How can proactivity change your life?
During their conversation, God told Bruce Nolan: “People want me to do everything for them but what they don’t realize is they have the power”.
Well, this power is proactivity!
What is proactivity?
Proactivity is mostly related to Stephen Covey, American Author, educator, keynote speaker, and businessman, who developed this concept in his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” (they became 8).
The simple definition of proactivity is acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes.
But in reality, and terms of practice, it is a more elaborated and beautiful concept.
How does Stephen Covey explain proactivity?
Covey, wrote about 8 habits for highly effective people, and he placed proactivity as the key to implementing the other habits.
“It is the foundational habit because all the other habits flow out of it”.
Proactivity makes you the product of your values rather than your feelings.
And if we are talking about the business environment, the organization will be the product of your decisions rather than your conditions.
So, we see here that we are talking about “activity” instead of “passiveness”, “doing” instead of “responding” and the action is coming from within rather than the outside, as much as it is related to our consciousness instead of our unconsciousness.
Covey, makes a point here: “the underlying principle of habit 1, is to take responsibility… You and I have the capacity to choose our response”.
How does this relate to the story of Bruce Almighty?
In the story of Bruce Nolan, we saw that he was blaming God for his miserable life, and everything happening to him.
But after his conversation with God, his attitude and response changed.
1- He became more patient, he waited in the traffic instead of using his superpower to arrive quickly to his destination.
2- When he saw the source of the traffic, which was a broken car, he helped the owner of the car to park it aside.
3- He had a problem with his dog, he pees in the house near the sofa… Instead of getting angry like he always does, Bruce decided to train him to pee outside and it worked.
4- He got back to his old job, cheerfully and willingly because he understood that he has a gift in the entertainment programs and not as a news anchor, and he apologized to Ivan his opponent for misusing his position.
The problems here are the same but the responses are different!
Bruce was acting proactively rather than reactively!
And I cannot find better words to describe this transformation than the words of Covey:
“It’s not what people do to us that hurts us in the most fundamental sense, it’s our chosen response to what they do to us that hurts us”.
To sum up things
Proactivity doesn’t ask you to fall into the cheesy positivity or being indifferent towards the events happening around you, instead, it asks you to be active enough to anticipate what can happen, or choose the best response to the events, especially the bad ones, that response which can move things instead paralyzing you.
Finally, you can never be successful if you make yourself a victim!
