3 Ways To Be More Proactive In Your Business

What’s the #1 leadership skill of mature entrepreneurs? Being proactive. (link to previous blog)

 

If your leadership style is reactive, it means that you are always focused on the problems in your business, your team, and with your clients. 

 

When you’re being proactive, it means that you are focused on solutions. 

 

It’s not that being reactive is bad, but when you’re managing a business, being proactive has a major impact on everyone around you and the growth of your business. 

 

Whether you are resolving a conflict or recovering from your own mistakes, making the shift from being reactive to proactive is an important step in your entrepreneurial adventure. And it’s one of the most impactful ways to mature as a leader. 

 

Here are 3 ways to make the shift from reactive to proactive in your business.

 

 

 

The biggest influence on how likely you are to respond reactively or proactively is the speed at which you are racing through life. 

 

When you are going at super speed it’s second nature to focus on the problems, to get defensive, and to look for who's to blame when those unexpected situations pop up.

 

Emails are a great everyday example from entrepreneurial life. You don’t always need to respond right away. Especially if you feel like your reply will be negative. 

 

When you open that email, take the opportunity to slow down. You might even need to sleep on it, have coffee with it, or look at it from a different angle.

 

Slowing down will give you a chance to choose your words carefully, rather than reacting in the moment.

 

When you are ranting at people online, it's not helpful. It causes people to not trust you, and even to run away from you. They won't give you feedback or want to have conversations with you, and that’s bad for business. 

 

If you want to be more proactive in managing your business, you need to tune in to how busy you are and how fast you're moving.

 

 

Another way you can move towards being more proactive is by being open to change. There are always going to be things that change. That’s just life. 

 

When you are living reactively, any changes can become pain points. Even the potential for change can create huge stressors and unnecessary pressure.  Being resistant to change keeps you stuck in a “what if” world and it’s easy to get lost there.

 

However, being open to change allows room for flexibility. It’s a lot easier to manage a crisis if you allow yourself to be flexible. Give yourself a chance to take a step back and know that if something doesn't work, then there's another way that you could make it work.

 

 

Online calendars are a great tool for flexibility, especially when you can "tetris" your schedule around easily when those unexpected situations come up. 

 

You can be proactively flexible, and open to an adventure or you can be reactive because you're in freak-out mode whenever anything changes.

 

It’s OK if your entrepreneurial adventure takes a slightly different route than you expected. Being proactive in those moments will grow you as an entrepreneur and as a leader. 

 

 

There will be people showing up in your space who will say things to hurt you, but you don't have to bite back.  You can step back and be "choicey" with how you respond if you have that buffer of space and speed.

 

Being reactive in these moments looks like giving people back what they dished out to you, and matching their nastiness because you’ve been hurt. 

 

But being proactive means remembering that the mood they are in probably has nothing to do with you. They had a bad day or have something on their mind. 

 

Social media is a big place where this happens and online text makes it impossible to interpret tone and feelings, especially when there are words left out or misspelled. 

 

But in life (and business) you don't want to hurt other people when it's not necessary. Even if you feel that you’re defending yourself. 

 

By slowing down and focusing on the solution, you can be more proactive. And when you are proactive you can have a meaningful impact on those around you, by creating a space where others feel safe, encouraged, and motivated. 

 

 

Being proactive is a maturity thing. Making those daily choices to be more proactive is how you grow as a person and an entrepreneur. 

 

It won’t happen overnight, and for nearly all entrepreneurs, maturity is a life-long journey.

 

But every time you choose to be proactive rather than reactive, you are making that shift more natural for you and you are showing others how great it is to work with you and for you. 

 

Our Groundwork Brigade Mastermind is the perfect place to find accountability and support from a community of entrepreneurs who are also practicing being more proactive in life and business. 

 

If you missed the conversation between Kim and Kerry on their podcast Buckets and Boom Gates, you can catch it here.

 

To connect and find out more about Kim or how to create a sexy business for a sexy life, you can reach her and the My Sexy Business Team at www.mysexybusiness.com 

 

And to connect with Kerry Zarb go straight to her website www.kerryzarb.com and you’ll find her there!