Pursuing Proactive
Host: Isaac Mashman · May 11, 2022 · Episode 103 · 9 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, yo, yo. What is going on, everybody? Isaac Mashman here, and welcome back to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show that is all about helping you become a more capable individual through me sharing my experiences and knowledge in business, life, and all things personal growth. Today I want to talk about proactiveness, the state of being proactive. How can you promote being proactive in your own life, in your own business, in your own organization, and apply it when it comes to building your personal brand or getting into better shape and literally every other possible use case, career, business related? The list goes on and on and on.
Now I want to start off and talk about what it means to be proactive, and I have the definition right here from Oxford Languages, the number one dictionary that you use whenever you Google a word.
Now, proactive is an adjective. It means creating or controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than responding to it after it has happened. The example it gives is "be proactive in identifying and preventing potential problems." Now the thing is, the best way I can say and define proactive without this boring Oxford Languages definition is being ahead of schedule, being ahead of the problems, being ahead of the things that you have going on. Rather than seeking and expecting a client to come to you, you are now going after the client yourself and looking for business. Rather than expecting your business to grow, you are now going out and looking for ways you can grow your business.
You see, proactiveness, being proactive, is one of the biggest traits, one of the biggest character traits that you have to have in order to become successful or have success in any area of your life.
You cannot expect things to happen. You cannot be on the couch watching TV and think that your business is going to grow. You also cannot expect to be sitting in some dark room meditating and manifesting your goals and think the law of attraction is going to just magically present all of the money and your dreams will come true. That is not being proactive. Yes, manifestation and thinking and visualization are extremely important, but what's more important is actually going out and applying and taking action towards getting those very things. You can think, oh, I want $1,000, and you can be thinking about it, or you can go and ask a thousand people for a dollar.
You can go and ask one person for a thousand. That is being proactive. You are going out and seeking it rather than expecting that which you want and desire to come to you naturally. You see, in order for you to get into shape, you cannot expect your body to just shed those pounds for you or for you to gain that six-pack.
No, you have to go for the walks, go for the runs, climb the mountains, and expect yourself to get results only after you are taking action. You have to be proactive. When it comes to your career, you cannot expect your job, your boss, or the superiors at your job to just say, hey, Johnny, here you go, here's a raise. You just gained a $20,000 raise. No, you have to do things that demonstrate your ability and show you are worthy and deserving of that raise. You have to go out and make yourself known, make yourself available, and put yourself in those situations where you are being seen.
Now your boss is saying, wow, Johnny is going above and beyond for the company, for the team, for the culture. This is somebody who deserves a raise.
You are now on their radar. But if you are not being proactive... Say we have two different people. You have one person who's working a job. They're just doing their normal job at the bare minimum, clocking off at the bare minimum, and not doing anything else, not showing up to any events. But then you have the second person who shows up to every event, who stays maybe a little bit later, shows up a little bit earlier, or does everything that they need to get done in an exceptional time period. Then who do you think, out of those two examples, will get the attention of their superiors?
Exactly. It's the same thing with building a business and having a restaurant. You have one restaurant that is opening and they don't do any marketing, and then you have a second restaurant that is opening and all of a sudden they're doing all of the marketing, all of the branding. They're going out and telling every single person about this new restaurant.
Which restaurant is going to have a better grand opening? The one that sits and does nothing, the bare minimum, or the restaurant that goes above and beyond? Proactiveness covers our career, it covers our life. It covers our health. It covers our business. It covers our spiritual wellbeing, our emotional wellbeing, every single thing. Yeah, you might want to think that your dream spouse or dream girlfriend is going to come to you, or you can go and put yourself in situations for the dream girlfriend to come to you, where you are making yourself known and available. So proactiveness, the state of being proactive, is something that you have to develop and you have to fall in love with.
I'm not saying that you're going to love every single time you go to the gym or every single thing, but the ability to say, hey, what is the next thing?
What is the next opportunity? What can I be doing? That is a natural skill that you're going to have to just make second nature to you. You're going to have to adopt that principle and put it into your lifestyle. A lot of times we talk about making things a habit, making it habitual to you. But the entire state of being habitual is making it a lifestyle, to where you're not thinking about it. You're just doing it because you've done it so many times before. Make proactiveness an aspect of your lifestyle and who you are as a man, as a woman, as a businessman, as a father, as a husband.
You can't expect your kids to just naturally love you. You have to go out and develop their love. Me, I'm not a parent, but what I can speak to is having a cat.
You have a cat and some people are like, oh my God, my cat hates me. Well, have you ever gone and actually developed that relationship with your cat? Might be a radical or stupid example to give, but seriously, if you expect affection back, you have to deliver affection in the first place. If you want to have strong relationships and strong friendships, sometimes you're going to have to send out the first text message. That's how this is. That's the kind of life we're in. So if you want to be proactive in your life and develop it, I would take a couple of minutes today and just reflect and think, what can I do in my life to take control of my circumstances?
Evaluate and examine your previous thought patterns and the way that you speak, and be aware of whether you're blaming other people. Are you blaming the people around you, or are you taking responsibility and going out and looking for solutions?
Be aware of that. And then secondly, I would also highly, highly, highly recommend studying other people that you know are proactive. Say you're going down the street. You're seeing somebody walking, and you see them every single morning on your way to work, or when you're up in the morning drinking your cup of coffee you see that person going jogging. That is a perfect example of somebody who is proactive about their results, because they are consistent and they're looking for ways to improve. You have to be that person. You have to be that person who's up. You have to be that person who's going after it.
I'm not trying to motivate you. I'm very simply saying that if you want results to come to you, you first have to be going to them.
The point of building your personal brand, your business, et cetera, is to get to the point where they can come to you and you can get opportunities, and it gets easier and easier over time. But let me ask you this: you still see Coca-Cola advertising. You still see these brands advertising and building and looking for new levels and new heights. But they really don't need to. [They're what you would call set], but they're looking for the next thing. They're looking for a way to continue growing. They're proactive about their results. They're proactive about their success. The way that you get your success quicker is by becoming a proactive individual.
I hope that you got some value from today's episode of Chase the Vision. If you did, make sure to pay the fee and share this episode forward with a friend, a family member, a business partner, somebody else that you think will also get as much value from the words and from the topic of today as you did. That is the way the show grows. That's the way we get in front of new audiences, touch new lives, touch new hearts. With that being said, I hope that you're having an exceptional day, and much love. Be on the lookout for the next episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, coming very soon.