Fostering Self-Empowerment, Resilience, & Agency

Tools For Personal Growth - Even For Older Adults

Photo by Phill Brown on Unsplash

As an older adult, I want to take responsibility for my circumstances and actively work to overcome challenges and adversity.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but terms such as self-empowerment, resilience, and agency describe it well.

Self-empowerment is a belief in my ability to navigate life's challenges, make meaningful choices, and create positive change.

The Mayo Clinic site says

When I have resilience, I harness the inner strength that helps me rebound from a setback or challenge, such as a loved one's death.

Agency is my sense of control, the ability to influence my thoughts and behavior, and faith in my capacity to handle various tasks and situations.

I see myself as having resilience but needing to continue building self-empowerment and agency.

So, what would it look like if I developed self-empowerment and agency to support resilience? An Internet search gave me some ideas to start with.

Self-Empowerment

Empowerment for an older person means having the opportunity to learn, discuss, decide, and act on decisions for themselves. Individual empowerment improves the well-being and health of each person, their family, community, and society.

Experts suggest ways to stay empowered. They include reframing what it means to get older, being involved in decision-making, setting boundaries and goals, keeping a routine, and staying active.

Resilience

The Mayo Clinic site says:

Not ignoring problems but figuring out what to do, planning, and acting on that plan. Recovering from a significant setback, trauma, or loss takes time, but life can improve if one works at it.

Agency

The Mindful Organization website says this.

Agency means taking control of one’s life, cutting through the noise, finding emotional and physical balance, thinking more clearly, and advocating for the self.

It’s the ability to cut through all of what pulls at us, find emotional and physical balance, and think for ourselves so we can take a sensible course of action. Agency allows use to feel more in command of our lives.

The site suggests that agency begins with what people let into their minds, meaning they control what they accept and believe. They can also move, see themselves as learners, manage their emotions and beliefs, and check their intuition.

To bolster my self-empowerment and agency, I could start by adopting one self-empowerment suggestion, like staying involved in decision-making, and one agency suggestion, like controlling what I let into my mind. It’s worth a try and seems essential if I want to age well!

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