Personal Agency
The sense that you can understand your patterns and influence the direction of your life — not through force, but intentional choice.
Psychology Glossary
Words for the inner work, in plain language.
Short, honest definitions for the ideas behind our assessments. Tap any term to read the full detail.
Assessment Foundations
Self-Efficacy
Your belief that you can succeed at specific challenges. This belief shapes effort, persistence, and recovery from setbacks.
Growth Mindset
The belief that abilities and patterns can develop through practice — making challenges feel worth attempting.
Human Agency
Your overall capacity to act from your values — awareness, trust, action, and regulation working together.
Self-Report Inventory
A questionnaire where you describe your own patterns. InnerAgency assessments are self-report mirrors — useful, private, and shaped by how honestly you answer, not a clinical exam.
Personality Traits vs Types
Traits sit on a continuum (more or less). Types put you in a memorable box. Agency scores are dimensional; a 16-type code is a sketch. Neither is a life sentence.
Self-Trust & Inner Validation
Self-Trust
Confidence in your own judgment — making decisions without needing constant reassurance from others.
Internal Locus of Control
Believing your choices influence outcomes — linked to lower helplessness and more initiative.
Validation
The need for outside approval to feel a choice is correct — a common driver of hesitation.
Shadow & Depth
Shadow (Jungian)
Parts of yourself you learned to hide or deny. Shadow work is noticing these patterns with compassion, not shame.
Shadow Archetype
A recognizable pattern the shadow takes — like The Critic, The Mask, Exile, Protector, Flame, or Wanderer.
Projection
Seeing a trait in others that actually belongs to you — a doorway into your own shadow.
Inner Child
The younger emotional self that still reacts when something old gets touched. Inner-child work and shadow work overlap; one is not a diagnosis of the other.
Integration
Bringing a disowned pattern back into awareness without acting it out or attacking it. The aim is a wider self, not a perfect one.
People-Pleasing
Saying yes to stay safe, liked, or needed — often at the cost of your own knowing. A common Mask / Protector pattern, not a personality flaw.
Emotion & Patterns
Emotional Avoidance
Habits that keep difficult feelings at a distance — distraction, numbing, busyness — often at the cost of long-term clarity.
Emotional Regulation
Not suppressing feelings, but letting them register and choosing how to respond rather than react on autopilot.
Self-Awareness
Noticing what you feel, think, and do in real time — the foundation every other capacity builds on.
Numbing
Turning the volume down on feeling — scrolling, overwork, substances, niceness — so nothing has to be faced right now.
How to Read a Result
Likert Scale
The agree–disagree buttons you tap on most InnerAgency check-ins. Several answers combine into a dimension score; one item is never the whole story.
Reliability
Whether scores stay reasonably consistent when the pattern itself has not changed. A useful check-in can still shift with mood, honesty, and context.
Validity
Whether a score supports the meaning we give it. InnerAgency results are educational pattern maps — not proof of a diagnosis, and not a substitute for care.
Response Bias
Answering in a way that looks good, stays polite, or always agrees — instead of what is actually true. Private results help; honesty still does the work.
Put words into practice
Reading helps — doing the work helps more. Start with a free assessment, then reflect in private.