Mastering Proactivity: Tips and Strategies for Taking Initiative and Achieving Success

This article will help you understand the principles and develop the habits you need to become a proactive person.

Pro-active combines the words active, meaning ‘to do something’, with the prefix pro, meaning ‘before’. If you behave proactively, you prepare for something before it happens. The opposite is behaving reactively by waiting for events to unfold before you determine a response. So, if you are a proactive person your actions will dictate how events transpire; If you are reactive, you allow events to dictate your actions.

For example, imagine that flu season is coming. A proactive person washes their hands often and gets vaccinated ahead of time to avoid getting ill, while a reactive person will become ill and take medicine in an attempt to manage that illness afterwards.

This article will help you discover areas in your life where you can think and behave more proactively by focusing on four key areas:

1. Planning in order to influence the future.
2. Taking a proactive mindset in order to boost our effectiveness.
3. Understanding control in order to make better choices.
4. Using proactive language in order to better understand your influence and stay motivated.

Let’s get started!

1. Planning is Everything

It’s true that you cannot always control your environment. However, what you always control is your response and your preparation. Consider this example of a proactive approach toward the achievement of a career goal:

Imagine you’ve set a goal to earn a promotion to manager within one year. You start by gathering information on upcoming manager vacancies. Next, you look up the job profile, the job description, and job postings for similar jobs to determine the competencies that you will need. After establishing what skills and competencies you are missing, you make a plan to fill those gaps. The plan includes taking courses and volunteering to do tasks that will give you the skills and competencies you need; you set a deadline of 9 months to complete your plan so that you’ll have 3 months to apply to manager jobs ahead of your 1-year deadline.

Of course, you cannot always anticipate things so clearly, but by taking a proactive stance, you will be able to face reality as it happens. One of my favourite quotes pertains to this — maybe you’ve heard it:

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

I often see this quote trimmed down to something a little more agile, like “plans are useless, but planning is everything”.

What this quote says is that your plan itself probably won’t be a total success, because life happens and things change. However, the preparation you have done will put you in a position to respond and adapt your approach. For instance, here is an example of a situation where the plan itself isn’t a success, but the planning leads to a success anyhow:

Imagine you want to buy a house, and you want it to be in a specific neighbourhood. You prepare a budget, research the best mortgage terms, read about the risks, hire a realtor and a mortgage broker, gain approval for a loan, and find the house of your dreams; you are all set! Unfortunately, the city has just announced that a new park will be built in that neighbourhood, and the price of homes in that area suddenly increased beyond your budget. However, due to all of the planning you have already done, you are prepared to make the adjustment. You are entirely prepared to purchase a home; all you need to do is research and choose an alternate neighbourhood.

Sometimes our choices have negative consequences; these are called mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes (highly successful people make them constantly), and they cannot be undone. The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it immediately, correct it, and learn from it.

Tip: Organizations should encourage creativity and resourcefulness from proactive individuals in order to create a proactive culture within the organization.

2. Take a Proactive Mindset

“Your behaviour is a function of your decisions, not your conditions.” — Stephen Covey

In order to become effective, we need to take control of how we spend our time and energy. We need to reduce the time and energy we spend behaving reactively and find more ways to behave proactively. We do this by taking a proactive mindset and shedding our reactive mindset wherever and whenever possible. So what does that look like?

Reactive Mindset:

• Focus efforts on things that concern us, but over which we have no control (e.g. the weather, celebrities, politics in other countries..)
• Focus on negativity and weaknesses.
• Blame and accuse others, use reactive language (‘I have to’, ‘I don’t have a choice’), and behave like a victim.
• Negative energy and neglecting areas that we could control causes our influence to shrink.

Proactive Mindset:

• Focus our efforts on things that are in our control.
• Focus on positivity, strength, and opportunities.
• Positive energy and continuous focus on the areas we control causes our influence to grow.

A great opportunity to identify whether you are taking a proactive mindset of a reactive mindset, think back to the last staff meeting you were in. Were you the person who kept saying “what if we did this?”, or were you the person who kept saying “the reason we can’t do that is…”.

If you were the former, then you are trying to come up with solutions — that’s proactive. If you were the latter, you are trying to maintain the status quo, which means carrying on without a solution — that’s reactive.

It’s okay to identify problems, but you have to combine them with a solution. Next time, try saying something like “that's a great idea! While we wouldn’t be able to do it exactly that way, what we could do is…”. That way, you can use your expertise to help solve the problem, grow your influence over the decision-making process, and help keep the group’s energy high and the ideas flowing. You can ignore that advice if you like, and that’s fine of course; however, you might not get invited to the next meeting, which leads to the next step…

3. Understand your Control and Grow Your Influence

As discussed, not everything is in your control, and on the flip-side, there may be many more things in your control than you thought. Learning how to identify what truly is in your control will help you develop your proactive mindset and goals. It’s equally important to identify and dismiss concerns that are out of your control, feeling great about it, and moving on.

So let’s talk about what ‘control’ really means. According to Stephen Covey, there are three kinds:

• Direct control: Involves our own behaviour and is influenced by our habits. Examples include choosing to smoke a cigarette, choosing to go to work, choosing to go to bed early, etc.
• Indirect control: Involves other people’s behaviour and is influenced by our methods of influencing others. For example, when someone is rude or angry with you, you can choose to listen to them and try to understand why they are feeling that way, or you can become defensive and argumentative.
• No control: Involves aspects of our lives that we cannot influence; we must accept and learn to live with them, even if we do not like them. For example, you cannot control the weather, the number of days in a week or the number of cars on the road during rush hour.

When thinking proactively about control, it’s critical that you clearly understand what is and what isn’t in your control. For instance, imagine that you are responsible for ordering inventory for a small trendy clothing store for girls. You probably cannot control what clothes are going to be in demand that season. What you can control is the research and preparation you do to make sure that you have stocked the clothes that will be in demand. You might do this by following fashion influencers, watching the big fashion shows, and placing your orders as early as possible.

In this example, the shop owner should not be upset about not being able to influence the trends, nor should they spend time and energy trying to change that; the right thing to do is to do a really great job at stocking the right inventory, connecting with their demographic, and running a profitable business.

A good way to understand your scope of control is by completing a Circle of Influence exercise. The idea of a Circle of Influence Exercise is that it takes everything that you are interested in (career, sports, hobbies, relationships, the economy, celebrities, etc) and sorts them into different layers of a sphere based on your level of control; these are your ‘Circle of Influence’ at the center and your ‘Circle of Concern’ on the outside. As a proactive person, you will focus your energies on those items in the center of your sphere, and neglect the circle of concern. As you gain influence, you will grow your ‘Circle of Influence’ and it will start to include items that were previously on the outside.

For example, think of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. When he first started to sell books online, ‘reliable logistics’ would have definitely been a concern of his, but it would not have been in his control. Today, it’s an understatement to say that Amazon has an incredible amount of influence in the logistics involved with their business. This is because he scaled his business up to the point that Amazon was able to influence the way logistics are managed across the globe.

4. Language Matters

“Between stimulus and response, (a person) has the freedom to choose” — Stephen Covey

The language you choose to describe a circumstance has a powerful influence on the way you perceive and approach that circumstance.

Imagine your alarm clock has just gone off, signaling that it’s time for you to get ready to go to work. You don’t want to get up, but you tell yourself “I have to because I have to go to work”.

What’s wrong with this?

• Well, it’s not true. You don’t have to go to work. There is no magical force that is going to transport you to your workplace. You can no-show for your shift, or you can call in sick.
• Using this type of language (“I have to”) disrespects the agency you have in your life. It can make you feel like you have been compelled to do something against your will, your life is out of your control, or you are on auto-pilot.
• This type of language can cause you to experience demotivation, loss of confidence, loss of sense of self, and resentment.

At first glance, this may seem a bit over-optimistic. Of course, we have to work, right? Well, with practice, you’ll come to understand that every action you take is the result of a choice between consequences.

I’ll break down the ‘go to work’ example from my perspective, to show you what I mean:

Consequences of going to work:

• I’ll get paid. I can use that money to feed myself, pay for my home and save up to go on a vacation.
• I can work towards completing projects and tasks that will help me get promoted to an even higher paying job, which will help me go on even nicer vacations.

Consequences of not going to work:

• I’ll have the day off. I can get more sleep, I can catch up on projects around the house, and do something fun.
• I’ll have less money. I may not be able to feed myself, pay for my home, or go on vacation.
• I may lose my job entirely, and I may have to move in with my mother.

I would choose to go to work because I like the consequences, but I really do have the choice. There are many people who have made the decision not to go to work, and they are alive and possibly even happier for it. For instance, someone else may really want the extra sleep, and be totally fine with moving in with their mother. They might choose to stay home, and they have the freedom to make that choice.

The point is that every single action you take involves a decision between alternatives; your decision, consciously or not, will be the one that aligns most closely with your values.

You can try this with anything that you think you’ve been forced to do (the chores your spouse asks you to do, the bills you pay, your homework, your errands, etc).

Get in the habit of identifying and ridding yourself of reactive language (such as ‘I have to’) and whenever possible, work with proactive language (‘I choose to’). In doing so, you will become more honest and accurate with what is truly in your control, and what is not.

Final Thoughts

It’s true that there will always be times where one needs to be able to act reactively. It’s not possible to plan and account for every possible scenario. For instance, eating healthy, getting exercise, and saving money from each paycheck are all proactive behaviors that won’t necessarily help you if the earth gets hit by a meteor.

However, you’ll find that there are always opportunities to proactively develop your abilities to react. By prescribing to the principles in this article, you can give yourself the best opportunity to succeed in even the most unexpected situations.

Thank you for reading!

My name is Chris, and my mission is to elevate standards and skills across the Management profession. I want managers to be better, and I’m taking personal responsibility to help them get better.

I train coaches and managers to build winning cultures through trust, pride, ownership and empowerment. I’m especially interested in harnessing and developing the power of the front-line and entry-level staff.

I enjoy science fiction, 80’s hair-metal, and spending time with my partner and two orange cats.

I’d love to connect with you! Find me on Twitter and say “hi”!