Power Hour: New Year - New You
Want to Change? - Your Change Starts from Within
Be Proactive - Begin With The End in Mind - Put First Things First
To Be Proactive is to have the gift of self-knowledge or self-awareness - the ability to choose your own response. A proactive person is driven by values that are independent of other people’s reactions or responses. We can choose to use difficult situations to build our character and develop the ability to handle such situations better in the future. Being proactive means assessing the situation and developing a positive response to it. (I work on this everyday.. I have a lot to change, and I am defnitely a work in progress. )
Out of the multitude of events that occur every day, there’s only a subset that are actually of concern to us - the rest really don’t matter. Within that set of events that are of concern is a smaller set that you actually can do anything about, your sphere of influence, so to speak. There are events and things you can change, and there events and things you cannot change. Now, where is your focus? Is it on those events that you can do something about, or on the ones that are out of your control?
The idea is don’t spend your time focusing on events that you can’t control; instead, focus on what you can control. Let’s say, for example, that you’re waiting for a very important phone call, contract to be signed, or event to happen. Some people stress out waiting for the call, - that’s a bad habit because you can’t control when the phone call comes. On the other hand, others simply spend their time focusing on the things they can control - the phone call will eventually come, right?
How can you achieve that? Count the number of times you focus on things you can’t alter the outcome of in a given day. Do you daydream about unachievable things? Do you worry about stuff you can’t affect or change? Cast those efforts aside and spend your time on things that you can affect and change.
Begin with the End in Mind is a gift of imagination and conscience, and occurs when you prioritize and plan with 'The End' in mind. 'The End' represents the purpose or driving force in your life. To engage in this habit you need to have a dream. By defining your own vision, and setting goals, measurable progress towards the fulfillment of your dream can occur. When employing imagination and conscience—two unique human capacities—difficult situations can be alleviated. By using imagination and conscience, you don’t rely on memory. If you rely on memory or history, chances are you will lose your cool, make judgments regarding other people, and will probably exacerbate the situation.
Taking 'The End' literally, imagine your funeral and what others there are saying and thinking about you. What do you want them to say? The things that you want them to say are the real core values that you care about the most, and thus they should be the ones that you focus your life’s work on, both personally and professionally.
This leads to writing your personal mission statement. Can you really codify in a few sentences what your mission in life is? It seems overused and common, but it’s truly effective if you spend the time to work out what it really means and actually state it in words - in writing.
Put First Things First is the gift of will power. It is a life of advantage and influence. To really understand and apply this, you need to spend time doing what fits into your personal mission, observing the proper balance between production and building production capacity. Identify the key roles that you take on in life, and make time for each of them.
Most things that we do each day can be divided according to urgency and importance: they’re either urgent or not urgent, and they’re either important or not important. Obviously, in our lives, we wish for the things we do to be important, but we’d also like for them not to be urgent, because urgent things cause stress. So, ideally, an effective person focuses on things that are important but not urgent.
We should strive to do this in all aspects of our life, no matter which hat we’re wearing at the moment: worker, parent, spouse, volunteer, and so on. Then, within each of those roles, one should define specific goals that they wish to accomplish, important short-term goals. Once you’ve defined a couple of goals for the upcoming week for each of your roles, literally schedule them in. Add these things to your schedule and don’t let anything interfere with them. Because these items are not urgent, you have some flexibility on when to do them, but because they’re important, you must schedule them and keep it on the schedule.
