You are going to spend a lot of time in your life making choices. If you are reactive, this will be an agonizing process of looking at the pros and cons, weighing them against your past, and turning into a fortune-teller to see about the future. It’s exhausting, anxiety inducing, and a trap. If you are reactive, you are stuck in this cycle, on repeat, with no end in sight.
Being reactive to choices means that the choices themselves have control over us. We are waiting for the conditions to arise before we notice them. We make the choice to try to take back control. But stuck in this pattern, we never will. It’s a constant, self-fulfilling prophecy of bad choice after bad choice. The choice itself takes control and we make decisions on the fly.
Being proactive with choices means that we make them before they even happen. We are making choices by creating the conditions in which they will occur. If you have your priorities, business and personal, in place you are defining the space in which the choices can happen. If you have your growth plan in place, you are setting up the confines of the choices as they come. In this way, the choices are making themselves.
Reflection becomes the key, before and after those choices. It is not wasted time to identify and plan for your future. Designing appropriate responses to conditions before they arise is important. Analyzing the results after they happen is key to making better choices in the future.
Take the time to reflect so you can make the choices, not have them make you.
