The Prerequisite for Agency: Self-Compassion
What Andre Agassi's collapse reveals about how we make decisions.
Posted May 28, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
I keep returning to this sentence in Andre Agassi's memoir: "I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have."
His memoir, Open , came out in 2009; Agassi's career had reached its lowest point 12 years earlier, in November 1997, when he was 27 and ranked 141st in the world. Two years earlier, he'd been number one. He'd been hitting balls in his father's backyard since age 3, and that drill‑like voice had become his inner voice . In 1997, he wanted to quit, but he wouldn't let himself. "In true fashion to my process," he writes, "I rebelled against myself. I said I didn't deserve to quit."
That last line stops me in my tracks every time because it's the most accurate description of a state many of us call weakness, apathy, laziness, lack of discipline, or some failure of will. Agassi ranked 141 wasn't any of these things, but he'd stopped being agentic . I recognize the state, and so will anyone who's spent much longer than they're willing to admit staring at that email they can't make themselves send.
By agency, I mean the capacity to be an active participant in your own life—the ability to notice, in almost any moment, that more than one option is available, and then make an intentional choice. Agency is the antidote to helplessness because it lets you treat what's in front of you as a question instead of a verdict. The voice many of us were raised to mistake for our conscience , the one that beats us up when we fall short, is what narrows the field around us until there's nothing left to choose.
The research runs counter to folk theory on this. In one well-known experiment , people who'd just failed a hard test were given one of two scripts. Half were told to be self-compassionate, to speak to themselves the way they'd speak to a friend in the same spot. The other half were told to remember what they were good at and where they'd succeeded before. Which half studied harder for the retake? The self-compassionate half, by a clear margin. They were also more willing to be around people who'd done better than they had. Compassion produced more effort, and the authors argue it may support better outcomes over time.
Why does compassion produce better results? Because of what self-criticism does to the body. Compassion-focused therapy identifies three inherited emotion systems: threat/protection, drive/resource-seeking, and contentment/soothing/safeness. Chronic self-criticism can keep activating the threat system. That same system runs our fight, flight, and freeze responses and activates our survival mode. Its job is to scan for danger, not to imagine positive futures. So, under threat, options collapse. You stop asking what's possible, and instead start looking for ways to protect yourself.
Albert Bandura spent 50 years on the question of what makes a person agentic. He landed on four capacities:
Each of those capacities requires a nervous system not overwhelmed by threat responses.
Why self-criticism narrows your options
The belief that sheer discipline solves most problems is longstanding and has garnered strong traction in public discourse, from the Stoics down to whichever business book is on the airport shelf this week, and sometimes it manifests as this: Self-criticism is the load-bearing wall of high performance. Take the wall down , and the structure caves. Stop the voice that says you should be better, and you spend the rest of your life becoming the kind of person you used to pity.
There's something to the worry. Standards matter, and an honest appraisal of where you fell short is an important part of personal growth, but it doesn't mean you need to be your own enemy. Decades of research on goal pursuit show that people who can hold their shortcomings without making them a verdict on who they are make more progress, ruminate less, and quit less often. Self-compassionate people pursue mastery more readily because they're less afraid of failing. Mike Agassi's brand of appraisal produced a number one player in Agassi by 1995. Two years later, the same appraisal had taken the same player apart.
Marty Seligman gave the older version of this a name in the 1970s: learned helplessness . The finding was that when a person stops believing that their actions change outcomes, their field of perceived options collapses. They stop trying because trying no longer registers as something they can do. Self-criticism runs the same loop inside your head. When every misstep reads as proof of a flawed self, the question "What can I do differently?" no longer matters.
Agassi's comeback included the biggest one-year leap into the top 10 in the history of the ATP , five more Grand Slam titles, and a return to Number One at age 29. The way he tells it, the change came as a result of the support from the people around him: his coach Brad Gilbert, his trainer Gil Reyes, and a small circle of friends who became like a family. They offered him the kind of support his father had never offered, they treated his suffering as their business, and, most importantly, his decisions as his own . The harsh voice didn’t leave, but other voices came in alongside it. The field he could see, and the options within it, got much wider.
This is the part we get wrong as a culture (and I include myself in that “we”): Standards don’t need to change just because you’re more compassionate toward yourself. What changes when you’re not bracing for impact are the options you can see and choose from. Self-compassion is the ground you put under your feet before any of the walking begins. We’ve been asking it to be the prize at the top of the climb, and the order’s been wrong all along.
Agassi, A. (2009). Open: An Autobiography . New York, NY: Knopf.
Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-Compassion Increases Self-Improvement Motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 38(9), 1133–1143.
Gilbert, P. (2014). The Origins and Nature of Compassion Focused Therapy. British Journal of Clinical Psychology , 53(1), 6–41.
Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a Psychology of Human Agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science , 1(2), 164–180.
Powers, T. A., Koestner, R., & Zuroff, D. C. (2007). Self-Criticism, Goal Motivation, and Goal Progress. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology , 26(7), 826–840.
Neff, K. D., Hsieh, Y. P., & Dejitthirat, K. (2005). Self-Compassion, Achievement Goals, and Coping with Academic Failure. Self and Identity , 4(3), 263–287.
Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-Compassion: Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention. Annual Review of Psychology , 74, 193–218.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1972). Learned Helplessness. Annual Review of Medicine , 23, 407–412.
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Jon Rosemberg, MAPP, received his Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Guide to Thriving: The Science Behind Breaking Old Patterns, Reclaiming Your Agency, and Finding Meaning.
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