BY STEPHEN R .COVEEY
The first habit is 1)proactivity. Be proactive. The word proactivity is fairly common in management literature, but you won't find it in the dictionary. It means more than merely taking 2)initiatives, it means that as a human being you take responsibility for your own life.
Look at the word responsibility, ability to choose your response, response-ability. I suggest effective people are proactive, thatis they take responsibility, their behavior is a product of their own decisions, based on values, rather than being a product of their conditions, based on feelings. For instance, you are planning a picnic with your family. You're excited. You have all the preparations. You've decided where to go, and then it becomes stormy...killing your plan. Proactive people carry weather within them. They realize what their purpose really was, and they creatively have a picnic elsewhere even if it's in their own basement with some special games, and make the best of that situation. The opposite of being proactive is to be reactive. Reactive people would say, "What's the use, we can't do anything," "Oh this is so upsetting after all of our preparations we've made these arrangements." And the whole spirit of 3)negativism will tend to pervade those people's minds and also the family. That's being reactive.
Being proactive is really just being true to your human nature. Your basic nature is to act, and not be acted upon. That's true, despite widely accepted theories of 4)determinism used to explain human nature. Determinism says, that you don't really choose anything, that whatyou call choices, are nothing more than automatic responses to outside conditions or stimuli.
The language of reactive people, are people who are determined by their environment, or by their conditions, or by their conditioning or their genetic makeup. "This I can't, that's my nature." "...can't, don't have time." "I have to, I have to." "I must." See the whole spirit is of that language is the transfer of responsibility, I am not responsible, able to choose my response, the spirit is, I am not responsible, psychologically isn't that easier to say than "I'm a flake,"and "I'm irresponsible." The problem is, this is a self-fulfilling 5)prophecy. People who believe they are determined will produce the evidence to support the belief, and they increasingly feel victimized and out of control. They're not in charge of their life or their destiny at all.
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