You may consider yourself to be a ‘proactive’ person, as Stephen Covey describes it in his book, 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People. I know that I did. But then I took a closer look.

Being reactive instead of proactive can be related to the victim mentality, which is the basic belief that you are not in control of your own destiny, that you are controlled by your circumstances. If you aren’t in control of your thought process, then odds are that you are living in the reactive world.

What does that mean to someone who wants to improve their life, to increase their peak performance? It simply means that as long as you are letting circumstances determine your reactions after the fact, you aren’t at your most effective performance. You are letting others control your actions by the simple fact that you aren’t doing it yourself. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Why we do the things we do — or don’t do what we should do

The essential explanation is that your actions — what you think, do, and say every day — are determined by your internal carrot-stick associations, what your brain has determined will make you feel good, and what will cause discomfort, or pain. The challenge is that, as with most of your rules, beliefs, and values, you haven’t consciously chosen what causes you pain and pleasure! Your life experiences have been evaluated by your brain and stored as associations to help it decide what makes you feel good and what makes you feel bad. The good news is that you can change this data that is stored in your mind.

Using the carrot-stick to change your programming

If there are actions that you need to take to advance your life and you’re not taking them, the reason why is simple: you think that the stick that’s going to hit you when you take this action is going to hurt more than the reward of the carrot is worth. The reward you’re going to get is not worth the cost.

For every action that you consider taking, whether it’s walking the dog, or going out to get the morning paper, your mind evaluates whether the cost is worth the reward. If it’s raining, then getting the paper may not be worth getting wet over. Walking the dog may take more energy than you have right at the moment. Your brain is always thinking of these things. There are 4 different evaluations that are made when you contemplate doing something:

• the reward, or pleasure, you’ll get from taking the action
• the cost, or pain, of taking the action
• the reward of not taking the action
• the cost of not acting

Your task is to make the reward of acting worth more than the cost, and the cost of not acting more than the reward you’ll get by not acting.

When you find yourself putting off or avoiding actions that you know you need to take, you must picture in your mind all the good things that will happen when you do take this action, and picture all the bad things that will happen if you don’t. You maximize the reward of your action and the cost of not acting, and minimize the cost of acting and the reward from not acting.