Agency Over Outcomes

It’s likely you know someone who regularly (or almost always) sees themself as the victim of most of their life circumstances. As they see it, life and everyone else is out to get them and there’s nothing they can do about it.

You likely also know someone who takes life in stride no matter how difficult it gets. That doesn’t mean they put on an air of everything being okay, but they seem to excel in dealing with whatever life throws at them almost without missing a step.

Then there’s the rest of us: those who live on a continuously swinging pendulum of victimhood and defeatism to resiliency and experiential growth. Unfortunately, seeing ourselves as victims of circumstance is likely the default position.

Why?

The short answer: accountability is hard. Self-accountability is harder.

The prevailing societal trend over the last few decades has been to place blame on circumstances and others rather than owning when things don’t go quite right (or go very wrong) in our lives. If you view yourself largely as the victim, this won’t change until you’re actually willing to do the work of challenging your own thoughts and changing your response.

But challenging your own thoughts is also hard. It requires a combination of stopping the initial “gut reaction” and leaving space to think and process. In the era of instant access and gratification, both of these are increasingly difficult.

The late Groucho Marx is credited with saying:

Two percent of people think. Three percent of people think they think. And, ninety-five percent of people would rather die than think.

Some years earlier, in 1922, Woods Hutchinson penned it this way, giving a little more credit to the general population than Mr. Marx:

Some cynic declares that 5 per cent of people think, 10 per cent think they think, while 85 per cent would rather lie down and die than think.

I want to tread lightly here because I do not, in any way, want to minimize the very real traumas that people experience that can take hold in their mind for years or decades, replaying like the awful nightmare they are.

However, one thing the victim is often very good at is thinking deeply about the circumstance(s) in which he or she feels victimized; endlessly repeating the wrong and justification for playing the victim role.

However minor or severe, acute or chronic the trauma, there always comes a point when you get to decide how that trauma will impact you. On this topic, perhaps no one has been quoted more (and rightly so) than Viktor Frankl.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

And from John P. Weiss, one of my favorite authors:

Most of the time, we’re probably just spectators. Going through the motions of life, watching what happens as if we have no agency over the outcomes.

Agency over outcomes.

Often, there are far too many factors in any given circumstance for you to have any real control over the outcome or consequences. But, you get to choose how you respond. You can take an active role in learning from the experience (good or bad) or give yourself over to simply reacting to stimulus.

That’s what I understand from John Weiss’s statement.

It’s incumbent, then, to answer the question: are you a spectator only or the main, unscripted character acting out your own life?

It’s a process. For me, I feel as though mastery of my own thoughts will be a lifelong pursuit. In order to be more proactive in writing my own story, I have to challenge my own status quo.

It’s not easy, but it is absolutely worth the effort. Even the most dire circumstance will be improved by contemplating what lessons you can learn from it. Of course, what you learn is entirely up to you and not the place of any other person to tell you what you should learn from it.

You may not have freedom over the outcome, but you always have freedom over your response.

So choose.

Thanks for reading!