The man who eats his tail

Last week, I read the “7 Habits of effective people,” and although the story of Victor Frankl stands out to me, I remember most significantly the notions of proactivity and reactivity.

These terms may sound hefty or scary, but proactivity simply means taking responsibility for behavior, and reactivity implies becoming a tandem pole for other people’s actions.

Picture a fight with your spouse, where a flight of words damages the relationship further. You could say it’s because of your spouse’s provocation that the brutal words escaped, but by this definition, you are being reactive.

On the other hand, when you are proactive, even if you decide to enter a spur-of-words with your significant other, your speech will be more controlled and curtailed since you have taken responsibility before you even let them out.

As a result, proactivity equals a continual state of developing accountability, and reactivity involves passing blame.

Imagine a nurse with a hard-to-deal-with patient named Justin. Now, I know each of us has a threshold of pain, but imagine this nurse unable to reason with Justin’s pointless arguments, his spitting on her face, and his inability to understand that she is, in fact, working for his benefit.

The nurse has a variety of options to choose her reaction from. She can decide to take the assumption that Justin is annoying, and in turn, her attitude to work will change.

Anytime her shift is about to start, she will make a long groan about how she can’t deal with his troubles, and like that, Justin will have more to complain about because of her subconscious lack of care.

Imagine then a situation where she chooses to ignore, or even better, make a mental decision that Justin does not know any better. For this reason, she treats him like a child, and even though there are useful times to be strict with children, we can tell that their actions do not affect the core of our souls.

The reality is that we can choose to be conduits of people’s emotions or decide to make ourselves the catalyst.

When you face life without passing blame, there will be no limits to how far you can go because you know whatever the case, you are the one in charge.

Have a lovely day, my friend.

And remember to believe, like me, that the world needs more empathy.