Career Changes: Be Proactive

One of the books on our recommended reading list is Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.” I have taken the course, and for a few years was a certified Covey instructor. It’s powerful stuff, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is going through career transition.

Proactive Habit

The first habit is “Be Proactive,” which is founded on the principle that individuals are responsible for the own choices and have the freedom to choose. Proactive people respond to things that happen to them according to their values not their moods, they accept responsibility for what happens to them, and they focus on the things they can control rather than worrying about the things they can’t. One of Covey’s key statements about being proactive is this: “It’s not what people do to us that hurts us. In the most fundamental sense it is our chosen response to what they do us that hurts us.”

Accepting Responsibility

What does this mean for the person who is between jobs, who’s lost a job? It means that he or she needs to accept responsibility for what happened, and have the power to choose the response. Years ago, I was a co-founder in a startup that was ultimately unsuccessful. I had taken a huge pay cut to join, and when it foundered 2 1/2 years later, I had no “net”, very little savings, and a young family. In Covey terms, it wasn’t that the company failed that mattered, it was how I chose to respond that mattered. Spending time blaming my circumstances on others would have done nothing to make a change for the better.

Conclusion

Covey likes to say that proactive people carry their own weather with them. Meaning, every day when we wake up, we get to decide if it’s going to be a good day – it can be a sunny day in Seattle for me despite what the actual weather may be. It’s not the losing of that job that will hurt you in the long run. How you choose to respond to that loss, however, will have an enormous impact on how successful you’ll be in finding whatever it is that’s next for you.

Author

The author of this article is Frank Cohee.