Sustaining Agency/Daily Practice Checklist

Daily Practice: Nurturing Your Agency

Agency—the capacity to act independently, make choices, and influence one’s environment—is a fundamental aspect of human experience.

Here’s a “Sustaining Agency” Daily Practice Checklist, grounded in the Sustaining Agency module of Wikiversity.[1] This checklist is designed to help you consistently recognize and exercise your personal power in meaningful, principled ways, especially when facing challenges or feelings of helplessness.

1. Morning — Set the Intention for Empowered Action

  • Reflect: Agency is your personal power to act—rooted in an internal locus of control and a refusal to succumb to learned helplessness.
  • Set your daily intention, e.g.: “Today, I will identify one positive change I can make and commit to acting on it.”

2. Midday — Recognize and Mobilize Your Agency

A. Choose Something You Can Change

B. Identify Your Personal Agency

  • Reflect on the assets available to you—skills, knowledge, relationships, resilience, creativity, voice, emotional awareness, etc.

C. Overcome Ambivalence

  • Notice if you're torn between change and inertia.
  • Clarify the benefits of change vs. staying the same to resolve internal conflict and move forward.

D. Act Purposefully

  • Using your identified assets, take at least one step toward the change you’ve chosen, no matter how small.

3. Evening — Reflect on Your Effort and Intention

Reflection Prompt Your Response
What change did I focus on today?
Which personal strengths did I use?
Did ambivalence arise—and how did I address it?
What action did I take—even a small step?
How did taking action affect my sense of agency and well-being?
What’s my next step tomorrow to sustain this momentum?
  1. ChatGPT generated this text responding to the prompt: Generate an ‘sustaining agency’ daily practice checklist based on the materials at: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Sustaining_Agency