Things that always keep you active

What is Proactivity ?

While the word  proactivity is now  fairly common in  management literature, it is a word you won’t find in most dictionaries. It means more  than merely  taking initiative. It means that as human   beings, we are  responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of  our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.

Look at the word responsibility—“response-ability”—the ability  to choose your response. Highly  proactive people   recogn that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior  is  a product of their   own conscious choice, based on values, rather   than a product of their  conditions,  based on  feeling.

Because  we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning and   conditions,  it is because we have, by conscious decision  or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us.

In   making such a choice, we become reactive. Reactive people   are often affected by  their   physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people   can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains  or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn’t a  function of whether the weather is  conducive to it or  not.

Reactive  people are also affected by their social environment, by the “social weather.” When people   treat  them  well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people  build  their  emotional lives around   the behavior of others, empowering  the weaknesses of other people to control them.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are  driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values—carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.

Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological.  But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.

As  Eleanor Roosevelt observed, “No one can hurt you without your consent.” In the words of Gandhi, “They cannot take away our self respect  if we do not give it to them.” It is our willing permission, our consent to  what  happens to  us, that hurts us far more than what happens to  us        in  the first place.

I admit this is very hard to accept emotionally, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our misery in the name of circumstance or someone else’s behavior. But until a person   can say deeply   and    honestly, “I  am what I am today because of the choices  made yesterday,”  that person cannot say,  “I choose otherwise.”

Once  in Sacramento when I was speaking  on the subject of proactivity,  a  woman in the audience  stood up in  the middle   of my   presentation  and started  talking excitedly. It was  a large audience, and as   a number of  people turned to look at her, she suddenly became aware of  what  she  was doing, grew embarrassed  and sat back down. But  she seemed to find it difficult to restrain herself and started talking to  the people   around her. She seemed so happy.

I could hardly wait for a break to find out what had  happened. When it  finally came, I immediately went to her and asked if she would be willing   to  share her experience.

“You just can’t  imagine what’s happened to me!” she exclaimed. “I’m   a full time nurse to the most miserable, ungrateful man you  can possibly imagine. Nothing I do is good enough for him. He       never expresses appreciation; he hardly even acknowledges  me. He constantly harps at me  and finds fault with everything I do. This  man has made my life   miserable and I often take my frustration out on my family. The  other nurses feel   the same way. We almost pray for  his demise.

“And for  you to have the gall to stand up there and  suggest  that nothing can hurt me, that no one can hurt me without my consent, and that I  have  chosen my own emotional life of being        miserable—well, there was just no  way I  could buy into that.

“But I kept thinking about it. I  really went inside myself and began to ask, ‘Do I have the power to choose  my response?’

“When I   finally realized that I do   have  that power, when I swallowed   that bitter pill and realized that I had  chosen to  be miserable, I also realized that  I could choose  not to be miserable.

“At that moment I stood up. I felt   as though I  was being let out  of San Quentin. I wanted to  yell  to  the whole world, ‘I am free! I am let out  of prison! No longer am I  going to be  controlled by the  treatment of  some person.’”

It’s not what happens to us, but our   response to what  happens to  us that hurts us. Of course, things can hurt us  physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity,    does   not have  to be  hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult  experiences become the crucibles that  forge  our character and develop the internal powers, the freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to inspire others to do so as well.

Frankl is  one of many who  have  been  able   to develop   the personal  freedom in difficult circumstances to lift and inspire others. The  autobiographical  accounts of Vietnam  prisoners of war provide  additional persuasive testimony of the transforming power of such  personal  freedom and the  effect of the responsible use of  that freedom on  the  prison culture  and on the prisoners, both then  and now.

We have all known individuals in  very difficult circumstances, perhaps  with   a terminal illness   or a  severe physical handicap, who maintain   magnificent emotional strength. How inspired we are   by their integrity!  Nothing has a greater,  longer  lasting impression upon  another person  than   the  awareness  that someone has transcended suffering,  has  transcended circumstance, and is embodying and expressing  a  value that inspires and ennobles and lifts life.

One of the most inspiring times Sandra and I have ever had  took place over a four-year period  with a dear  friend of ours named Carol, who  had a wasting cancer  disease. She had been one of Sandra’s bridesmaids,  and they had been best  friends for over 25 years.

When Carol was in  the very last stages  of the disease, Sandra spent time   at her bedside helping her write her  personal history. She returned  from   those protracted   and  difficult sessions almost transfixed  by  admiration  for her friend’s courage  and her desire to write  special  messages to be given to her children at different stages in their lives.

Carol would take  as   little pain-killing medication as  possible,  so that she had full access   to her  mental  and emotional faculties. Then  she would whisper into  a tape recorder or to Sandra directly as she  took   notes. Carol was  so proactive, so brave, and so concerned about others  that she became an enormous source of inspiration to many people around her.

I’ll  never forget the experience of looking deeply into Carol’s  eyes the day before she  passed away and sensing out of that deep hollowed agony a  person of tremendous intrinsic worth. I  could see in her eyes a life  of character, contribution, and service  as   well as love and concern  and  appreciation.

Many times over   the years, I  have  asked groups of people  how many have  ever experienced  being in the presence of a dying individual    who   had a magnificent attitude and communicated love and compassion  and served in unmatchable ways  to the very end. Usually,  about  one-fourth of  the  audience  responds in the affirmative. I  then  ask  how   many of them will never forget these individuals— how many were  transformed,  at  least temporarily, by the  inspiration   of such courage, and were deeply moved and motivated to  more  noble acts  of service and compassion. The same people respond again, almost inevitably.

Someone suggests that  there are three central  values in life—the experiential, or that which happens  to us; the  creative, or that which we  bring into existence;  and the attitudinal,  or our response in difficult  circumstances such as terminal  illness.

My own   experience  with   people confirms  the point Frankl makes—that  the highest  of the three values is attitudinal,  in   the paradigm  or  reframing sense. In other words, what matters most is how   we respond  to  what  we experience in life.

Difficult   circumstances often create paradigm shifts, whole new  frames of reference by which people see   the world and themselves  and others  in it, and what life is asking of  them. Their  larger perspective reflects the  attitudinal values that lift and inspire us all.