Personal Agency Belief Patterns
Personal goals provide us with direction and purpose in life. But motivation also requires a belief that you can successfully progress toward your goals. You must have confidence in your personal capabilities and an expectation that the world around you will respond positively to your goal-seeking efforts given sufficient effort and persistence. Taken together, these beliefs about personal agency – known as capability and context beliefs, respectively – provide us with the motivational strength needed to pursue our hopes, dreams, and everyday desires and obligations.
The Assessment of Personal Agency Belief Patterns (APP)
The chart below describes 10 different personal agency belief (PAB) patterns organized in 9 cells. Most people experience all these PAB patterns from time to time. (Go ahead and imagine when you have experienced the pattern described in each cell.) However, as we gain life experience and deal with an increasing array of goals and circumstances, we tend to develop a predisposition to approach challenges and opportunities from the perspective of a particular region in the PAB matrix.
Capability Beliefs Expectations about your abilities |
Strong | Antagonistic or Accepting (A1/A2) |
Tenacious (T) |
Robust (R) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moderate or Variable |
Discouraged (D) |
Cautious (C) |
Encouraged (E) |
|
| Negative | Hopeless (H) |
Insecure (I) |
Fragile (F) |
|
| Negative | Moderate or Variable | Positive | ||
| Context Beliefs Expectations about your opportunities |
||||
What is Your “Home Page”?
Take the Assessment of Personal Agency Belief Patterns (APP) to learn more about your capability and context beliefs and how they can influence your motivation and personality. What PAB pattern is your natural “home page”?
Personal agency belief “habits” can be altered or even transformed once you are aware of those habits. Sometimes it just takes a conscious effort to think realistically and consider positive as well as negative aspects of a situation. At other times we may need a little help focusing on future possibilities rather than on current problems. Or perhaps you simply need a “change of scenery” in terms of the life goals you are pursuing or the circumstances in which you are pursuing them. If so, the Assessment of Personal Goals (APG) and the APG Personal Application Guide can help you identify your core personal goals and to then align those goals with your capabilities and life circumstances.