Proactive – I hate that word!

Lifestyle design is personal.

It has to be built upon your feelings, your needs and most of all your passion.  It isn’t something that anyone can create for you or plug you into a cookie cutter model.  That is why the models you used in the business environment are poor choices when you create your lifestyle design, particularly if you are retired.  The buzzwords may have seemed to hold meaning in the workplace but they were mostly a cover for manipulation and coercion.  The word proactive is a good example.  Consultants urge proactivity but when you did deeper, the word is a meaningless con job.

But surely you want to be proactive

I have probably spent too much time in business meetings in my lifetime, attended too many business conferences, read too many corporate mission statements and written too many personal development plans over my career but I convulse when ever I hear the word proactive.

You know, the opposite of antiactive.

I can’t remember when I first heard the term. At first it must have seemed fresh and positive. It must have brought a new perspective to the whole world of personal development and business. Take the word apart and we find pro meaning positive and forward looking and active meaning not inert. Put it together and it means acting in a positive fashion. So what distinguishes PRO active from just plain active?

Not just any old action!

My first thought is that it must be the direction of the action. Pro-action is moving forward where action might go in any direction. So it means more than just taking action. You must take special, forward moving action. So if that is true what about the times when you catch yourself going in the wrong direction and you immediately change course, maybe going backwards or sideways from the direction you were originally going. What kind of action is that? RE action or maybe RETRO action? I don’t know.

The secret ingredient is…..

When we are urged to be proactive, what are they trying to tell us? What is the special message about what we are doing? They want us to act; to do something but how is our action different from just plain action? What is the additive to the action that makes it PRO action? What is the secret ingredient?

It is self-hypnosis.

From my years of doing my best to be a productive employee, PRO is a code word for buy in to whatever the consultant or the corporate manager is hawking. It is a way to set up a Pavlovian response to make the listener choose to do what the speaker says. It is so much more effective than telling us what to do because we resist direct instructions. We do want to be Proactive however so it the speaker tells us that X is proactive and that we should be Proactive, then we, eager little lemmings will decide to do X all on our own – because we are Proactive. We feel good because we are proactive and because we are proactive we do X. We become mindless followers. It is a code word to hypnotize ourselves.

Proactive or anti-lemming, you decide.

So that is why I am repulsed by the word proactive. Instead of urging us to think about our actions and take charge, it tricks us into accepting whatever the speaker is advocating. It triggers an unconditional response to accept the recommendation and act, without questioning the value of the recommendation.  Stop being proactive and start thinking for yourself!