Proactivity: Nuance or Antique?

Monday February 4, 2013

"Proactivity" is something that is engrained into today's college student's mind along every stepping stone in the journey. Professors, advisers, coaches and mentors all emphasize how if we aren't proactive then we will inevitably not get any of the results we want from our efforts, therefore losing any hope of reaching our goals and aspirations. You have to be proactive and do the work and practice to get the results you want on the playing field or as a personal fitness goal, or you'll never get to where you want to be. You have to be proactive to get good grades and have good relationships with your teachers to get good recommendations. If you don't do this, you'll never get an internship. If you don't get an internship, you'll never get a job.

I don't know how much time any of you readers have spent with college students, but being told what to do is not generally well received. This only further emphasizes the stereotype attached to GenY-- our blatant disinterest in listening to authority.

One piece of advice I am attempting to follow is to read everything, starting with Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Imagine my surprise when habit #1 is to "Be Proactive." Covey breaks it down into basic ideas that we are "response-able" for the majority of the events in our lives, all of which fall into our concentric circles of concern and influence. When you are a proactive individual, you can push the boundaries of the circle of influence wider inside of what concerns you. This had me thinking about the ways that companies use their circles in order to engage with their target markets. In terms of traditional marketing, there was a lot more negative focus in the circles of concern and the circles of influence were a great deal smaller than they could have been. Traditional marketing is so impersonal that the amount of influence available was almost negligible. When thinking in terms of social media marketing, it is mind-boggling to think of the influence that they can have on peoples' lives. This is a proactive move for a lot of companies, but it is still a reactive strategy for late entrants into the social phenomenon. For those that were proactive, I'm sure their ROI is increasing in spades. Maybe all those authority figures do know what they're talking about...