Research Paper By Sylvia Gautier
(Life and Wellness Coach, UK)
Introduction
The objective of a coach is to help his/her clients achieve their full potential. This paper aims at discussing how coaches can guide clients towards a proactive life. It explains how this can be achieved by increasing the client awareness according to four levels:
- self-awareness,
- goals awareness,
- mapping awareness a
- nd environmental awareness.
Finally, a real case study presents how the theories presented in this paper can be applied in a real coaching environment.
Definition of proactive living
The word proactive appeared in the 30s before being vulgarized after the release of the book Man’s search for meaning (Frankl, 1946). Proactive is formed with the prefix pro – ‘before’ in Greek – and the root active. Etymologically, it means ‘active before’. This relates to the importance of anticipating when adopting a proactive behaviour, which differentiates being proactive from being reactive. It also refers to the importance of taking a leadership role when dealing with a situation. Those two ideas are combined in the modern definition of proactive which is ‘anticipating and taking charge of situations’ (Wikipedia, 2012).
Proactive behaviours can emerge in two kinds of situations (Bindl, In Press):
Proactive behaviours are often compared to reactive ones because both aim at bringing a change (Bindl, In Press). However, the main difference between the two behaviours is the attitude towards the change:
The difference between reactive and proactive behaviours lies in the importance given to preparing the change. While the reactive person focuses on the actions, the proactive person builds up some in-depth awareness of the current situation in order to fully benefit from future actions (Ehow, 2012). The next section of this paper describes the elements of the proactive person’s awareness.