- 1. Taking Initiative Helps You Show Love in Concrete Terms
“Taking initiative pays off. It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if he is always waiting to be told what to do.” – Sheryl Sandberg
Check this scenario. You are a leader in your home. Your wife is pregnant. She may or may not be working outside the home. But she tries to do the house chores. And with all the love you have professed to her, you still afford to watch her labour to cook, clean, wash, go to the market, and take care of the children. And you as the husband, since you were not taught to take initiative, even in the face of this situation, it naturally does not occur to you to take the initiative of relieving your pregnant wife of some of these house chores and usual cares. If she is not able to advice herself, she carries on until something likely goes wrong.
Men should not feel too big to take certain initiatives particularly if it directly affects persons they love and care about. Leaving your woman to labour and bring food to the house while you press your phone and listen to the news is lack of responsibility and not taking initiative.
As a father, if you take more initiatives, your sons will learn that things around the house are not left to the women and girls in the house alone. Through your example, you can teach the boys that they too must take initiative to keep the house clean and assist as much as the girls are doing.
2. Taking Initiative Makes You Service-Oriented
“When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” – Barack Obama
It is not enough that you take personal initiative. It is also important that you work with others to achieve the common good and common goal. Individual initiative geared at contributing to a team and integrating with the work and effort of others brings much benefit to the community and society.
3. Taking Initiative Helps You Live with A Mindset of Abundance
You have a mindset of abundance when you have the ‘I Can’ spirit. It is the belief that You Can that moves you to take up an initiative because you have a mind that tells you that you are so much more, and you are capable of a lot more. With this mindset, you count on what you can do, not on the things you cannot do. That is a mindset of abundance. And as you keep doing so, the good things of life and the things you desire get pulled to your direction and you begin to truly live in abundance.
4. Taking Initiative Helps You Achieve Your Goals in Life
“One has to take initiative in life to achieve what he or she wants.” – Donald Johnson
Don’t fold your hands and wait for life to happen. Take initiative and create the opportunities you desire for yourself. You can do this by preparing yourself for relevant opportunities that come in the very near future. Follow your line of interest and build a niche for yourself; build a business; develop a service around something you are good at and have people pay you for it. You are fasting and praying and hoping for the best but without some effort to back it up? Remember, faith goes with works. And as the Latin motto goes: ‘Ora et labora’ – Pray and work.
5. Taking Initiative Teaches You to Act On the maxim that “Life is a Give and Take”
If you take initiative to do good and I take the initiative to do good, it becomes a give and take. We might agree that taking initiative is not always convenient, comfortable, or necessarily interesting. It sometimes requires patience, sacrifice, financial implications, stress, and discomfort. Yet, you choose to do it for the benefit of others. Every time you give in this way, life has a way of giving back to you. So, your giving becomes a source of your getting back from life.
6. Taking Initiative Keeps You Active and Enthusiastic
When you take initiative, you keep your mind and spirit alive, active, and enthusiastic. That action of reaching out drives away depression, irregular moods, and other emotional staccatos. Hence the advice that when you feel down, stand up, step out and do something for someone. Then watch how that helps you feel much better. Reaching out helps you feel that you matter and can contribute to make the world a better place. That is enthusiasm, which makes all the difference.
7. Taking Initiative Inspires and Motivates Others
You do not need to be a leader to inspire and motivate others around you. From the simplicity of your being, irrespective of age, experience, economic or social status, you can be an example to others. Recently my 11-year-old son decided to go with me to my workplace. I accepted but had no specific task in mind to keep him busy. Yet, interestingly, he spent the entire day taking initiative. He helped me with a lot of folders filing tasks and organizing of papers. Later in the day, he decided to follow my colleagues around and give a hand where necessary. It turned out that he helped to do quite a lot of hands-on work. Even as his mother, I felt inspired at all the initiatives he took.
(The End)