Dr. Paul Conti

What do I want to change?

What am I striving for?

And how do I get myself there?

And it's that empowerment that brings along with it agency.

Agency is the exercise of empowerment.

So if I might say shift from a place of feeling behind the eight ball and feeling down and feeling on the back foot and I shift to a place where I think, no, I can bring understanding to bear.

In fact, I am understanding things and bringing change now.

So I know that I can do more of that now.

Now we're on the front foot and it's that empowerment inside that lets us exercise agency and say, no, if I've been going two steps to the left, now I understand and I'm changing it and I'm going to go two steps to the right now.

And once we do that, now we start the ball rolling in the right direction.

And once we start making healthy change, it then becomes easier to make more healthy change.

Well, if we look at the structure of self and the function of self, and we say, okay, this is our analogy to physical health.

So this is like saying, if you presented with a physical health problem, we'd say, okay, well, let's take a history, right?

Let's do a physical exam.

We might want to get some labs.

There's a process to understand and say, hey, if your body is out of balance, you're having a pain somewhere, for example,

Let's understand that.

And there's this method so that we can understand it and we can bring you back into balance.

We can do the same thing through the structure of self and the function of self and the components there so that we can help to bring a person back into balance.

Or if they're already in balance, make that balance stronger.