，它可以帮助治愈有害的消极偏见、缺乏自信和自我批评。对于大多数人来说，这个过程始于内心。您在生活中采取有效行动的能力取决于您的思想和情感，因为健康的能动性就源于此。 培养强烈的能动性需要练习，而锻炼个人能动性有助于您实现内心的幸福和自我满足。您的能动性意识和实际的能动性程度（如前所述，它们是不同的）可以相互促进。

对自己能力的一点点信心都能促使您采取行动，即使只是产生了一点点积极的结果，也证明了您的能动性。反过来，这又证明了您的能动性，从而导致更多的行动、更好的结果等等。一个健康的肯定自己能动性的循环始于一种内在的信念，正因为如此，当失败打断您的信心时，它也可以重新启动。即使您没有成功，相信尝试的价值也是肯定自己取得进步的力量的最佳方式之一。

进一步阅读

• 人格策略：持续改进类型
• 内向的人如何建立自信和社交能力的 11 种方法
• 哪些性格类型更善于克服消极思维模式？为什么？