Collective Agency vs. Self Agency

We don’t lose our agency, we give it away to belong.

The hard part is taking it back.

Collective Agency vs. Self Agency

We’re all born with agency, the innate ability to make choices, take action, and influence our world. As children, that agency develops within family systems, where belonging often depends on fitting in. We learn early that survival sometimes means surrendering parts of ourselves to maintain harmony, that’s collective agency at work.

As young adults, we reach for self-agency, independence, identity, and ambition. Some of us even channel that drive into something bigger than ourselves, like the military, where we willingly trade self-agency for collective agency and a shared mission.

That exchange serves a purpose, until the mission ends.

Reclaiming self-agency after service, or after any long-term system that required compliance, is hard work. It’s not about learning to do hard things, veterans, survivors, and professionals already know how.

It’s about remembering who they were before they had to trade their agency to survive.

Many people face this same struggle:

• In abusive relationships, where safety depends on silence or self-erasure.

• In toxic workplaces, where conformity is rewarded over authenticity.

• In rigid institutions or family systems, where identity must yield to the collective.

Reclaiming self-agency isn’t rebellion — it’s recovery.

It’s the moment a person decides: I belong to myself again.

Through my work at Transition Strategies and Coaching on Purpose, I help veterans, leaders, and everyday humans rebuild their self-agency after systems that taught them to disconnect from it.

Because when people reclaim their agency, they rediscover purpose, belonging, and the power to change their world.

And that is a purpose bigger than me.