Stuck in a suffering loop? Use agency, not blame, to move again. Sort things into Control, Influence, and Accept, then use proven psychological tools that work in real life. This episode is a blunt-but-kind guide to swapping self-pity for small, deliberate moves!
You can’t control what life throws at you, but you can pick the next right move. That’s agency. Not the lottery numbers, not the timing of a layoff, not the coworker who emails in ALL CAPS and CC-s your boss, just the next right move you can actually make.
By “agency,” I mean choosing your response inside real limits. Think of Viktor Frankl’s line we quoted in the main presentation: between stimulus and response there is a space. That space is small, but it’s powerful. It’s where we buy a breath, remember who we are, and then make a choice we won’t regret tomorrow. Sometimes the choice is tiny, but tiny still counts when it’s intentional.
Here’s the tone for this episode: I’m going to try to be direct but kind. We’ll name grief, anger, depression and we’ll talk about how to stand back up without shaming ourselves. If you’ve been feeding the self-pity loop, I get it; I’ve been there. But we’re going to try something more useful than another round of “why me?”
Keep this in mind as you listen: “Agency doesn’t mean ‘try harder.’ It means ‘try differently, on purpose.’” That’s our job—find that little space between stimulus and response, and learn what “differently, on purpose” looks like in your real life.
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