Unfortunately, most people don’t believe you can live any way you want. They don’t believe you can shape your direction or change your present working and living situations.
On the surface, it looks like there are lots of reasons. But if you look deeper you’ll find that we all have 2 basic modes of operation that are responsible for the difference.
“Proactive Mode” and “Reactive Mode”
“Proactive Mode” looks like this — you are in control. You use your time, energy, imagination, and creativity to solve strategically-selected, high-priority problems.
For some reason, I relate “proactive” with “doomsday prepper” and I can’t help but laugh.
To be honest, being really good at using a bow and arrow like Katniss in The Hunger Games would be pretty cool!
The proactive mode would mean preparedness on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis. If you are running your own business it would mean you have to live connected to the details and be future-minded. You would be juggling the short term plan and the long term plan.
“Reactive Mode” would be the alternative. This is when life happens to you. It’s when conditions around you dictate how you need to live and what you spend your time on.
Most people spend most of their time between these two modes.
Reactive living is the default. It’s like an autopilot that hasn’t been programmed well. Like a GPS with an incomplete map and an unclear destination. A ship without a rudder. We all have way too much re-active living go on. And that is usually the reason we feel like we are living small, powerless lives.
In business, it can be really easy to become reactionary and respond primarily to what is directly in front of us, rather than employ some of our creativity, genius, or high-quality attention to being proactive.
The reality is that we are trading time for money, and we need to change that. Every time we take a break, we feel we are turning off the “faucet” of revenue — we are trying to figure out what kind of “loss” we are going to experience in our time off. Our muscles are so addicted to doing the work that they don’t feel ‘right’ taking a break.
It’s true that you can’t live in a proactive mode in all areas of your life, all the time. We only have so much time and attention to use. So you need to select the areas that are most important to you and focus your pro-activity towards them.
We should be working in order to live, not living to work. We need time to regroup, dream, idealize, strategize, and breathe!
Learning how to become proactive instead of reactive can be a major shift that changes everything for you. It’s the difference between living life intentionally and living life accidentally.
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