Reclaim Your Agency: The Inner Leadership Reset + Journaling Guide

Dear reader,

I have found that most, if not all, the issues I’ve encountered in coaching over the years have to do with what I call reclaiming agency. By that I mean the degree of agency we believe we have over the circumstances playing out in our lives and work.

What can get us stuck is the belief that we can’t change things, that we are on some level reliant on others’ behavior change, or something about our context is the problem, or that the system is intractable.

Or, that we undermine our personal power or others’ respect of us if we admit any responsibility. In essence, this belief means we are a victim of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. 

Moreover, so long as you believe another person is at fault, the perpetrator, and the cause of your issue, you are stuck in a victim mode. And similarly, so long as you believe you are a victim of your circumstances, you are giving away your inner integrity and coherence to outside forces. You are not the “captain of your soul.”

Victor Frankl in his seminal work “Man’s Search For Meaning” described how two people will react in profoundly different ways to the exact same circumstances. This observation under the utmost of difficult circumstances of oppression showed him the supreme importance of an inner perspective that could determine one’s ultimate fate of life or death. 

The fate of life or death being dependent upon one’s inner state of being! This is quite an extreme take, but nevertheless instructive.

Your inner orientation and perspective is responsible for a great deal playing out in your life.

Let me give you a story as told by Caroline Myss (from her book Anatomy of the Spirit) to illustrate:

A woman broke her leg and it wouldn’t heal. So she went to a healer to figure out what to do. The healer told the woman that her leg wouldn’t heal until she stopped her affair with a married man. Her broken leg was a picture for how she was giving away her power and agency to someone who could not love her or be committed to her in the way she wanted. Once she recognized how she was giving away her agency to this circumstance which left her chronically unmet, she broke off the relationship and her leg could finally heal.

This is a challenging concept: we have more to do with the dynamic playing out in our lives than we are comfortable admitting. Moreover, to own up to this appears to mean we would lose our agency and control in the situation.

BUT — as counter-intuitive as this is — in fact we “take back our agency” when we do.

What does this mean?

You will find, surprisingly, that when you take responsibility for what happens to you — whenever things feel hard — you have more power to shift the dynamic out of stuck and cycling and move it forward toward something more productive. 

Admitting culpability, making ourselves vulnerable to censure, taking responsibility for outcomes, these are practices that are so painful to do because of deep-set protective mechanisms that put up a fight within, preventing us from exposing ourselves in such ways to potential derision, loss in respect, or giving others power over us when we’re vulnerable. 

This is no small thing! It takes real courage, and may feel like a substantial risk to our safety, standing, or reputation. But, so long as you wait for others to change, or conditions to change, because you’re not willing to take responsibility for the situation, you’ll find yourself unable to move forward.

I created a framework with which to better understand how you can take back your agency in such situations, without giving away your power. In fact, just the opposite. 

If you can learn how to take back your agency in the ways I’m going to show you, you’ll find you have more influence over your circumstances than in pretty much any other way. You’ll earn the love and respect of your communities because you’ll be showing up in greater integrity, honesty, and maturity.

However, its one thing to know all this and quite another to get into action around it. 

So therefore I also want to give you a journaling exercise as this can guide your reflective process. I think journaling is a very helpful tool in self-knowledge, but people often complain to me that journaling without guidance is not fruitful. So I include journaling guides wherever possible.

The framework I created for you is called the Inner Leadership Reset:

1: The world is our mirror

You might believe your inner life is hermetically sealed from the world, that you can hide from the world your inner condition. But the opposite is true. Unbeknownst to you, your inner condition is radiating out into the world at all times. The thousand little decisions you make every day are very determinative. Moreover, there are invisible currents and forces you don’t realize you are participating in, either to your benefit or detriment, according to your proclivities and “soul wounds” (the unresolved ways you’ve internalized your life experiences).

In other words, the world is a mirror of your inner condition, in relationships and interactions with others as well as in how you interact with the outer circumstances you find yourself in. 

The sooner you get this the sooner you can actually change things. 

We shouldn’t, as a general rule, look to others for answers in their behavior or attitudes about why things are difficult, nor to the circumstances which seem to be making things so challenging. Looking for who or what is to blame is what we all do when we feel outraged or hurt, but far better is to look within.

Let’s take, by way of an example, a difficult interpersonal dynamic, perhaps with a co-worker or team member. Here is a rule of thumb that can help: don’t analyze their behavior or motives in the dynamic. Just focus on how it is impacting you, and why. 

Imagine them as the world mirroring back to you a reflection of yourself, showing you something about an inner dynamic, an inner wound in you that is being expressed in this outer dynamic. By focusing in this way, you take back your projections and assumptions about the other. You try to leave them out of the picture.

In my coaching practice, this is how I work. I don’t allow my client to guess about or analyze the person they are struggling with, but keep our focus entirely on my client and their beliefs, assumptions, and conclusions about the dynamic playing out. This is an extremely fruitful approach and yields much more insight and ultimately empowerment. We intervene at the source point of the dynamic, enabling it to fall away on its own instead of trying to fix it. 

That source point is always within you. And there lies the secret to getting back your agency.

You can’t expect to change another person, nor change their mind. But you can completely shift your participation in the dynamic. And that has the power to fundamentally transform the nature of the relationship like magic.

Because the dynamic is just a symptom, not the cause.

That is not to say you are letting the other off the hook and allowing them to walk all over you. I also am not saying that they are not to blame and you are, or vice versa.

There is no blame.

You are trying to understand how you, just you, got into this situation. That is where you can take your agency back and get unhooked from something that isn’t serving you, and likely isn’t serving them either. 

This is spiritual leadership, where you discover the source of your participation as an unresolved wound in you being mirrored by the world. This mirroring is trying to show you an important lesson about your biography. 

Once you have the key, you then have power over the dynamic and can, inwardly, unhook from it. You can cut the Gordian Knot.

Do you see the power in this approach?

Now that we’ve covered the first concept of world as mirror, let’s get you exploring it in your particular context.

Take out your journal and answer the following questions.

1. Consider all the events playing out in your life that you find challenging. Write them down in a list. You can either pick out just one to work with, or work with all.
2. Notice if this is a pattern. Has it happened before, perhaps in slightly different ways but with some detectable similarities? 
3. Notice how the event is impacting you. What do you feel? What unmet needs are there in you? Do you feel any sense of disempowerment, or frustration, or outrage? Just see if you can identify in as objective a way as you can, what was present within you at the time it happened.
4. Now imagine the event is a mirror that you’re looking into. What do you see? Here are some ideas to help you:
   1. For example, do you see in the mirror a stalemate situation? Do you see a self-fulfilling prophesy? A self-fulfilling prophesy is when the thing happens that, on some level, you always expect to happen.
   2. When you look into the mirror the event is holding up for you, what sort of quality or tone or mood do you experience within you, or being radiated by the event? What does that tone or mood tell you about what you believe about yourself, or about others, or about the world?

2: 100% responsibility

Now let’s build on this work and dig a bit deeper. 

By 100% responsibility you are going a step further than the previous step, the world is our mirror. Here is where you can experience the freedom that comes with taking on the responsibility for what happened.

The more you take responsibility for what you believe and how you feel about what you believe, the sooner you can see how you participated in the outcome of the event you’re concerned with.

I, however, do NOT mean that you take the blame. 

I am also not asking you to take responsibility for another person’s choices about what THEY believe, feel, and do. That is their responsibility, just as your inner life is yours.

However, what YOU do with the circumstances or interpersonal dynamics you find yourself in is where you take back your agency. But in order to do that, you have to practice being responsible for how you’ve been impacted. 

I have this sometimes painful and difficult challenge: to be responsible for how hurtful words and disappointing circumstances have impacted me.

So I make the assumption that I had a part in their coming into being, and that part was created within, the thing that radiates out from me and got mirrored back to me.

On some level I have invited this relationship, this particular dynamic or situation into my life, and that it’s now my responsibility to get out of it. 

As I write this, I must confess that it is an easy point to understand, but not so easy to actually accomplish. And yet it’s the key to freedom from the deep, compulsive tendency to project our feelings and beliefs onto others or onto our life circumstances and thus disempower ourselves from being able to do anything about it.

Can you see how this is true?

Now let’s explore a client story. I’ve changed some things about it for anonymity.

A client went through a nasty divorce process. Lawyers and custody battles dragged on until it was finally done. However, the fallout for the kids was devastating and my client still had to communicate with his ex-wife, trying to keep things civil for the sake of his kids. As we worked together, another story came to the fore. His experiences with childhood abuse.

While we acknowledged the importance of knowing about the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) from childhood, what we spent most of our time focused on was exactly how those early experiences had shaped his current reality. In other words, how he had internalized them, and the ways that internalization expressed itself in beliefs, conclusions, worldviews, and coping mechanisms that he carried with him mostly without being aware of them.

As he explored in his current reality what he really believed about himself and the difficulties he had with attachment, trust, and setting boundaries, a new picture began to emerge for him where he was able to see why he had chosen that particular person to marry, and also why it had gone south. He began to see how he himself had set the game board of his adult life.

That game board was shaped by his beliefs about himself and the world, the consequences for his sense of self-worth, and the unfortunate strategies he had employed to try and get his needs met.

He saw the threads of connection between how he had internalized life: the coping mechanisms he’d employed to keep himself safe as a child were not serving him as an adult.

He began to take back his sense of agency from what used to be a hugely powerful and forceful presence in his life (his ex-wife), resulting in less blame, more compassion, and an undoing of the bindings that had kept him stuck in the dynamic playing out between him and his ex-wife. 

He was able to see his ex-wife and her behaviors as the world mirroring back to him the ways he’d internalized his childhood abuse. He no longer blamed her nor himself for the situation.

Without that insight into how he had set the game board, he wouldn’t have been able to experience his agency and power, inaccessible to him so long as he gave his ex-wife so much power over him. And while the challenges continued from the fallout of the divorce, his perspective had shifted fundamentally, enabling him to meet those challenges with more grace and love which in turn shifted the dynamics in significant ways for everyone involved.

I hope you can see that taking 100% responsibility is not about apportioning blame to anyone, including yourself. It is simply about taking ownership of the fact that you are in this situation, and you are going to take the higher road out of it and be the leader you aspire to be.

And along the way discover the healing and transformation of places in you that needed it.

Those places in need of healing and the beliefs needing transformation is what the world is really mirroring back to you as a significant teaching in leadership.

And now lets turn to a journaling guide to help you consider 100% responsibility in your situation.

1. Look again at the events you wrote out in the last journaling exercise. What did you conclude about what happened? That it was your fault, the other person’s, circumstances out of your control? The economy was to blame? Is there someone or something to blame? Who is actually responsible for what happened in your mind?
2. Now, when you look at what you just wrote, what belief do you have about yourself that drove that particular conclusion? For example, the belief could be that “this always happens to me”, or that you are on some level unworthy, or that other people are always a disappointment. The belief that you hold could be that you are always overlooked, or misunderstood, and you on some level expect this to happen. Notice the word “always” — it indicates there is a belief present in you. Try and capture that belief.
3. What belief do you have about the way the world works? For example, maybe you concluded that the world doesn’t care about you and you have to make things work on your own with no help or support. 
4. Once you have a better idea about what you believe, you now have an opportunity to decide if you want to continue to believe that or not. Beliefs are often not logical, nor even true. They are borne of how we internalize our life experiences, especially in childhood, which makes them difficult to see. Getting to know what we believe is an important first step toward taking back responsibility for how we feel and what we do with the circumstances we find ourselves in.

3: Gratitude

There is one more exercise in this framework, and that is the concept of gratitude. When I teach meditation, gratitude is one of the foundational feelings upon which you can build a resilient, independent, and coherent inner life that is not so easily swayed or influenced by outer circumstances or dynamics but has an infinite source to draw upon. 

Gratitude, practiced regularly every day, has the agency to help you shift your perspective in a fundamental, life-affirming way. 

Here’s a thought exercise to illustrate what I mean:

Imagine you have a glass of water in front of you. The water has been poured in exactly half way. Now, imagine the glass is half empty. What is the mood of a half empty glass? Its half empty, meaning, by implication, that there is a lack, something missing, less abundance. There is a mood of less, smaller, scarcity.

Now, imagine the glass is half full instead. What is the mood now? Abundant, more generous, more possibility, more ease. 

Now, try switching back and forth between these moods diven by the imaginations of the glass. 

This is the agency of gratitude: it helps you learn how to shift your soul back and forth from half empty to half full, like a switch you can flip that takes you from thoughts of stress and scarcity to hope and possibilities that you couldn’t see before. 

This shift I call “turning the soul” and is a powerful capability or skill on the road toward empowerment.

There are many studies about the power of positivity and its myriad effects. What I’m talking about here is, yes positivity, but more than that, actually experiencing the quality and and tone of your perspective and how it drives your beliefs, mood and ultimately your behaviors. 

I believe you already know that positivity is good for you but chances are you still don’t have any control over your mood, feelings, or attitude. 

That is what a thought exercise like glass half empty, glass half full shows you: how to have more say in what you choose to believe and feel.

Gratitude is more powerful than positivity, and practicing gratitude does something to the soul that is rejuvenating, revitalizing, and healing — especially when practiced regularly. 

On the whole I find a practice of gratitude doesn’t have to ignore the things that are difficult, or fuel avoidance — the main criticism of positivity practices.

A practice of striving to feel grateful for the lessons for which you are working to understand better will fuel your ability to take more responsibility for what you DO with what happened. Its a self-reinforcing loop, supporting the whole with all the strength and grace that gratitude can bring.

You can work on the world is your mirror as a concept that you have in your back pocket. You can always recognize good concepts because they work in you as you live with them, helping shift your perspective.

And then, you can practice 100% responsibility as a goal to strive for. For example, if you are triggered by something someone said, you can assume your trigger is your responsibility; your feelings are yours to own. This is the place I started to apply this rule, and where I still work. 

And finally, be grateful for the challenges that come your way because they are your teachers. They are also fierce injunctions to work on something you’ve not yet faced.

Here is a journaling guide for you to work with:

1. Can you identify the lesson inherent in the event you’ve been focused on? Write it down. Sometimes the writing comes before the understanding, as you might process while writing. In which case, try not to edit as you write. The journaling question could be: what hidden lesson is this event trying to show me about myself — my beliefs, my feelings, or my unmet needs?
2. Try to call up within you a feeling of gratitude. Flood your being with the feeling as best you can. If it helps, write down what comes up in you when you imagine being grateful for the lesson. 
3. Try practicing gratitude every day. Think of three things for which you are grateful, and cultivate a mood of gratitude while you do so, and then let it go and get on with your day. The things could be small and mundane, or they could be big and important to you.

This ends our foray into Reclaim Your Agency: The Inner Leadership Reset + Journaling Guide. I hope it was fruitful for you!

Please let me know how this lands with you, or if there is anything missing for you. I would like to improve this, but I need your help! 

Simply hit reply to this email, or leave a comment at the bottom of this article on my website. 

Warmly,

Louisa