Being Proactive with yourself and your challenges
-paradigm shifts, stratagems, and why positive thinking makes them work for us

Two authors and thinkers came to mind as i was developing this realization and learning:

Stephen Covey makes a good point with the need for a paradigm shift rather than just behavioral and personality change. Seven habits starts from this deep change, or shift, in paradigms, which are the perspectives with which we view phenomena or situations and people around us. I guess i've arrived at that. These Perspectives or paradigms really can have a strong influence on your emotional response. Stick to old paradigms, and you often find it difficult to understand and accept situations and develop new ways of adapting and djusting. Shifting paradigms makes us and see things from different perspectives give you a better sense, understanding and acceptance of the situation. You are less stressed and emotional when you figure things out from a different perspective, or paradigm. You tend to think faster, and adapt more quickly to the changing situation.

Sun Tzu, one of my favorites, always admonishes against being emotional, drastic, and mercurial. Its the pitfall of lesser skilled generals. Being cool and calculating, therefore is a virtue in the art of war. When emotions get to you, you lose that ability to calculate your moves, because you lose your cool. Revealing emotions therefore are only a deliberate tactic of the skillful general to obtain certain objectives among your men, in the same way coaches need to use emotion to drum up a necessary response. This is why,m in the art of war, we wage war by STRATAGEM. I translate that as "Organized diskarte," where a series of moves are planned and executed swiftly in an organized manner, enabling the element of surprise, leaving your opponent dumbfounded and confused as a result. When you look back at your enemy, you are already a series of steps ahead, and can cut him off if you need to. Again, when we are emotional or easily emotionally affected, we lose sight of executing the stratagems properly, and always falter because we are prone to inconsistencies.

For when we drive ourselves on the road to mour success, or we need to gain specific advantage, we need to be calm and cool to enable us to see the situation in the light of a paradigm shift and make the necessary adjustments in our stratagems. When we look at challenges this way, our probabilities of overcoming the obstacles are higher! Seeing things, events and people's actions as part of a paradigm, and planning and adjusting by stratagem enables us to go beyond simply keeping up with and reacting to situations. We sieze the advantage and make our oppooinents react to us, and follow our lead. it therefore makes us PROACTIVE.


Positive thinking as a paradigm shift that builds good stratagems

For me, the best way of being proactive is to think positively. It enables paradigm shifts and encourages you to face situations in a positive light. You are lighter . Being a negative thinker makes you heavy and slow, since you hold on to too many preconceptions that are a disincentive to being open-minded, creative and agile in the way we see the world and the situation at hand.

Many good stratagems are build out of positive thinking for three reasons:
One, it enables us to look ourselves in a confident positive light. We are more able, because we THINK we are more able to face situations and deal with their appurtenant issues. Secondly, we see more of the situation rather than the limited, negative, often cynical and prejudiced perspective that narrows our field of vision and hence, limits our response. These are fetters to our agility.

The third reason may work for some, but not for all people and situations. Being a positive thinker makes us see the good in people, and draws out this goodness as a means to build teamwork, or achieve resolution of conflicts. Often, non-cooperation and strife are born out of a lack of good self-concept among the protagonists. Bringing these out helps build the trust and confidence in people, especially in the way they see each other and the situation they are in. It requires, however, that WE have a paradigm shift towards seeing others in a positive, good light.

Over-all, this takes practice and time to train the mind and heart to be positive in our outlook. Good stratagems will follow.