Beyond Responding
I’m not sure if it is a word, or even if it could be a word, but I want to offer you the option of “pre-ponding.”
There’s responding and reacting (and there’s over-responding and over-reacting, but those options are for another post… ), and there is pro-acting. I want to create a distinction between pro-acting and pre-ponding.
If “responding” is what one does when events and circumstances arise and impact one’s life and “pro-acting” is acting in advance of events or circumstances, then “pre-ponding” is creating events and circumstances and our role therein.
I may be splitting hairs here, or have a different definition of pro-activity than you, but I wanted to add a word to our working vocabulary – in the hopes that we might see new possibilities.
What if I asked you what the ideal “pre-ponse” would be in a situation that mattered?
What if instead of waiting until something happened and responding (or worse, merely “reacting”), we had the option of creating the actual events?
What if instead of acting in advance of coming events or circumstances, you created both the circumstance and your inputs?
That’s going beyond pro-activity and pre-ponding.