Reactive vs Proactive

I missed writing my essay yesterday. For the whole day, I had not prepared what I was going to write about. So when I got into my writing hour, I could only scribble a few thoughts.

We all do this sort of thing - make last moment travel plans, or not talking about promotion with your manager until the cycle starts, or feel depressed when the weather is bad etc.These are all forms of reactive behaviour. We decide our actions based on external events.

When you are reactive in doing things, a lot of time is spent in firefighting of some sorts. You have to take actions quickly and with very limited information at hand e.g. if you are booking flight tickets at the last moment, you will pay a lot more. It can be very stressful and expensive.

External events are outside of one's control. So in reactive mindset, you blame the circumstances or others for your problems. Unfortunately, that never helps. So you find yourself in such situations against and again. Your mind will jump from one emotional state to another depending on what happens in the world. Your happiness will depend on things and people that you don't control.

But it does not have to be like this.

I believe that everyone chooses how to approach life. If you’re proactive, you focus on preparing. If you’re reactive, you end up focusing on repairing. ― John C. Maxwell

Being proactive means you prepare ahead of time.

You will know what things you control and what you cannot. So even if something bad happens, you understand what led to this. You see no need to blame others. You take up responsibility for the outcomes. So you will feel like you have control in your life and over your emotions.

I now realised my mistake of not preparing ahead of time for my writing course.