In Part 1 of this discussion of Proaction – we discussed mostly the why of making changes in your life. Now, let’s dig a little bit more into how to bring about proactive change. Let’s first discuss the four quadrants of change and discover in which quadrant you must exercise your proaction in order to seize control or and own your own life instead of it owning you.
Four Quadrants of Change
Scientists studying many things love looking at conditions in dual axes to categorize and understand things better. Change can be viewed along the dual axes of internal vs. external change and individual vs. group change. Using these two axes results in four quadrants of change: individual-internal, group-internal, individual-external, group-external. There are various components of each of these four quadrants of change.
Each person’s individual-internal quadrant contains their psychological, emotional, cognitive, conscious, and spiritual elements that control their true existential behaviors. Each person’s individual-external quadrant expresses their individual-internal elements as their skill sets, behaviors, performances, and impacts on others. Each group-internal quadrant contains the group’s organizational culture, memories, and unwritten rules that guide the group’s members’ inter-relationships. Finally, each group-external quadrant expresses their internal elements as the group’s organizational structure, polices, procedures, work instructions, which affect the group’s hopefully profitable results.
Each of these quadrants touches upon and affects the others. All change begins in the internal quadrants and becomes visible in the external quadrants. While some change can occur in all four quadrants of this model, none of them will survive over the long term unless they begin in the individual-internal quadrant. The individuals in the individual-internal quadrant comprise those who drive group-internal changes. The individual-internal quadrant, however, is where proaction resides.
Returning to the idea of overcoming your status quo by using proaction, you cannot do anything proactive without getting off the dime and …
Get to it, now!
People often ask, how to a get started using the P10 Principle? The answer is simple. Just get to it, now! How can you get off the dime and get to it now? By moving forward, right now, to the next P of the P10 Principle. Decide what you do not like about your life and make the rock hard commitment to change it.
To recap, if you do not like the way your life is going, you have to effect a change in what you are doing in order to change the way your life is going. That change must start with you making changes in your individual-internal quadrant result with you taking action in your external quadrant. The key word in this last sentence, however, and the key idea of proaction is “Start.”
Start. Start thinking about what you want to change. Then quit just thinking about it and start doing something about it to move you forward from where you are now. Get to it already. Start, now. Get to it, now.
Are you ready to “Get to it, now!”? Good. Then let’s move on to the next P in the P10 Principle and learn about perception.
[reminder]What is the one thing you would like to change in your life?[/reminder]
In the meantime, you GOTTABGATT! so go out there today and be Great! All the time!