A Need for Agency: The First Step to a Life Designed

This blog has been 40 years in the making.

Forty years is a lot of life to live, and you learn a thing or two along the way. I’ve always shared my ideas openly with trusted friends and colleagues, but I’ve been more reluctant to share them with a broader audience.

Thanks for reading Agency: Next Steps for a Life Designed! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Somewhere along the way—probably as early as grade school—I noticed a trend: people use all sorts of tactics to get noticed. Being loud. Being dramatic. Being “the best.” I was no different. As a kid, I was a bit of a class clown, using humor to get attention.

What I’ve come to realize is this: we all want to be seen. We all want to be valued. And in pursuit of that validation, we often start adapting our behavior—not to align with who we really are, but to meet the expectations of others.

And that behavior doesn’t stop in high school. It continues—quietly and consistently—throughout adulthood.

Some of this adapting is healthy. We learn the Golden Rule. We learn that kindness often leads to connection, and that unkindness usually creates resistance. That kind of behavior change is necessary. It’s part of emotional maturity.

But other times, the adapting becomes dangerous. We shift who we are to please the loudest voices, follow the flashiest trends, or align with people who don’t have our best interests in mind. In fact, they often benefit from our confusion, our comparison, and our consumption.

We live in a world of endless distraction: marketing, social media, 24/7 content, smartphones, Influencers, AI tools, and pop-up “experts.”
It’s never been noisier.

In this noise, people lose touch with what they really want, why they want it, and even who they are. We’re overstimulated, oversold, and undereducated in one of the most essential life skills: how to exert agency over our own lives.

And here’s the hard truth: the system is designed that way. Because confusion is profitable.
If you don’t know what you want, someone else is more than happy to sell it to you.

Today, we have more access to information than ever before in human history. What we don’t have is margin—the space to think clearly, to reflect deeply, or to choose intentionally.

So we stay on autopilot.
We absorb the next hack, follow the next trend, and let the next “expert” speak into our most vulnerable moments.

As an education consultant, life coach, and advocate, I’m launching this blog as a space to reflect, question, and reclaim what’s ours: agency.

If we don’t design our own lives, others will do it for us—and they rarely have our best interests in mind.

In my coaching practice, I focus 6 F’s:
Fitness, Fellowship, Finances, Family, Focus (Career), and Fun.
By applying Pareto’s 80/20 Principle to each of these areas, we can begin to eliminate the noise, reclaim our attention, and design a life that aligns with our values—not someone else’s agenda.

Reflection: What helps you stay connected to what you really want? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Subscribe to Substack: A Need for Agency