“Be Proactive” is habit #1 from Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But what exactly does being proactive really mean to most of us? Taking conscious control over your life, and setting goals and working to achieve them. Do you want to react to events and wait for opportunities, or go out and create your own events and opportunities?
Being proactive means that instead of reacting to events, you can consciously engineer your own events.
Many people think reactively. It can become a challenge and that’s all there is to a person’s life — nothing more than instinctively reacting to stimuli.
Stephen Covey points out that there’s a gap between stimulus and response, and within that gap lies the potential for us to choose our response. There are four special human endowments that give us this power:
Self-awareness – the understanding that you do have a choice between stimulus and response. If someone insults you, you can choose not to become angry.
Conscience – the ability to consult your inner compass to decide what is right for you. You can make decisions based on unchanging principles, regardless of what is socially favored at that time.
Creative Imagination – the ability to visualize alternative responses. By using your imagination, you can mentally generate and evaluate different options.
Independent Will – You have the freedom to choose your own unique response. You aren’t forced to conform to what others expect from you.
Some spend too much time in a state of low consciousness and never reach the level of awareness necessary to make proactive life decisions. Has your conscience has become confused by society’s conditioning? Are you sure what you want from life? Do you look to others to decide how you should feel? It can be a challenge to visualize alternatives, but also necessary not to be restricted by the pressures to conform to others’ expectations.
On some level there’s proof that exists we’re always reacting to events, whether they be on an external or internal level. The difference between proactivity and reactivity can then be viewed in terms of what degree of “mental processing” occurs during the gap between stimulus and response. A proactive person will apply the four human endowments to choose a response (or not to choose one). What’s key is that a proactive person will invest the time to make conscious life choices and follow through on them.
Reactive people tend to be out of touch with their core values. Instead of running their lives based on unchanging core principles, they pick up temporary values from others. If no special opportunities come their way, they’ll stay at the same job year after year. They go with the flow of the people and circumstances, but they don’t direct the flow. Their life is mostly lived on autopilot.
Proactive people, are aware of their core values. They consciously make key decisions based on those values. They create their own opportunities and direct the flow of their own lives. Even when things are pretty good, they’re still making conscious choices. Proactive people will take actions that often seem mysterious to reactive people. They may suddenly quit their job to start a new business, even though everything seemed to be going well for them. A proactive person will still pay attention to external events, but they’ll pilot themselves to their desired destination regardless of those events.
Powerful examples of reactive vs. proactive language:
• Where is the industry going? [Where shall I go next, and how will I get there?]
• I don’t have time to exercise. [How shall I make time to exercise?]
• How much money can I expect to make if I do X? [How much money do I want to make, and what will I do to earn it?]
• I’ll try it and see what happens. [I'll do it.]
• Nothing really inspires me. [What would I tackle if I knew I couldn't fail?]
• What is the meaning of life? [What is the meaning I wish to give to my life?]
Everyone has a mixture of both proactivity and reactivity. You can be extremely proactive in one area, while other parts of your life have slipped into unconscious autopilot. Take time to use your human endowments of self-awareness, conscience, creative imagination, and independent will to shine a light on the areas of your life you’d like to work on and consciously choose to get things moving. If you don’t like where the currents are taking you, then change course. Don’t wait for an opportunity to arrive; engineer your own!
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