This chapter motivates the project of the book by arguing against the decompositional picture of action. It is argued that this picture alienates agents from their own actions, by restricting their role to merely providing goals and plans while delegating execution to sub-personal mechanisms. Through analysis of agential control – the distinctive guidance agents exercise over their intentional actions – the chapter demonstrates that standard approaches fail to capture genuine agent involvement. Special attention is given to contemporary reliability-based accounts of control, as well as to approaches that appeal to knowledge-how. Neither approach, it is argued, suffices to avoid the problems with the decompositional picture. The chapter concludes that an alternative account is needed, where the mind is genuinely embodied in overt action. As part of clearing the ground for the arguments that follow, the chapter provides responses to recent, empirically motivated scepticism about the concept of intentional action, and suggests that agential control is the ‘mark’ of intentional action.