Amy McLaren's Passion to Purpose and the Self-Efficacy Facet (C1)
Amy McLaren went from an unfulfilled schoolteacher to founding a charity that educates thousands of children in rural Kenya, and Passion to Purpose is her map for anyone waiting for the right moment to start. She is blunt about where that moment comes from, on its book page: "People often get hung up looking for the perfect scenario and opportunity, but I learned that they come when you make them happen." That belief that you can produce your own opening rather than wait to be handed one is, in the Big Five, one facet.
Making your own opening is the Self-Efficacy facet
That facet is Self-Efficacy (C1), under Conscientiousness, the sense that you are capable and can bring about the results you want. McLaren writes from high C1: the conviction that the perfect scenario rarely arrives on its own and that the capable move is to make one. A high scorer assumes there is something they can do to create an opening and goes looking for it. A lower scorer is more likely to wait for conditions to be right, and the waiting itself becomes the thing that keeps the opening from appearing.
The idea that gives the book traction is that clarity and opportunity are downstream of action, not upstream of it. You do not wait to feel ready and then move, you move and the readiness and the opening take shape as you go, which is C1 in motion and close to the drive to aim at something that matters. For a lower-C1 reader the usable version is small and concrete, taking one action toward a vague hope before the conditions look perfect, since the action is what makes them start to. The perfect moment is a mirage. McLaren's argument is that the capable make their moment, and then it looks, in hindsight, like it was waiting for them.
Read your C1 to know how Passion to Purpose lands. If it runs high, McLaren names the agency you already trust and points it at work that matters. If it runs low, the book is the more useful push, an argument that opportunity is something you build rather than await, and that the capacity to build it is one you can grow. The perfect scenario is not coming. McLaren spent her life making hers instead.
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Research Citations
McLaren, A. (2022). Passion to purpose: A seven-step journey to shed self-doubt, find inspiration, and change your life (and the world) for the better. Hay House.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.