Reactive people are controlled by their feelings. If your feelings are controlling your actions, it’s because you’ve abandoned your responsibility of your own actions and empowered your own feelings to control them.

Stephen Covey talks about the Circle of Influence and the Circle of Concern in his book 7 habits of Highly Effective People. This can really help you become more self-aware in terms of where you’re putting your time and energy and figure out your degree of proactivity.

What he does here is separate the things that you have no emotional or mental involvement in by creating a circle of concern – so put things that you can’t do anything about in the Circle of Concern. Now put things that you can do something about in the Circle of Influence.

People that are proactive focus on what’s in the Circle of Influence, the things they can do something about.

Reactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and things that they have no control over. Their focus results in blaming others, reactive language, and playing that victim role. The more your mind is if focused on empowering the things that you have no control over to dictate how you think and feel, the more your Circle of Influence shrinks, and your Circle of Concern grows.

As long as you are working in your Circle of Concern, you empower the things that you can’t control to control you.

When you’re thinking more in that proactive mindset of focusing on the things that you can do on a physical and mental level. Whenever a difficult situation presents itself, you’ve trained your mind to focus on the things that you can do instead of the things that you can’t, and the decision of what to do becomes easier to reach.

An example of something that happened to me a few months ago was I used to work for this non-profit organization, and we had a huge change in our B2C marketing strategy which I was in charge of presenting our new direction to about 30 to 40 people.  I sent an email to everyone earlier, but was afraid that people wouldn’t check their emails. Luckily, part of the sign up process was to include your contact information which included people’s phone numbers. So I personally texted every single person and made sure they knew when the presentation starts and how long it was gona last.

Once I’ve done that, I knew I did what I could to get people to show up, so I focused my energy on my content instead of worrying about whether people are gonna even show up.

Focus on what you CAN do instead of what you CAN’T.

Follow me @Marwanalshafei where I spark rainbows within people’s subconscious and make the world go round n’ round.