GIVING YOURSELF OVER TO PROACTIVE LIVING.
The foundation that would empower you into proactive living and get you to avoid being a victim under any circumstance involves examining yourself and your behaviours in order to identify what to keep and build on, what to jettison off and what life skills and strategies to acquire. Acquiring life skills helps you to aspire for more with greater passion and commitment. To create a major change in your life and to lever yourself into proactive living depends on your consciously acknowledging that you want more since you cannot change what you do not acknowledge. The ultimate goal of accepting and forgiving yourself for your flaws and fallacies and then making a fresh start will become achievable only when you honestly own up to yourself your fears, guilt and insecurities.
When we shine the light of our awareness on the fears that we often hide in the dark recesses of our mind, when we probe its thought system, we tend to demystify and unravel them. Besides, fear often puts us in a state of inaction which is really the worst state we will find ourselves in if we attempt to engage with the feared situation. So, we are not really worse off in trying. Under the influence of fear, our state in not trying is equivalent to our state in trying. Hence, we do not really lose anything in trying. A postmortem of why things didn’t work out will get you up to make a better run at your goal the next time and create a better atmosphere for proactive living. A desperation for something often invites in the fear that the desperate need may not be met. There are so many instances in our lives, vouching for our Completeness and Wholeness, which we can use to soothe our desperation.
To get real with yourself, to prefer proactive living to reactive living, is to have very realistic expectations about the outcome of undertaking a challenge. What truly upsets us is the violation or the voiding of our expectations. Being honest and realistic with ourselves prevents our expectations from being violated. A trend of consistent past behaviour is a good predictor of current behaviour. We reduce our likelihood of being upset when we tailor our expectations to the idea of who people choose to be. Get along to identify all the good things about yourself, your skills, strengths, abilities. Then, nurture them, so you can trust yourself in critical moments and set about making space for proactive living. Knowing your strengths and shortcomings gives on to a self that is more informed, confident and purposeful in tempering the shadow aspects. This self-awareness makes you less vulnerable to the judgements and attacks of others.
Knowing yourself should get you over to work for what you want in life. The proactive living is all about being goal oriented. At the same time, it is also about asking yourself what your precise definition of success is in the various roles that resonate to being a parent, wife, husband, son, daughter, employee, employer or student.
A postmortem of your failed relationship or other venture enables you to itemise the things you should have done but didn’t do or the things you shouldn’t have done but did. This process empowers you to create an action plan of things to do or not to do as you move forward into proactive living. A goal is measurable and defined by an action plan and a timeline. The specific behaviours or operations that give on to the goal must be clear.
Standing up for what you want doesn’t cheapen you in the least, instead, it paves the way for proactive living. For others to believe in you, you have to believe in yourself first.
