Proactivity Defined

Proactivity Defined

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 feeling to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make thing happen.

Look at the word « responsibility » - « response – ability » the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize 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 feelings.

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 conductive to it or not.

We have all known individuals in very difficult circumstances, perhaps with a terminal illness or a severe physical handicap, who maintain magnificent emotional strength. Illustration by Elena.

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 weakness 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 internalzied values.

Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social or psychological. But their response to the stimuly, 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 I made yesterday,» that person cannot say, «I choose otherwise.»

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.

(The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Powerful lessons in personal change. By Stephen R. Covey).

Proactive model: Stimulus — Response — Freedom to choose — self-awareness — independent will — imagination — conscience. Illustration by Elena.