Increase Your Agency By Increasing Your Affordances

Once you learn about affordances, you're going to see them everywhere

We met some friends in Las Vegas for dinner a few weeks ago. The following day, we drove west from the city to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area for a morning hike.

The weather was perfect. And the trail was a lot of fun because it was so varied. It had flat parts but also places where you had to scramble up sandstone cliffs. You even had to jump across a small chasm, which made me feel like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade.

During our descent, we encountered a group of hikers delayed by one member stuck at a steep decline on the trail. It wasn't anything particularly tricky. You had to step down the sandstone going backwards like you were going down a ladder. Most regular hikers wouldn't have had a second thought about it, but this poor woman just sat petrified on a steep sandstone rock, yelling at her husband, "DON'T TOUCH ME! I CAN'T DO THIS!"

We stood there patiently for several minutes, telling her to take her time and offering encouraging words. She made zero progress and continued to yell at her husband. Kate and I had a flight to catch back to Tulsa, so we had to skip ahead of this lady. We saw another potential route to take and scampered down the slope in seconds.

While we were walking back to the trailhead, I was thinking about that lady stuck on a sandstone ledge screaming. She had no physical disability that would have prevented her from making it down that ledge. She also seemed to be in pretty good shape.

Her problem was she couldn’t recognize the affordances in her environment.

What's an affordance, you ask?

Well, let me tell you because once you learn about affordances, you're going to start seeing them everywhere. And once you start seeing them, your sense of agency will exponentially increase.