How Are You Acting?

As you go through your day, are you aware of how you’re acting? No, I’m not talking about performing your favorite scene from Romeo and Juliet, I’m talking about how you’re coping with what happens to you and around you through the day. When something happens you have a choice to be reactive or proactive.

A lot of times, being reactive to a situation is the norm. When you react to something you’re not in control; the very act of reacting is the result of a stimulus in your life, cause and effect. When you’re reacting, you’re living your life through your emotions. You’re allowing circumstance to drive your decisions. This is where the seed of victim thinking is planted and springs to life. Your focus is on the problem, how it’s affecting you, and how unfair it is. Many times being reactive is caused by being so engrossed in doing things or being so checked out that you don’t see what’s happening around you. You don’t see the signs that have been in front of you for months and now here you are. The typical byproduct of reactive living is some combination of blame, excuses, and denial. Being reactive cuts down on your creativity and solution thinking. Reactive living causes you to shrink from life and miss out on becoming all you’re meant to be.

An alternative to being reactive is becoming proactive. It’s looking around in your life, seeing the signs, and taking appropriate actions to ward off these issues. Instead of being blindsided by an employee leaving and reacting to it, you see your employee’s energy and enthusiasm waning. So you bring them out to lunch and have a conversation as to what’s going on and finding out how you can help them. Crisis averted. Instead of being understaffed in your busy season and putting ridiculous pressure on you and your people, you start looking for help months before the season starts so you can have the right amount of manpower that’s fully trained to help carry the load. Being proactive is living your life through your intelligence, intuition, and experience. Instead of staring at the problem, you’re searching for solutions and your creativity is your best tool for solving your upcoming issues. Living proactively allows you to learn and grow.

To switch from living life reactively to proactively is pretty easy. First, you need to take ownership of your current situation. Placing blame deflects responsibility and you have to be responsible in order to improve your situation. Next, you need to be aware. Stop doing it, doing it, doing it. Come up, take a breath of air, engage with life, and see where you’re at figuratively speaking. Then change the quality of your questions. Tony Robbins says that if you want a better life, you’ve got to ask yourself better questions. Instead of asking yourself why the bad stuff always happens to you, start asking yourself what you can do to deal with this issue. The third thing you do is take action; take massive, confident action.

Before you know it you’ll be living a better life, having more fun than you deserve and showing everyone around you just how AMAZING you are!