If you’re proactive, you don’t have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.
~ Stephen Covey ~
In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey stresses the importance of being proactive.
Being proactive means that you take conscious control over your life. You set goals and work to achieve them. Instead of reacting to events and waiting for things to happen, proactive people create their own events and opportunities.
Most people live their lives reacting to situations as they occur. To be honest, reacting to certain events can be all well and good. However, it can become a problem when that is the primary way a person decides to act. Instinctively reacting to stimulation does not lead to good decision making.
In Covey’s book, he mentions a gap between stimulus and response. In that gap is the potential for us to choose our response to a situation. There are four human qualities that give us that power to CHOOSE a response.
4 Basic Human Qualities
- Self-awareness – this is the understanding that you can make a choice between stimulus and response. For example, if someone insults you, you can choose to not to lash out in anger. If someone offers you a cookie, you can choose not to eat it.
- Conscience – this is the ability to consult with yourself to decide what is right for you. You can make a decision based on your own principles, regardless of what is acceptable socially at any given moment.
- Creative Imagination – this is the ability to see all the different responses available to you. Using your imagination, you can mentally generate and then evaluate different options.
- Independent Will – this is the basic freedom to choose your own response. No one can force you to conform to what others might expect from you.
Reacting rather than being proactive may be linked to being weak in one of the above areas.
How weakness in one of the four basic qualities can affect our ability to be proactive.
Remember, there are four basic qualities. If you spend too much time in a state of low consciousness, you may never reach the level of self-awareness to make proactive life decisions. Maybe your consciousness is so foggy that you are not even sure what you want from life. For example, when something just doesn’t feel right to you, do you look to others to decide how you should feel about it? Maybe you’re not taking the time you need to visualize alternatives. Or maybe you are restricting access to your independent will by conforming to others’ expectations.
This subject came up full force in a comment by one of my nutritional coaching clients wrote to me. She was in a situation where she felt compelled to enjoy a special piece of cake with a co-worker. Because she chose to share the moment with her co-worker, she proactively decided to be very careful the rest of the day in response to her conscious decision to enjoy the cake.
She wrote: “Therefore, I was extra careful for the rest of the day and it paid off! Yaaay! I guess it helps to be reactive sometimes, too.”
She made the choice to eat the cake and was still able to lose one-half of a pound (she was on maintenance).
It can be argued that on some level we always reacting to external and internal events. The difference between being proactive or being reactive lies in the “mental processing” that occurs between the gap of the event and the response to the event. A proactive person will apply the four basic qualities to choose a response. Moreover, a proactive person will invest the time to make a conscious life choice and follow through.
When I wrote her back, I explained that being proactive put her in the mindset to be extra careful the rest of the day. She made a conscious decision to enjoy the moment with her co-worker, and then made the conscious decision to be careful the rest of the day.
A reactive response may have gone like this: ”To heck with it, that piece of cake I just ate ruined all my chances, so I am gonna binge”.
There is a difference.
Choose to be proactive.
Would you like some help in practicing pro-activity? Consider attending my Create Your Life Online Vision Board Workshop … we will be working on discovering our dreams and then developing an action plan to accomplish them. Proactive at its finest!!! If you would like to know more, please click here.