Lesson 7: If You Want To Be in Control, Step out of Reactive Mode

What the difference between surviving and thriving is made of

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In the early days of building a startup, you’re mostly learning to swim in an ocean of endless tasks and possibilities. You open one door only to discover ten others behind it. With the constant stream of ideas in your head and the vast amounts of unexplored potential out there, you can easily get bogged down in busy work. Later on, when you have paying customers and a team, just managing them all can become a full-time job.

Whether you’re a startup founder or an employee, it’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day challenges and constantly react to what comes your way. In fact, it’s the path of least resistance, so most of us take it. Then, we wonder why we don’t get ahead in spite of our hard work and conscientious efforts to take care of everything and everyone.

Here comes a hard truth that might be common sense but is definitely not common practice: It’s about working smart, not hard.

Working hard and being constantly busy are in fact warning lights that you need to watch out for if you’re a leader, or simply want to take control of your life and steer it in a certain direction. Here’s why: the more you’re doing, the less you’re thinking. The less you’re thinking, the more unconscious choices you’re making. The more unconscious choices you’re making, the more you’re leaving things up to chance.

Startup founders often take pride in being restless doers, but they have to build thinking time into their schedules if they’re pursuing sustainable success.

When we’re absorbed in immediate issues, we lose sight of our bigger, long-term goals. Often, founders are like “How can I make time to just sit and think when there are so many fires I have to put out on a daily basis?”

How can you not, when your job is to prevent them? Don’t you want to find out why there are fires burning all the time in the first place?

Well, stop and think. There’s no way around it. It applies to any area of life you would like to improve. If you’re constantly bumping into the same sort of obstacles or having similar types of problems, it’s a definite signal for you to stop and examine what needs change. Breaking out of a loop requires stepping out of the reactive mode cycle and trying something new.

Two systems drive the way we think and make choices. The one is fast, intuitive, and emotional; the other one is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shows how the mind works, and offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and personal lives – and how we can guard against the mental glitches that often get us in trouble.

To understand how certain problems arise, we need to distance ourselves from them, in order to see the context that predisposes or creates them. It’s a sure way for us to discover blind spots or become aware of decisions we made in the past that have enabled the results we’re experiencing in the present. Sometimes, that means just roaming. Doing nothing. Slowing down and letting go. Getting our minds off the problem, until its cause floates up to the surface on its own. This might sound very counterintuitive when you’re in the midst of a crisis, but it works.

I believe it all boils down to deeply understanding and facing the reality that if you keep being busy all the time, you will not have what you really want in life or business. Busy makes you reactive. Reactive means you’re not in control.

Are you giving yourself the opportunity to just observe, without engaging? Or do you feel like you always need to respond, react, or do something? Do you judge and jump to conclusions without even noticing?

Are you making time to reflect on what and why has happened? How you can do better? What you did great?

Are you making space for the big picture? Can you identify broader patterns or trends in your life/business?

As a first-time founder, I did lose sight of the forest because of all the trees on multiple occasions. The type of questions I ask here have surfaced during a long pause I took to examine what had led me to burnout.

Try this. Observe yourself for just one day. Watching what you’re doing, ask yourself: What am I making time for right now? What am I prioritizing? If you take the time to scroll social media or reply to all incoming messages and emails, can you really say you don’t have 5 minutes to meditate? Taking control is rooted in self-awareness, and self-awareness gets activated in stillness.

The difference between surviving and thriving may as well be just noticing how far you have come, by making the time to reflect on it, enjoy and appreciate it.

What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead, we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?

― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

This post is part of the series “100 things I learned by becoming an entrepreneur” that I launched to reflect on my founder journey, nudge fellow founders to appreciate their own progress, and inspire more women to make the leap to entrepreneurship. Subscribe to get all hard-earned lessons featuring helpful tips & tools delivered to your inbox as soon as I hit publish ???