Do you sometimes struggle to get yourself to do the things you know you want to do, and should do? Do you find yourself constantly relying on self-discipline to force action? Are you becoming a bit of a tyrant to yourself? And do you find you sometimes rebel against your own self-tyranny?

I’ve got a solution for you. It’s called agency. Keep reading.

Agency is your ability to act on your own behalf, to recognize what needs doing and get it done through self-mastery. It’s the root of autonomy and the foundation of a meaningful life.

The better you understand yourself, the more leverage you have to guide your life in the direction you want. When you know what drives you, what frightens you, what excites you, you hold the keys to your own behavior. You stop guessing what to do. You start engineering your future.

Developing your agency isn’t about a mindset or a feeling, it’s not abstract. It begins with taking full self-ownership and choosing a path guided by your values, what matters to you, what gives you meaning. That’s your strategy. From there, you must learn the tactics required to be a responsible owner of yourself. You need tools. You need a system. And you need a way to see the levers inside yourself, and pull them.

Explanation of the Big Five as Levers of Motivation

The Big Five (OCEAN) test is a psychological assessment that measures five core dimensions of personality: Openness (creativity and curiosity), Conscientiousness (organization and self-discipline), Extraversion (sociability and energy), Agreeableness (cooperation and compassion), and Neuroticism (emotional reactivity and anxiety). It’s used to understand how individuals typically think, feel, and behave across situations.

You can find free and useful Big 5 personality trait tests online. Try one.

One important caveat before we explore each trait: your current Big Five profile might not be your true default. We possess significant neuroplasticity as humans, and your current personality traits may reflect adaptations to your environment rather than your core potential.

For example, I once coached a young woman who scored at the extreme high end of neuroticism. But she lived with an abusive, chaotic family, particularly an unstable mother. I suggested she remove herself from that environment, and she found a position as a nanny with a stable, loving family. Within three months, her neuroticism dropped from the highest percentile to nearly the lowest. She didn’t change who she was; she discovered who she could be, when the threat subsided.

This raises an important question: how do you know if you’re genuinely high in neuroticism, or simply in a high-threat environment? How do you know if you’re introverted, or just surrounded by people not worth your time? Often, you can’t know until you leave the situation, calm your nervous system, and reassess. This is true across traits.

As you gain emotional regulation and autonomy, traits like neuroticism may persist in signal but drop in effect. You still feel what you feel—but it no longer drives your behavior the same way. You gain leverage. You shift.

So here’s the advice: Use the traits you have today to your advantage, but don’t believe you’re trapped in them. Change your environment. Learn emotional skills. With time, you can become more neurotic when vigilance is needed, or less, when it’s time to rest and grow. The same applies to every trait. The greatest power lies in adaptability.

Big 5 or OCEAN

Most people see the Big Five (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) as labels. But they’re not just descriptors, they’re functional measures of your current demand and sensitivity to stimulation across five evolutionary domains. They’re proxies for how your nervous system calibrates risk, novelty, order, cooperation, and threat.

Each trait can be seen as a motivational lever, and each end of the spectrum gives you tools:

• Neuroticism: High? Use it. Fear of negative outcomes can drive responsibility and diligence. Imagine future harm, then act to prevent it. Low? You may need to simulate consequences more actively or use external accountability to stay on track. People low in neuroticism tend to be more attuned to opportunity than to threat, so lean into that. Focus on the positive outcomes that your good behavior makes possible. Frame action in terms of gain, potential, and exploration rather than loss or punishment.

• Conscientiousness: High? Use order and goal-tracking to build unstoppable momentum. Lean into your natural sense of duty and heroism, channel that inner drive to do what’s right, not just what’s scheduled. Let your internal compass turn routine into legacy. Low? Use short cycles of reward and visible progress. External structure, checklists, and micro-deadlines are your friend. But low conscientiousness isn’t just a handicap, it can be an asset. People low in conscientiousness tend to be less stressed in high-chaos environments. They adapt more flexibly, tolerate uncertainty better, and are often more comfortable when routines break down. In a world growing more chaotic and unpredictable, this resilience to disorder can be a competitive advantage, if you learn to steer it.

• Extraversion: High? Use social visibility and momentum. Tell others your goals. Turn achievement into performance. Build your network, your real power lies in your ability to bring people together, tolerate diverse social energies, and channel that vitality into coalition-building. Low? Carve out quiet rituals. Optimize for autonomy and remove distractions. You’re likely highly introspective. Use that solitude to develop personal mastery. Your strength is depth, time spent alone honing skills, refining projects, and diving deep can make you a true craftsman or expert.

• Agreeableness: High? Use relationships to motivate action. Don’t let others down. Serve. But be careful, your agreeableness is only as useful as the people you direct it toward. Take time to be clear on who you agree with and what you agree with. Anchor your agreeableness to your Circle of Care, those who love, support, and protect you. With them, cooperation is a virtue. Low? Use competition or self-interest. Prove something. Outperform. If you’re naturally disagreeable, position yourself in roles where truth-telling, hard decisions, and even playing the ‘bad guy’ bring value. You can be the one who says what others can’t, profitably.

• Openness: High? Use exploration. Novelty. Variety. Learn your way into motivation. But be careful, openness is a double-edged sword. In the pursuit of novelty, you can harm yourself or those around you if you’re not discerning. Structure your life so that learning new things is not just exciting, but also productive. Choose careers where innovation and discovery are assets. In relationships, consider marrying someone similarly open, so you can explore the world together. Low? Stick to routines. Use predictability and stability as scaffolding for progress. You thrive on structure and consistency, so build systems that reinforce those strengths. Surround yourself with others who also value stability and routine, and let repetition become your superpower.

Why This Matters

Because behavior is downstream from cognition, and cognition is shaped by evolutionary temperament. The Big Five doesn’t tell you who you are, it tells you how you compute. That is how you calculate what to do next. And if you can model your internal computation, you can intervene to improve it. You can create a system.

Now imagine the opposite of where we started. Instead of fighting yourself to get things done, you move with fluency. You don’t live on willpower. You don’t need to berate or coerce yourself into action. Because you’ve built a life and a rhythm aligned with who you are, and who you’re becoming.

Everything doesn’t become easy. But it becomes smooth. Predictable. Even enjoyable. You reserve discipline for when it’s needed most, emergencies, transitions, or breakthroughs. The rest of the time, your system carries you forward with momentum.

That’s the promise of knowing yourself. That’s the gift of agency well-developed.

Go take a Big Five test. Free ones are everywhere. But more than that, reflect. Ask yourself what truly motivates you. What you fear. What you chase. What you love.

And if you look inside and don’t like what you find, there’s good news. You can change it. You can shape what you want. You can cultivate new desires. You’re not stuck. This is the work of becoming, not just knowing.

And if you want to learn how, I can show you. That’s what I do.

Stack your motivations. Don’t rely on one trick. Layer them. Build a framework around your nature, and your goals.

The good, the right, and the beautiful aren’t just ideals. They’re targets your temperament can be aligned toward. You just need to aim.

Know thyself. Then act accordingly.