4. Environmental awareness
The environmental awareness aims at understanding the surroundings of the proactive person, in order to identify potential risks and opportunities. Everything that can have an impact on person’s progress towards his/her goals should be considered.
A good awareness of the environment helps to manage changes in the surrounding of the proactive person. Indeed, those changes are identified sooner and can be assessed and dealt with before they become critical. Also, opportunities can be seized as soon as they arise. Finally, the initial plan can be modified after an informed and logical decision, so that feelings such as powerlessness and confusion can be greatly avoided. Due to the flexibility of the plan and the increased motivation of its actors, changes managed in a proactive manner are therefore more likely to be successful on the long term.
Once the full awareness is built, it is time to plan the person’s next step and to act. The aim of the plan may not be to fully achieve a goal, but just to bring the person one step closer to that goal, before reassessing the situation and trying to identify potential opportunities. A proactive person will have a very powerful and flexible short-term plan that has a greater chance of success.
Coaching towards proactive living– a case study
At the start of the coaching process, Sabrina was in her 30s and aimed at finding a work-life balance and increasing her health. As a business owner, she often worked extra hours to accommodate her clients and found it hard to manage the different areas of her life. She was also suffering from joint pain that was getting worse because of her current job.
1. Self-awareness
Sabrina was very aware of her limitations from the start, but she could not overcome them because of a lack of understanding. We started by focusing on the reasons why she couldn’t have a work-life balance and two things became clear immediately:
She found it challenging to set clear boundaries with others as she did not see how she would benefit from it. So we started by focusing on her own needs and why it was important for her she had to take them into consideration.
2. Goals awareness
After having understood Sabrina’s needs as a person, we were able to redefine her main goal. It became clear that when Sabrina talked about finding a work-life balance, she actually meant allowing time for herself. Focusing on her organizational skills, we created a timetable that would indicate when she was meant to work and went she would have social activities or some “me-time”.
3. Mapping awareness
Then we started talking about Sabrina’s other goals and how they fitted in. She had started going to the gym but felt a lack of commitment. We spent time understanding why she was going to the gym and found ways to increase her commitment. We added slots in her timetable dedicating to exercising gym. I also asked her if she could go with someone else. She thought of her mother, with whom she actually wanted to spend more time. It all came together: she would go to the gym with her mother as part of her weekly routine. She would feel more committed by having an accountability partner. It would also allow her to fulfill both social and health goals at the same time in a busy schedule.
4. Environment awareness
Even though her new work-life balance seemed to work rather well, Sabrina sometimes felt the need to always be and do her best. So we worked on challenging her perception.
She decided to challenge herself and have a make-up free day. She had a great day and ended up being complimented on her fresh look.
We also discussed the possibility of increasing her prices in order to feel less pressure at work from clients. She was not sure about the idea as she was afraid her clients would leave for other places but was surprised to see that most of them did not even notice.
Those two situations helped her focus on her needs as she realised that she set very high standards for herself and that it was ok to be just her.
Building up her awareness helped Sabrina be proactive and gave her the tools to make more informed decisions in the future. She changed her perception of her environment, understood herself better and found personal goals. It empowered her to take full responsibility for her actions.
Conclusion
Sabrina’s case illustrates how a reactive behaviour can be turned into a proactive one by increasing awareness. The breaking down in four awareness levels facilitates the identification of gaps in the client awareness. It also makes it easier for a coach to guide clients towards a proactive behaviour by following a bottom-up approach and making sure that each awareness level is complete before developing the next one.
As indicated in this paper, a proactive behaviour occurs in a change process. The building up of the awareness occurs at the start of the process, but the change materialises itself at later stages. A coach interested in guiding towards proactive behaviours should therefore understand how to support the full process. The awareness pyramid is believed to be a very powerful tool for anyone starting a proactive journey.
References
Websites
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2012) Proactivity. Available:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proactivity. Last accessed: 30th April 2012.
Ehow, Discover the Expert in You (2012) How to make proactive decisions. Available: . Last accessed : 30th April 2012.
Books
Bindl, U. K., & Parker, S. K. (in press). Proactive work behavior: Forward-
thinking and change oriented action in organizations. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.