out of the gate

If you’ve made the move to experience coaching, there’s a reason. You’ve got a vision for your life and it’s not happening the way you want. Why? Lack of motivation? Mind replaying negative comments from your youth? Other people holding you back? Yes of course, that’s it.

At any rate, you’re wondering where the hell your feeling of agency has gone. It happens to all of us; instead of acting, we find ourselves being acted upon or merely reacting.

Maybe it’s worthwhile here to consider the concept of Free Will (which is currently in the zeitgeist) and whether or not we humans actually have it. Free will has a verrry long history of debate. But now, certain neuroscientists opine that we actually don’t have it; that everything we are is a heady cocktail of nature and nurture: experience in the womb, societal interactions from childhood onward, and luck. Which goes for one’s parents, and their parents, and their parents, all the way back to our hairy ancestors. Yeah, that’s a whole lot of predetermination. But, but, but…

but does the loss of this supposedly innate human ability really alter how we live our lives? On the one hand it gives us a permanent hall pass for our wrong turns or outright bad behavior, or it seriously colors the way we take credit for our life accomplishments. Tough to swallow for some. And as for the implications for our justice system…

Anyhow ‘Here’s the deal’ – it’s what you make of the sum of your parts and whether or not you can learn, as a unified whole, how to seize your inborn assets and make them work for you. Otherwise known as agency.

Because, even if we’re determined, we still don’t know what life will present us with, nor how exactly we’ll respond – which sets us on a path through the relative unknown. Life as a surprise? And therein lies a sense of freedom that we can taste. Because in the end, life is what we experience along the way. We just need to allow ourselves to act as navigators on a wild river that will lead us through remarkable terrain.

So let’s go on and  (to bounce another metaphor) seize with joy the handlebars of that sometimes wobbly racing bike that is your life.